MAGIC

/ANUS/
how is it that old game developers use to be able to make so much content in their games and have worlds that looked really big and yet only use 8mb of ram?

What takes up RAM isn't content, but useless eye candy.

ONE WORD: JEWSASM

Infinite compression.

Because you touch yourself at night. Now scram.

>>2
Like in Dwarf Fortress?

As one starts to use higher and higher level languages their memory usage increases at a rapid rate. You can only fix this by using ASM

>>1
teh codez
see elite

I do remember seeing seeing some rather nice procedurally generated 3d shooter (quake 3-like) which fit in ~90KB. Can't say the same about RAM usage, but you can always control the amount of RAM you use by simply not keeping everything in memory( only keep what you currently need), it's a trade of speed vs memory. In today's world, where having gigabytes of RAM is common, I'd say speed is more important than RAM cost, but if RAM cost would be important, there are ways to minimize it, at the cost of either speed or programmer time.

>>8
I assume you mean .kkrieger

>>9
Oh yes, that seems to be it.

>>1
>8mb
The Nintendo DS has 16mb.

The GBA, only 256k.

The PS2 only had 4mb of GPU ram, though it did have 32MB normal ram.

More interestingly, N64 only had 4mb CPU+GPU ram. Think of how large a world was in Banjo Kazooie, or even Banjo Tooie. Or even something like Super Mario 64. That's efficient use of ram.

>>6
It has nothing to do with the language, if the language lets you do what you want. For modern operating systems, there's shittons of memory wasted for making sure the program properly talks to the OS, and interfaces with OS-level hardware and software properly, as well as inefficiencies from libraries that don't let you prune unused functions, or limit the ability of complex functions. (say, if you had an adding function that used types to identify the method required, most games you might not need matrix operations, or vector adding operations, if you used GPU functions properly, which would allow for increased performance of the adding operation on CPU).

Also, with old games, the games WERE the operating system, so there was basically no overhead.

The team that made .kkrieger has released .werkkzeug1 that allows someone to make the procedural textures so you could make a game with such file size on your own
http://www.theprodukkt.com/werkkzeug1

>>12
Why would you, though? It's a cool tech demo, but for an actual game having things exactly as you want them is easily worth the meagre megabytes it takes.

>>13
because procedural textures are quicker to produce and handle enmasse rather than hire texture painters to paint bitmaps by hand. the textures a build using logic bricks in werkkzeug1

>>14
At least assuming you don't care about the result.

>>11
According to wikipedia the DS has 4MB of RAM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS

The worlds of Super Mario 64 weren't large at all, they just seemed that way because the camera was so close to you.

>>15
So you teach the texture designer how to use that tool.

http://blog.aerojockey.com/post/iocccsim

>>17
The one you didn't hire? The one with experience with paint programs who'd probably rather just paint than connect 'logic bricks' and hope she can approximate what she wants?
You can use plugins and such to help generate textures, but if you want it to look good you'll have to give it a manual brush-over in the end.
Manual content beats procedural unless you need infinite variation, resolution or extent.

>>19
she

Please stop being a faggot and use "he" like normal people.

>>20
no ur teh fagot lol

>>20
Surely you mean ``they''.