There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??

Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.

Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?

    • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 months ago

      Sorry, can’t give you references, but the examples I used were from one of the early Mario games. I was around when the euro demo scene was still hot, so there were loads of tips and tricks they used to game the 8086-x386 hardware to create dazzling effects in real time, prior to the introduction of acceleration and dedicated graphics chipsets. It was a truly glorious time, and a great source of wonder growing up in the 90s watching the industry evolve around me.

      Still blows my mind (though not in a good way) to hear a simple app or http framework nowadays needs several gigabytess just to install. Everything I mentioned used to happen in 32k-8mb of RAM.

      • aksdb@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        The demo scene still exists and they still produce mind blowing stuff.

        I still remember “playing” .kkrieger, a 3d shooter fitting in a fucking 64kb exe. It did use quite a bit of RAM though.

        • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Ah yes! Projecktt or something like that. Procedurally generated models and textures, and caused some controversy due to heavy reliance on the directx API. But technically astounding, nonetheless!

    • Dran@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 months ago

      I don’t know if there are any for the switch specifically, but Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube does a really good deep dive series he calls “impossible ports” where he covers the technicals of how a port of a game was made for a console and why it’s crazy that it works at all. Portal on the N64 and halflife on the PS2 are the example that first come to mind.