Holy hell.
Just this week I started on a similar system for a game engine I work on (Zelda Classic). Main reason was for testing purposes, but another benefit is that it is SO cool to see the game replayed for you. Like those self playing pianos.
Hah
Things as simple as "believing you know the byte-width of a primitive data type" are dangerous.
In my C++ course, I require that the code runs correctly under 5 different compilers (GCC, LLVM Clang, Apple Clang, MSVC, Intel C++ Compiler Classic) on 3 OS (Ubuntu, Windows, macOS) in Release, Debug+Valgrind, Debug+Sanitizers modes, and students still get UB quite often.
Extra reading: http://evan.nemerson.com/2021/05/04/portability-is-reliabili... and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044419
What's a common new game trend since then? I can think of these: randomized microtransaction packs, online multiplayer PvP and co-op.
Are there any established trends that I'm missing out on, or new concepts emerging that old gamers may not have come across?
I like the Switch, but it definitely chugs, and I suspect had we not had the supply chain meltdown over the pandemic we would‘ve gotten a more significant hardware refresh.
As far as simulators go, I‘m playing Two Point Campus, and it definitely chugs and crashes occasionally.
I think the technical imitations can definitely hamstring their games, even the first party ones. breath of the wild comes to mind, and frequently dips into sub 30 fps which breaks the immersion factor.
Yes you don't need PC hardware to play those but non-console gaming environments are also about no lock-in, customisability etc as well.
You're right though - you don't need a fancy GPU to have a fun game, but what you DO need is permission from Nintendo to publish on their platform.
And the main reason the games are colorful on Switch is that Nintendo still, to this day, has a reputation of kids-only console. And Switch also pushed it towards "casual one-off gaming" which invites bright colors (think Candy Crush).
Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!
Pretty much every strategy / tactics game (outside a single one: Fire Emblem) runs terribly, below 30 fps, looks very burry and... the killing blow... has crazy long loading times. You can go grab coffee while Civ6 is loading and still won't be done by the time.
Quality control of games from Nintendo is very very poor. There are several games that came out which were unfinishable or unplayable and they just happily certified them.
Btw Factorio runs on any kind of PC well before it was on the Switch.
Maybe I don't notice this with other games but that seems like a really long time.
On the other hand, factorio is a load once and play for hours type game compared to something like mario which incurs loads on each level
I just timed Breath of the Wild (cartridge version), and from the time I launched the game from the Switch menu to seeing the game menu was about 16 seconds, and the time from selecting a save file to loading the game world was about 18 seconds. What exactly about this game makes it take so long to load?
They did this by overclocking the Switch during load. I didn't see any mention of boost/overclock in the Factorio writeup, though.
> The majority of time spent starting the game is preparing the images from disk into a format that the GPU can use. The images on disk being compressed and or not the exact format that GPUs want. Now, what that time on switch is spent on… I don’t know for sure but I would guess something similar.
I need to be absolutely sure i want to play the game five minutes before i do.
Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825543 - Sept 2022 (359 comments)
> Even after the launch, there is much to do. Next to my screen there's a stack of post-it notes with future improvements, possible features and technical debt I need to solve. As mentioned in the announcement last week, after the launch I will also work on controller support for PC and Steam Deck.
And all the graphics stacks nowadays are similar, Vulkan, Metal, DX12, all share the same ideas
Also there are countless opensource cross platform GPU libs, bgfx [1] or sokol [2] for example
Are there significant CPU-specific optimizations that can be made for the Switch / ARMv8 that wouldn't apply to x86-64? I've never really dug into things at that level, I wouldn't know where to begin except for like vector instructions.
Thinking about it some more, there are also probably some tweaks you could use for situations with limited resources which wouldn't apply to most PCs, but would affect the Switch.
One cool thing about ARM is that vector instructions run in parallel with the regular CPU pipeline. You can do some neat optimizations where you interleave sequential part of an algorithm runs while the SIMD instructions are executing. However if you do this yourself the code is going to be super non-portable. In general, knowing that something is always going to be running on a Switch lets you dig deeper into architecture specific optimizations, since x86 has so much variance it would take a ton of effort to really dial in performance on the whole menagerie of Intel and AMD CPUs
For fun, I'll mention that there is a hardware hash function that you can use. The public A57 documentation has a performance guide available that is applicable to the Switch.
There may be some cases where the fixed ARMv8 instruction set allows them to use instructions that have equivalents on recent x64 processors but not back to their minspec PC.
And that's heavily based on internal scripting with real code.
The recent "Minecraft"-in-Minecraft emulation was done with pure Redstone internal to the game, but has to be run on a specialized server that accelerates Redstone operations by several thousands to be even fast enough to record time lapses at a reasonable sped.
In-game simulations of logic gates that are generally running at fractions of a Hz are a pretty steep obstacle to overcome for any "real" computing like that. Just to calibrate your expectations.
The Switch supports OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan, and their own API NVN, which actually many engines make use of. Most likely Factorio is using one of the former anyway, so that problem is kind of out of the way, other that having to deal with the extensions and hardware/driver specific behaviors.
Then as they mention the blog, having to adjust the way the GUI works from a PC setup to an handheld.
Will I actually buy it again, just to have it on the Switch?
...yes. Yes, I will.
But there would have to be a touch only interface and that may be the killer.
How is this possible? I would imagine CPU requirements to be more or less same across any resolution / operating system.
This is what makes Nintendo Switch interesting to me. It's CPU is even less powerful than an Raspberry Pi 4. Even midrange android smartphones today are much more efficient and powerful than Switch and yet Switch can run Doom / Skyrim just fine.
Of course, being able to target a single hardware platform with very minor differences like the Switch also means the ability to make optimizations to that specific platform without having to care about possibly breaking compatibility with others. It'd be like being able to optimize your game for people with Nvidia cards and completely ignore those with ATI, Intel, or any other brands on the PC.
Factorio is pretty well optimized too, however the factory size Switch can handle are on the - can launch the rocket - scale. This is but a small fraction of the factory size people end up building
Also, they mentioned in the previous blog post that they've done some optimization to keep the framerate from bogging down, so maybe even the x86 requirements are lower these days (or will be when those optimizations show up in the public version, which might not have happened yet).
That "just fine" hides a massive understatement on just how compromised these games are on Switch. They usually run on settings even below lowest possible on PC and regularly drop resolution way down to even 640x360, making everything extremely oily and blurry.
These games run and can be enjoyable - but "fine" is not really a word that fits into their performance :)
A Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3ghz probably isn't.
They don't want to test and then list the minimum CPU for every generation of cpu for the last decade or more when listing system requirements. So they go a little higher in the stated requirements than is probably needed with newer gens so people don't get angry and disappointed that their older gen cpu doesn't run well despite having the listed clock speed.
(oops, that was the expansion, misread)
Unless I'm misunderstanding this section, that's about 5 weeks away.
> it still won't be ready sooner than in a year from now
This is a reference to the expansion.
