| One of my first paid iOS dev jobs was porting a Go game from iPad to iPhone, don't even think the 4 was out yet. It also used computation time based difficulties. By the time I was done writing it, I knew a few tricks I could eke a win out with on 19x19. When the iPhone 5S came out, I tried it on a whim to check the UI scaling etc... the beginner difficulty on a 9x9 board deleted me. It was grabbing something like 64x more samples per go, the lowest difficulty on the 5S (instant responses) never lost a single game vs the highest difficulty 3GS (15 second turns) iPhones had a lot of moments like that. Silly bullshit like "what if every pixel was a cell in a collection view" would go from "oh it can barely do 128" to "more responsive than that was, with 2 million" in a few gens. |
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| ▲ | microtherion 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh, this led me down a rabbit hole… I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself). So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse). A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever). This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379. It seems that somebody else had already discovered this and fixed it in a fork of the open source project: https://github.com/aglee/Chess/commit/dfb16b3f32e5a6633d2119... | |
| ▲ | hinkley 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed. Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means. | | |
| ▲ | jasonwatkinspdx 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, Reforged was received very poorly so they basically end of life'd the franchise. There is a thriving community with a couple different choices for servers to play on. So I'm sure there's a fix for your mouse speed issue. Check Twitch for people streaming it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/warcraft-iii Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tournaments with other streamers. | | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Reforged was received poorly because it was a lazy half assed job that was a blatant cash grab. Not because culturally we have moved on and the game has aged beyond being fun You probably knew this, but wanted to make sure others knew that the reason they ended the franchise is not because there was no market, but instead it was pure unadulterated greed that led to that situation. In an alternate reality they would have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene | | |
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| ▲ | bombcar 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work". The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane. | | |
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :) |
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| ▲ | droptablemain 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second. | | |
| ▲ | usefulcat 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've been enjoying Total Annihilation since 1997. Still works fine on fairly modern hardware with Windows 11. No modifications other than some additional maps that I downloaded decades ago. | | |
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| ▲ | afandian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it means gcc -O0 | |
| ▲ | psunavy03 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh man, I remember that: on a newer computer, I'd tap the left arrow to turn and the Hornet would do a 360. I suppose, technically, that's one way to make the Scimitar feel more responsive... | |
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story. These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game. I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this. |
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| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation Wow. 1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed! I guess some lessons don't get passed on? |
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| ▲ | monster_truck 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | AFAIK the only reason Chess even ships at all anymore is as a burn utility. They'll set it to AI vs AI at max difficulty to stress the system and make sure the cooling/power management works. | | |
| ▲ | microtherion 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs). It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines. | | |
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