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Comment by meagain20000 | Hacker News Reader

meagain20000

You can never have enough cpu power in gaming. You can always use more. The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

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Not until content creation tools get smarter. When your level is made of simple tiles in 2D top-down perspective, you can have large levels with lots of sprites, but when each character has to be a fully rigged 3D model and each tree rather than being an 8x8 pixel smudge is instead a fully 3D physical object with leaves that respond realistically to wind... Well, it's hard to make them by hand.

>The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

I've found the opposite. The faster computers get, the more games are all about BS graphics and nice explosions. Back in my day we had real interesting adventure games, now get off my lawn.

Back in your day minecraft would not be possible

Considering that it's quite inefficient and written in Java, it might very well be. Especially graphics wise, it's nothing that mid to late nineties GPUs couldn't handle.

Minecraft was memory-bound and bandwidth-bound such that it only really became possible in the late 2000's. A typical PC in 2000 would have, if generous, 128 or 256 megabytes of RAM. A typical connection, if any, would be dial up, with some ADSL and ISDN folks. Minecraft worlds, on the other hand, easily run into the gigabytes. Not to mention that all of its word of mouth came from popular Youtube videos.

You can definitely find examples of earlier voxel renderers that are also more efficient than Minecraft(e.g. Ken Silverman's VOXLAP), but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable, limiting its potential popularity.

>but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable

Those don't have much to do with Moore's law though.

Moore's law is about transistor counts and DRAM is made of transistors so it really does.

Mainstream games, sure. But what about indie games? Those have exploded due to computers becoming fast and cheap.

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