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by 0des 1775 days ago
When I hear stories like these, I always think that nobody is doing stuff like this these days; but in retrospect, I think it's just that I've never asked or seen it discussed.. so..

What are you guys doing these days that has this same hacker-ethos applied to it?
1 comments
gambiting 1775 days ago
It's semi-common on PS4 to abuse the audio coprocessor to do things other than audio, just to eek out that little bit of extra processing power. After all, it's programmable, so why not? In fact Sony specifically made the PS5's audio processor non programmable to make sure developers don't do this and actually focus on its strengths and things that it can do very well with 3D audio and such, rather than make it crunch physics or whatever.

Also I'm aware of at least one game that uses an internal executable restart routine to reboot and reload data on PS4 and X1 since it's just easier than dynamically unloading all engine data and loading it again following an in-game update. While not forbidden by either 1st party, it's certainly somewhat unorthodox.

In general, I think that even with next(current) gen there is still a lot of the good old school hacker mentality going on, it's just that you can't hear about it because it's all NDAd. Wait 10-20 years and those stories will start to come out.

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wolrah 1775 days ago
> Also I'm aware of at least one game that uses an internal executable restart routine to reboot and reload data on PS4 and X1 since it's just easier than dynamically unloading all engine data and loading it again following an in-game update. While not forbidden by either 1st party, it's certainly somewhat unorthodox.

Microsoft put out a video soon after purchasing Bethesda where someone from that team mentioned doing a similar trick in the Xbox port of Morrowind. If the game was approaching the relatively tight 64MB RAM limit of the platform it could soft reboot the console during a loading screen and then reload to the current point.

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gambiting 1775 days ago
Yeah, MVG did a video on it ;-) I can confirm that the exact same trick is still used on modern games.
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