[jmclnx]

Funny, decades ago (mid-80s), I had to write a onetime fix on a what would be now a very low memory system, the data in question had a unique key of 8 7bit-ascii characters.

Instead of reading multi-meg data into memory to determine what to do, I used the file system and the program would store data related to the key in sub directories instead. The older people saw what I did and thought that was interesting. With development time factored in, doing it this way ended up being much faster and avoided memory issues that would have occurred.

So with AI, back to the old ways I guess :)

[bsenftner]

Reminds me of early data driving approaches. Early CD based game consoles had memory constraints, which I sidestepped by writing the most ridiculous simple game engine: the game loop was all data driven, and "going somewhere new" in the game was simply triggering a disc read given a raw sector offset and the number of sectors. That read was then a repeated series of bytes to be written at the memory address given by the first 4 bytes read and next 4 bytes how many bytes to copy. That simple mechanism, paired with a data organizer for creating the disc images, enabled some well known successful games to have "huge worlds" with an executable under 100K, leaving the rest of the console's memory for content assets, animations, whatever.

[alexjplant]

Which games were these out of interest? I enjoy reading about game dev from the nascent era of 3D on home consoles (on the Saturn in particular) and would love to hear more.

[bsenftner]

Tiger Woods Golf PSX was one, RoadRash3D0 another. Dozens that were never popular too.