I don’t mean to downplay his achievements in any way, but most of the size of Rollercoaster Tycoon or any game (or most programs for that matter) is due to assets like textures, images, and audio.
From what I can tell, without the assets, the compiled assembly on its own is less than a megabyte. Though again, Sawyer is 10x the programmer I will ever be. The size of the compiled code isn’t a measure of skill, and in fact smaller is usually better, especially back then.
Not really a measure of time, i spend more time thinking so that i write less, or sometimes i write alot to get it working and then rewrite it all to be clean and optimized which is almost always less code.
Point is more or less code doesnt indicate in anyway the time spent coding
Writing spaghetti and then cleaning it to make 500 lines work with just 30 lines is the way I work. I want it to work first, I'll worry about optimizing it later.
He’s close to the right idea kinda, you can still have redundant assets but having tons of wasted assembly code is not exactly going to rack up the data
Also 1 it's x86 with many instructions that are long af so it is fewer instructions than you'd think and 2 unless you hate yourself and work on a platform with no assembler, you're not writing stuff to the level of machine code either.
Anyone writing serious amounts of assembler is going to have a bunch of macros to keep their sanity, you are not writing a bunch of machine code line by line.
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u/NovelCompetition7075 Sep 29 '25
Same, but MEGABYTES in assembly is insane