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Super Mario Inspired SuperTux Issues Its First Official Release In 10 Years (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SuperTux, the free software game inspired by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers, has put out its first stable release in a decade. SuperTux 0.4 rewrites the game engine to make use of OpenGL, SDL2, and other modern open-source game tech. SuperTux 0.4 additionally features a lot of new in-game content, an in-game download manager, and support for translations. SuperTux 0.4 can be downloaded for Linux, Windows and Mac via GitHub.
I prefer TAGAP
http://www.tagap.net/
MOD need specialist support to play now. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator - they capture each instrument individually and, as such, many things you might want to do you can't, and the mod player is responsible for decoding, timing, etc. which is an overhead.
MID technically needs hardware support or software instruments to play - and never quite sounds the same. The storage size doesn't include the software instruments - It was 45Mb last time I downloaded a soundfont for a soundcard. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator, and can't have various effects and changes done to them.
MP3 etc. are just sound recordings, not music formats, and are the final composition, layered with other instruments, effects, etc. Library support is pretty universal.
Graphics don't scale as nicely as you might think. Like fonts, you can't just scale up or down unless the original is vector. And then you have to process them and people complain that a game with a few boxes slows to a crawl when a lot of enemies are on-screen or requires a long startup time to rasterise them all in the right size first, or requires a 3D card with hundreds of megs of texture memory to hold them all.
Don't forget that nowadays, just the SDL library is several megabytes. It's supports all kinds of things that didn't even exist back in the 8-bit days. Hell SDL_TTF rendering requires a large library, plus FreeType, plus a font (the DejaVu fonts are 600Kb each or thereabouts). Sure, this is all "wastage" and you could just encode a bitmap font. For every possible screen resolution. Or run in fixed resolution. Like the 320x240's (or even half that) of the 8-bit era. Everytime you double a resolution, you QUADRUPLE the storage size required. So today's 1900x1200 screens require a lot more sprites to fill them and a lot more detail in those sprites to not look shit, and a lot more storage to hold it all.
There are reasons that things grew. I grew up in the 48Kb era. Have you looked at things like the Skool Daze disassembly. Fuck spending all that time squeezing that stuff into individual bits and still ended up with a ten-screen game because of memory restrictions.
Don't forget the amount of libraries that are sucked in to any simple program now. Dozens of megs for something as simple as calculator. Everything comes back to MSVCRT and a ton of Windows DLL's. On Linux, everything needs libc, and a bucket of support libraries and devices.
The reason it's so much more is because computers do so much more. And in terms of programming, I'd rather they spent time on making the game rather than pissing about optimising the graphics format for a 2D platformer. As it is they are short of people, short of code, lagging in development - and you want them to spend an age pissing about prematurely optimising shit using obsolete formats for the sake of some bit-level purism? That's a sure way to lose every developer on the project.
Especially compared to "#include " and just getting started straight away, even if that drags in megabytes of libraries that almost EVERY game written today uses.