• hayvan@feddit.nl
    1·
    6 minutes ago

    There are good open source puzzle and solitaire games that are not resource hogs.

    No solitaire but I strongly recommend Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection.

  • CabbageRelish@midwest.socialEnglish
    6·
    20 hours ago

    Youngins. They’re talking about the entirety of Windows and calling it all a solitaire game. EG - Windows 98’s minimum requirement was 16 MB, and 95’s was 4 MB.

  • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
    71·
    2 days ago

    Solitaire these days has Xbox integration, XP, levels, achievements, collectibles, events, ads, payment system, subscriptions for making it ad free, cheats behind a paywall, … It’s a bit silly.

  • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
    34·
    2 days ago

    Wait until you see the solitaire game I’ll definitely 100% make after I finish this class on C I’m taking this quarter!

    /s

    Yeah, I would never want to make a game in C when things like Python or Godot exist.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
        182·
        2 days ago

        Oh no, how will we play it on modern hardware if we can’t put it in the boot sector of a floppy disk

        • rhabarba@feddit.org
          33·
          2 days ago

          The main problem with modern hardware is that it needs to have an abundance of resources because of sarcastic questions like this. There is no reason why memory-efficient programming should be considered outdated.

          • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
            121·
            2 days ago

            Yeah but pretty textures and detailed models are nice too. And maybe you want to use a scripting language for parts of the game to save a bunch kf dev time

            That’s not the same as an unoptimized game. I have games running at triple digit fps that require more memory and disk space than 10 year old me thought possible.

            Also unused memory is useless. Caching things is good.

            • stingpie@lemmy.world
              81·
              2 days ago

              Unused memory is not useless, it is just unused. If I want to pull up a guide on how to giggle the grables in my favorite game Grable Giggler, I would be very happy if I had unused memory which I can now use for my browser.

              Also, smaller RAM usage generally correlates to smaller file size, which is very useful on computers with limited storage.

              And finally, there’s also low spec gaming and accessibility. Minecraft, at least prior to the microsoft acquisition, was a very low spec game. I wouldn’t say it was optimized, but a game of minecraft took less ram than chrome. There was nearly no computers at the time which couldn’t run minecraft. At the time of minecraft’s early boom, kids were getting low-spec hand-me-downs, and so minecraft was one of the most open-ended games they could play. What I’m trying to say is that minecraft—and Doom for that matter—owe a large part of their success to low memory usage.

              • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
                52·
                2 days ago

                Unused memory is not useless, it is just unused

                Yes, which means it’s doing precisely nothing to improve your performance.

                If I want to pull up a guide on how to giggle the grables in my favorite game Grable Giggler, I would be very happy if I had unused memory which I can now use for my browser.

                Your operating system should just free up some memory for that. In fact, your browser could be in memory before you decide to launch it. That’s the magic of caching, baby! I’m just saying, don’t be afraid to use memory - people are already buying way more of it than they need. That doesn’t mean you should be creating games with memory leaks! But e.g loading things into memory before they’re used saves you loading from disk in the moment - which would be slow.

                And finally, there’s also low spec gaming and accessibility. Minecraft, at least prior to the microsoft acquisition, was a very low spec game. I wouldn’t say it was optimized, but a game of minecraft took less ram than chrome.

                Minecraft was made in Java, the JVM is literally one of the worst platforms for memory usage (running something in the browser is just about the only way to make it use more memory than Java), so that just proves my point: Optimizing down to the kilobyte is useless in 2025. It was already useless in 2010. Also, you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft rewrote it in C++ to save memory, it’s called the Bedrock Edition and it runs on cheaper hardware than the Java Edition!

                In fact, the horribly memory inefficient platform, Java, greatly contributed to its success! First off, it was much faster for Notch alone (initially) to write it in Java compared to C. Secondly, it allowed for much easier modding.

                and Doom

                came out in 1993, when 16 gigabytes of memory would’ve cost 2,867,200 USD (175 dollars for 1MB is what I found online). Now it’s 50 bucks. 40 if you have an older machine that runs DDR4 and 30 if you have a DDR4 laptop.

                • rhabarba@feddit.org
                  3·
                  2 days ago

                  Caching is a weird term for “just move the needless waste of space into another part of the computer”.

            • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
              45·
              2 days ago

              Also unused memory is useless

              Unused memory means:

              • I can let updates continue in the background
              • I can open a web-browser on a second monitor
              • I can afford to buy less memory
              • I can run a server on the same computer, instead of having to buy another one to become a dedicated server
              • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
                51·
                2 days ago

                I can let updates continue in the background

                That’s used memory

                I can open a web-browser on a second monitor

                That’s used memory

                I can afford to buy less memory

                But I bet you don’t, because you look at your computer say it’s all being used - when actually a lot is being used for caching and is freed upon request.

                I can run a server on the same computer, instead of having to buy another one to become a dedicated server

                That’s, again, used memory

                • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
                  44·
                  2 days ago

                  That’s used memory

                  That’s memory not hogged by a single program, making me able to use it for other stuff.

                  because you look at your computer say it’s all being used

                  You’re lucky you didn’t bet any material thingy on it. I wait for the OOM killer to fire up before saying, “it’s full”.
                  While I do have enough memory on my desktop, I only have 8GB on my laptop (the other 8GB one I bought, went bad early, or maybe it’s just the slot that has stopped working, it could be anything), making it hard to even use the clang tools on large projects.

                  So there is this game called “Endless Sky” and its high-dpi stuff is in another separate package.
                  If I install the high-dpi package on the laptop, it crashes before even completely starting, while it works perfectly well, on removing the high-dpi package.

    • Asidonhopo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I suppose not a problem if you don’t want any innovation in the engine of the game and just want to re-skin something someone else made.

      • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
        2·
        2 days ago

        I don’t see how if I were to make a basic solitaire game why I’d want to innovate in the game engine, personally.

        Maybe for a different game, but why would I put in that much effort in a game you can probably download thousands of different versions/reskins of on your smart fridge?

  • Mestone@lemmy.world
    8·
    2 days ago

    What the heck is the thing on the right side of the picture? There’s a horse on the left and a what? A robot?

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
    19·
    2 days ago

    TBF I guess, it’s the UI toolkits. I see this on Linux too - a “very small” app that does basically nothing except monitor a file for changes, takes many MB of RAM if it has a UI.

    Since my RAM is almost never over half used, why not. Just make sure the OS swaps it out if something else needs a lot of RAM.

    • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, even adding a default blank GUI, greatly increases memory usage.

      I guess that’s another reason to prefer CLI programs. They reduce the system resource you need to have free at any point of time to do whatever you need them to do.

      In a condition when my computer is heavily swapping, I’d go with htop rather than plasma-systemmonitor

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      I like it, but kept running into weird bugs (and I think dependency issues) with different versions of python.

      Kpatience for me.

      • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        gonna try kpatience; i need a good one for my mum who plays microsoft solitaire all the time (i want to switch her since windows is losing security updates)

        have you tried the flatpak pysol? that’s what i have; installed through linux mint software manager and it works great.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
          3·
          2 days ago

          Yeah (on the flatpak) although I still had a problem, and don’t remember what/why.

          Kpatience is nice.

          Also I have a fundamental problem with pysol wins being just “you did it. Click OK”.

          Those bouncing cards in Windows sol.exe were early computer dopamine addiction that sold millions of computers.

          • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            i just got kpatience too since i hadn’t heard about it before and i agree, i love it more. i’m still getting used to it though. i love the downloadable packs though!