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.
You shouldn’t feel alone just because you’re solitaire
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.
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.
You’ll never fit the game in the boot sector of a floppy disk if you write it in python.
Oh no, how will we play it on modern hardware if we can’t put it in the boot sector of a floppy disk
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 There is no reason why memory-efficient programming should be considered outdated.
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.
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.
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.
Caching is a weird term for “just move the needless waste of space into another part of the computer”.
Just insert the disk.
That’s what she said
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.
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?
O_o
I fear for the future of programming
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.
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.
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?
I take it you didn’t play MechWarrior 2 growing up?
You would be 100% correct
That would be a Timber Wolf I suspect.
or a Mad Cat if you are not clanner scum!
Watch your genetically inferior tongue, Freebirth!
big talk from smoked jaguar!
Thank you for the linked explanation!
It’s a cow. The ASCII art is used in a lot of different CLI projects
It’s a cow on the left. It has udders. It’s from cowsay
meanwhile pysol fan club edition has about 50 types of card games and takes 230 kilobytes of ram
I like it, but kept running into weird bugs (and I think dependency issues) with different versions of python.
Kpatience for me.
Python is dependency hell.
Unless you use Nix(OS)
Or Guix
Or similar systems
Which are dependency hells.
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.
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.
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!
