What's the best coded game you've ever played.

Soldato
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A lot of games these days seem to run really poorly simply because developers don't put the effort in. In the past I was Wowed by how Half Life run amazingly with only 4mb onboard graphics and how amazing Deus Ex run on my old Vodoo 3 3000 graphics card. I've never played HalfLife 2 but I hear that runs really smooth on PC which you'd have never believed could even handle a game which looks as good as it does.

What games have shocked you in a good way going on how well they run and how good they look on a low spec PCs in the past.

(I almost put codded game in the title. lol)
 
Some of the Amiga games were amazing for the power available. But I assume we're talking modern-ish PC games here? In which case I'd have to say Far Cry. It ran great even on a 9800 Pro.
 
Once I knew how to actually program, I was fascinated by the simplisticly obvious class-based structure of RPG games like Final Fantasy. The code underneath is actually quite easy to figure out just from playing, but it's put together so well. :o

Best engine and bug-free is what I assume you're actually asking though? So I'd say HL2. Far Cry had an awful slow framerate for me, but HL2 has run brilliantly on whatever system I've seen it on, and without a massive drop in graphical quality. Admittedly that's because it has more emphasis on textures than polygons, but it's done very well nonetheless.
 
Deus Ex without a doubt, looked stunning on my Voodoo3 16MB. Although the earlier C&C games with their ability to run on the onboard graphics of the earlier systems have to be up there with the best.

That said, you just cannot discount the best game ever written, Elite!
 
HL2

I was pretty amazed when my boss' antique of a machine actually managed to run it, looked pretty decent too.
He tried to play Prey afterwards and it was a slideshow :p
 
Deus Ex was extremely well coded. The only trouble is that it was optimised for the Glide API that died along with 3dfx and their Voodoo graphics cards. The advanced power of modern GPUs make up for the lack of optimization when running on Direct3D though.
 
HL2 and doom 3 both had sound related stutter/stop start and loading problems on their release, they weren't well coded
 
Hades said:
Some of the Amiga games were amazing for the power available. But I assume we're talking modern-ish PC games here? In which case I'd have to say Far Cry. It ran great even on a 9800 Pro.

Uh, the 9800 pro was the pinnacle of the 2004 graphics cards :confused:

Having said that, Half Life 2 (source engine-based games) wins it for me.
 
It's hard to define what you mean by well coded. As we can't look at the code ourselves (and lets face it most of us probably would quickly get lost if we could) we can only judge how well coded it is by the amount of bugs it has and how well it performs.

Not a game in itself but the various iterations of the Unreal Engine are very well made in terms of flexibility and features.
 
Games havent really been coded very well since every started using C++, back in the days when asm was the only way to code properly, you could get some incredible things done with even the simplest of hardware. The Amiga was a prime example of that, some of the 3d demo's that were comming out of the demo scene were just insane. Alien Breed 3D was an amazing feet of programming considering the hardware in use.
 
I wouldn't say HL2 is well coded, you just have to look at the SDK... bit of a mess :), and no end of stuttering problems etc. in the engine
 
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