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I very much doubt the menu itself is putting strain on the console. The most common cause of inexplicable resource-sucking in simple scenes, I expect, is simply that they didn't bother to cap the framerate of the menu, so it's updating at something ridiculous like 500+ FPS.
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Apr 19, 2020 04:12
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Lord Lambeth posted:I think menus are often big ol' vector files which might explain some of that issue. Yeah vectors are good for menus/UI because they work equally well at any resolution, rather than having to create a bunch of resolution specific textures for every possible screen size. They're very math heavy though and it's entirely possible that a lot of games just implement them by going "gently caress it, re-calculate every frame, why not" because the GPU can technically handle it.
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Apr 19, 2020 04:14
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I very much doubt the menu itself is putting strain on the console. at least 80% of all code running on a console at any time, is menu code. its hosed up.
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Apr 19, 2020 05:33
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The Moon Monster posted:I definitely played some DOS shareware games where the game speed was directly proportional to your CPU speed so they basically only worked with one specific processor, but it is weird that that would be a problem as late as 98'. I don't think it ever even occurred to me to try the real time mode in Cyberstorm, though. Blade Runner in 97 has a bomb whose countdown is based on tics of your processor so before this new GoG rerelease you could play just fine and dandy then hit that part and instantly explode over and over with no recourse.
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Apr 19, 2020 07:13
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah vectors are good for menus/UI because they work equally well at any resolution, rather than having to create a bunch of resolution specific textures for every possible screen size. They're very math heavy though and it's entirely possible that a lot of games just implement them by going "gently caress it, re-calculate every frame, why not" because the GPU can technically handle it.
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Apr 19, 2020 08:02
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Dark Souls was never originally intended to be on PC, remember, it was built for PS360 first. When you're working with fixed hardware and no user modding ability, tying things to frame rate is absolutely fine because it should, if you're optimising for the hardware properly (cough Blighttown cough), be rock solid and consistent for every player. PtDE was a shoddy port but it was done by people who hadn't really worked with PCs before, so they didn't know the traps to avoid. DS2, as with many things in DS2, has no excuse.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:59
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Honestly, for people who have never worked with PCs before, the Dark Souls 1 port was really pretty drat solid, even with all the hiccups. DSfix was so easy to make that it was out in literally days, if I remember correctly, so it can't have taken much to solve the issues.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:01
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Dabir posted:Dark Souls was never originally intended to be on PC, remember, it was built for PS360 first. When you're working with fixed hardware and no user modding ability, tying things to frame rate is absolutely fine because it should, if you're optimising for the hardware properly (cough Blighttown cough), be rock solid and consistent for every player. PtDE was a shoddy port but it was done by people who hadn't really worked with PCs before, so they didn't know the traps to avoid. DS2, as with many things in DS2, has no excuse. The thing is that in the generations before the ps360 you couldn't just tie it to frame rate either because that meant the European version would be running at 5/6ths speed, due to PAL being 50 fps.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:37
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Hel posted:The thing is that in the generations before the ps360 you couldn't just tie it to frame rate either because that meant the European version would be running at 5/6ths speed, due to PAL being 50 fps.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:38
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Cardiovorax posted:Speaking from personal experience, PS2 games actually often did exactly that. Yes, but it was still a garbage solution then so it shouldn't have survived till now.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:42
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Yeah, just a bit of trivia. I played more than a few games that made me think "I don't know what's supposed to be so difficult about this" only to realize years later that I was basically on permanent bullet time the whole way through, lol.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:47
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PAL makes framerate slower, but it also gives you 20% more time per frame for game logic, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
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Apr 19, 2020 12:52
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Hel posted:The thing is that in the generations before the ps360 you couldn't just tie it to frame rate either because that meant the European version would be running at 5/6ths speed, due to PAL being 50 fps. Isn't this why console speedruns usually use Japanese versions of games?
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Apr 19, 2020 12:56
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Isn't this why console speedruns usually use Japanese versions of games? Usually it's because of things like faster text boxes (thanks kanji), bugs and exploits that were fixed in localised versions etc
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Apr 19, 2020 12:59
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Isn't this why console speedruns usually use Japanese versions of games? EDIT: and earlier versions being buggier, yes.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:01
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Cardiovorax posted:Yeah, just a bit of trivia. I played more than a few games that made me think "I don't know what's supposed to be so difficult about this" only to realize years later that I was basically on permanent bullet time the whole way through, lol. It might be why I thought I was good at fighting games in the PS2 generation. But it did have the side-effect of every piece of footage I saw of an American playing a game I knew well feel subtly wrong and it took me a while to figure out why.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:14
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Zereth posted:No I think they used 60fps video standards too. It's that the japanese text is usually shorter so you only have to mash through three text boxes instead of 5, or whatever. I meant that in the sense that you almost never see speedruns on PAL versions because they run slower. It's always either American or Japanese versions, usually Japanese.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:14
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It was especially painful for long RPGs that already took a ton of time to complete. That 60 hour JRPG you played? Imagine it's suddenly ten hours longer because it runs just that much slower.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:31
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IIRC FF9's special secret weapon was supremely difficult to get in PAL regions because the timer to get it wasn't based on frame rate and they didn't account for everything else progressing at 5/6ths the intended pace.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:39
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:I meant that in the sense that you almost never see speedruns on PAL versions because they run slower. It's always either American or Japanese versions, usually Japanese. There's also bugfix-based reasons for that, too. PAL games almost always took longer to come out, for distribution, localization and framerate conversion reasons, so it could sometimes mean that the European version caught some bugfixes that weren't in the initial run of the American version. I remember there were some cases of this with Metroid Prime. I believe that if you ever see specifically a European version being used for speedruns, it's probably a quirk of localization.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:43
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The whole reason that the hardest difficulties for the Substance/Subsistence versions of MGS2 & MGS3 is called European Extreme is because the European versions of those games took so long to come out that they were half-way points between the original release and the "Sub" releases. MGS2 had the cutscene theatre, the boss rush and a handful of VR missions (plus some other small things that I can't recall), MGS3 had I think almost everything from the Subsistence release except the new camera mode, multiplayer and the versions of Metal Gear 1 and 2.
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Apr 19, 2020 16:27
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I know from personal experience that Mega Man 2 and Solstice do run 20% slower on PAL, or at least their music does. Really hosed me up when I was playing MM2, I spent the whole time going "I don't think this sounds right".
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Apr 19, 2020 17:48
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Dabir posted:Solstice DON'T MIND IF I DO!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_gObHt1uZA
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Apr 19, 2020 17:55
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Cardiovorax posted:Speaking from personal experience, PS2 games actually often did exactly that. Yeah I remember that here in Europe Burnout 3 and Revenge had an option to choose whether your TV was 50hz or 60hz. It the matched the frame rate to the refresh rate :v I recall quite a few games doing that, and I would always pick 50hz cause I didn't know better. But then sometimes I'd pick 60hz and get completely obliterated. Man 7th gen was a lawless wasteland.
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Apr 19, 2020 19:29
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stuffed crust punk posted:the thing that drives me nuts and seems to keep happening over and over again is game logic is tied to framerate. the dark souls pc port had something like double damage or double weapon degradation or something when people modded it to run at 60fps because it determined those things by the number of frames where a weapon intersected with a target or some poo poo like that. I make loving phone apps and I'd be fired for putting business logic values in the ui So for clarification's sake, this was Dark Souls 2, no mods involved, and it was kinda dumber than most people actually remember so gently caress it here's a PYF hyperspecific knowledge post about  framerate jank Weapon degradation had 2 issues, First was, yeah, that it would constantly apply damage to the weapon as long as the weapon was inside an enemy's hitbox. A few weapons like the Dragon's Tooth were slightly disadvantaged due to having slam attacks and stuff like that, which would have your weapon sitting in the enemy for a while. This might have been fully intentional, god knows, if it was it's a horrible idea Second was the framerate issue, durability damage was technically not tied to FPS in the normal sense. At 40 FPS or below it would act normally, durability would drain at the correct, same rate regardless of framerate, though still for the entire time it's inside an enemy. At 41 FPS or above, the amount of durability damage doubles. Just like, jumps up. I don't think it was fixed until several patches into Scholar of the First Sin, and it wasn't actually fixed as much as it was changed so that it only does slightly more durability damage while over 40 fps. On top of that, over 40 FPS your ripostes do extra damage in both versions. I have no idea why any of this is the case!  Dark Souls 1 ran at 30 FPS out the box, and it hit that 30 FPS like a goddamn champion (for most people at least). It was a fantastic port apart from a lack of graphical options, which was dealt with by DSFix within like a week of the game's release. You could double the FPS cap with DSFix, and if you did, the game became very thread appropriate. 60 FPS was fine enough if you were running around on flat ground or just fighting skellingtons, but it'd sporadically cause weird issues that'd kramer you through a solid wall or floor. Sliding down ladders would shoot you through the floor. Your jump distance was nerfed, to the point that you actually couldn't make several important jumps, and it shortened your roll distance slightly. There were a lot of tiny little effects on how the game worked in regards to movement and physics, a good deal of them being very deadly. It was a neat hack but really not really usable. LobosJr actually streamed the game at 60 FPS as a challenge speedrun for a little while, it introduced that much new jank. looks buttery smooth though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMTlJ-_qi-I Basically, what Dabir said, Dark Souls 1 was a lovely port. Dark Souls 2 has absolutely no excuse, and in fact goes out of its way to be programmed in a very specifically weird and dumb way 3 and Remastered run at 60 and supposedly use a fixed timestep, so if the framerate drops, time slows down. I dunno if that's true, I barely played 3 and didn't buy remastered. I hope twitter was wrong about games for the absolute first time ever also, while I'm here, here's some "art" my engine produced while I had FXAA implemented wrong, I dunno why it turns everything into a broken monitor but this is now a feature  
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Apr 19, 2020 19:46
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Doc Hawkins posted:DON'T MIND IF I DO!!! Exactly, but on PAL it sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yPk0QgA0mA
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Apr 19, 2020 19:52
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Carthag Tuek posted:at least 80% of all code running on a console at any time, is menu code. its hosed up. that's not too much of an exaggeration for Star Trek Online, the ingame UI really sucks up frames
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Apr 19, 2020 20:36
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That face needs to be someone's avatar.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:23
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dreamin of semen posted:This might have been fully intentional, god knows, if it was it's a horrible idea From what I remember, and this might be wrong, it wasn't intended. However, when they were making the 60FPS port for the scholar edition they deliberately kept it, and some of the other durability jank, in. So in the end scholar's durability isn't as bad as the base game's "lol you hit two guys and now your weapon breaks instantly" cavalcade of shame, but it includes all of those lovely features by default because the dev team genuinely seemed to like them. I'm one of the biggest defenders of Dark Souls 2 as the best souls game, but the durability poo poo was extremely pointless and basically just served to gently caress over certain play styles (heavy weapons) and bad players, while annoying everyone else who had to repair their weapons every other encounter. See also: that one ring which was basically the best ring in the game bad had like, what, 10 durability? So getting hit at all would send it into "at risk" status right away.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:44
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dreamin of semen posted:Weapon degradation had 2 issues, First was, yeah, that it would constantly apply damage to the weapon as long as the weapon was inside an enemy's hitbox. A few weapons like the Dragon's Tooth were slightly disadvantaged due to having slam attacks and stuff like that, which would have your weapon sitting in the enemy for a while. This might have been fully intentional, god knows, if it was it's a horrible idea Wasn't this specifically when hitting an enemy's corpse? I seem to recall needing to be very careful about not attacking one extra time after an enemy was killed because my weapon would vaporize when touching their dead ragdoll.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:52
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Triarii posted:Wasn't this specifically when hitting an enemy's corpse? I seem to recall needing to be very careful about not attacking one extra time after an enemy was killed because my weapon would vaporize when touching their dead ragdoll. DS1 had some issues with katanas breaking especially quickly because their animation made them clip through the ground multiple times with every swing, though, if I remember correctly.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:57
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Nuebot posted:From what I remember, and this might be wrong, it wasn't intended. However, when they were making the 60FPS port for the scholar edition they deliberately kept it, and some of the other durability jank, in. So in the end scholar's durability isn't as bad as the base game's "lol you hit two guys and now your weapon breaks instantly" cavalcade of shame, but it includes all of those lovely features by default because the dev team genuinely seemed to like them. I wouldn't be shocked if that's dead on, shame though, I probably would have bought Scholar if it had fixed that and made a few other decent changes, but at the time it seemed like all the changes were kinda asinine so I never bothered. I'll also defend 2 forever, or at least large parts of it, but some of the mechanic changes seem a questionable in hindsight, durability being one of the big ones. Also yeah, you guys are right, it being corpse-related is ringing all sorts of bells. I don't recall katanas being particularly bad durability-wise in DS1, I used them a lot and don't think I had to repair much more than other weapons, but honestly the DS1 durability system is barely a thing (which is probably why they changed it so hard in 2 honestly) and extremely forgettable. They do clip through and spark off the wall a lot though, so if that does durability damage then I believe it immediately. Elfface posted:That face needs to be someone's avatar. I'd be delighted to see my dumb broken programmer art half-trump child next to someone's posts I'm thinking of getting huge prints for my party basement walls
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Apr 19, 2020 23:35
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It's kind of baffling that they even felt the need for weapons to lose durability specifically when hitting dead enemies, let alone that it was implemented in such a weird and different way. It honestly feels like the kind of thing where one day a random programmer on the team thought "hey it would make sense if it worked like this" and then implemented it incorrectly and didn't tell anyone about it, so it didn't get tested properly. Like the time a programmer I was working with decided that arrows in a physics-y game should naturally do more damage if the arrowhead hits an enemy rather than the shaft but didn't tell us that's how it worked, so arrows seemed to just do random amounts of damage.
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Apr 20, 2020 00:00
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It's weird, in the time I played SotfS I don't remember ever having any equipment break (I didn't reach the really low durability stuff to be fair like that ring), was it really such a big issue outside things apparently made of glass? I thought all your equipment auto-repaired fully when you sat at a bonfire. Or was I basically going with fully broken gear after a point without noticing?
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Apr 20, 2020 00:47
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IIRC it autorepaired as long as it wasn't fully broken.
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Apr 20, 2020 01:09
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Zanzibar Ham posted:It's weird, in the time I played SotfS I don't remember ever having any equipment break (I didn't reach the really low durability stuff to be fair like that ring), was it really such a big issue outside things apparently made of glass? I thought all your equipment auto-repaired fully when you sat at a bonfire. It autorepaired, but the issue was that a LOT of things had painfully low durability. DS3 has the same system but durability overall is a lot higher.
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Apr 20, 2020 01:47
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I think I had weapons break maybe 2 times ever in all the times I played through that game. The bug sucked but it rarely mattered and 90% of the time when it did it just meant you’d switch to another weapon before your primary broke. people massively exaggerated how bad it supposedly was.
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Apr 20, 2020 01:51
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Gay Rat Wedding posted:I think I had weapons break maybe 2 times ever in all the times I played through that game. The bug sucked but it rarely mattered and 90% of the time when it did it just meant you’d switch to another weapon before your primary broke. people massively exaggerated how bad it supposedly was. It really depended on the kind of weapon you were using (and was framerate dependent, which is how this got brought up). I distinctly remember an area in the Lost Bastille where a group of dudes would rush you through a door such that it was easy to end up killing several of them right on top of each other, and if you happened to swing a weapon vertically downwards onto the pile of their corpses, it would break instantly from full durability. That was probably the most extreme case but there were a lot of other instances where a bad swing could immediately cost you 25% of a weapon's durability.
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Apr 20, 2020 02:10
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the durability, especially combined with the framerate bug, neutered my favorite weapon, the Caestus. it broke so drat fast because of a naturally low durability and the fact that you were swinging it a lot.
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Apr 20, 2020 03:36
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dreamin of semen posted:I'd be delighted to see my dumb broken programmer art half-trump child next to someone's posts Mind if i make use of it then? Im clearly in need of a better av and that face makes me chuckle.
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Apr 20, 2020 04:03
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