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I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment, and man, it is full of a lot of bullshit isn't it? Beneficial spells that can fail on your own guys. The inability to know why one enemy does 30 damage to a guy with a spell, and another does 103 at the same level with the same spell. Losing takes you back to the title screen, an element I'm glad has been mostly dropped from modern games. Unskippable cutscenes that you have to tap through all the dialogue for. It's tough to know if an attack can hit an enemy from your movement destination, but once you've moved you're no longer allowed to undo it. So if you move, and find the enemy is actually .5 height units too far from you to hit, well, tough poo poo. The computer, of course, does not need to worry about this.
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Jan 17, 2020 14:46
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Morpheus posted:I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment, and man, it is full of a lot of bullshit isn't it? FFT is a weird game for me because I really enjoyed it when I was younger, but as an adult I just find it too tedious and time consuming to really enjoy. The early game in particular is hard for me to get through now, it's very dry. Weirdly enough I think I actually like Tactics Advance 2 more nowadays, even though it's an incredibly bloated mess with a number of sometimes annoying design choices. It's much simplified over the original Tactics in a number of respects (no zodiac stuff, beneficial spells always hit) but I find it to be for the game's benefit.
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Jan 17, 2020 14:57
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dracula vladdy AF posted:FFT is a weird game for me because I really enjoyed it when I was younger, but as an adult I just find it too tedious and time consuming to really enjoy. The early game in particular is hard for me to get through now, it's very dry. FFT is a perfect example of why you rarely actually need to dumb down games for children. They might not be as educated as an adult player, but kids have way more time and inclination to solve very specific problems. Tactics is filled to the brim with mechanics that you can exploit, but it's kids would reasonably have bothered to try all of them in the first place.
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Jan 17, 2020 15:31
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Morpheus posted:
Pretty much anything like this is going to be related to the Zodiac signs of the people involved.  With some minor differences being from the different gear on and faith/brave values of the characters in question. Cleretic posted:FFT is a perfect example of why you rarely actually need to dumb down games for children. They might not be as educated as an adult player, but kids have way more time and inclination to solve very specific problems. And the Tactics hacking community is entirely composed of people who grew up exploiting the gently caress out of all that so it's expected you have that knowledge before you play. There is an LP by Rosalie_A in Let's Play of one of the better hacks that goes into incredible depth about the mechanics of the base game and how they've been changed for the hack.
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Jan 17, 2020 15:51
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Quantum Theory is still fun, but this fight near the end of the game in a constantly shifting labyrinth of bridges and towers is really hard and has no checkpoints, you have to navigate so much terrain and kill so many things in tricky circumstances that eventually something new will pop out that you aren't expecting and kill you, making you start the whole thing again. It's a really cool fight, and as I learn enemy locations and how to deal with them it's getting easier and I'm getting further each time, but it's really long and hard and it's wearing me out.
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Jan 17, 2020 16:20
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Morpheus posted:I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment, and man, it is full of a lot of bullshit isn't it? 95% chance to hit and youd miss at the worst possible time  i also remember being kinda bummed out that the special units you gain later in the game greatly outclassed the crew youd spent the whole game training up. that being said, after bullshit like the weigraf fight i had no problem using orlandu to cheese the poo poo out of the rest of the game.
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Jan 17, 2020 19:17
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ASenileAnimal posted:95% chance to hit and youd miss at the worst possible time Yeah I dislike that in any strategy game. If I can recruit my own guys, don't give me other guys that are way better, have unique sprites, and have unique abilities that no one else gets.
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Jan 17, 2020 19:42
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Olaf The Stout posted:drat, I was about to say that that RAM pack only worked for three games, but it was only required for three games: Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark, and Majoras Mask. Apparently there was a fair 30 or 40 games that could optionally use it, which I didn't know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansion_Pak_(NUS-007) The extra fun thing about DK64 using the expansion pak was that it barely even used it. The whole game was more or less finished and playable with a random unexplained hard crash that they couldn’t figure out, but for some unknown reason the game would be perfectly stable if the expansion pak was installed. Solution: Sell one with every copy of the game and say it’s required. Bug fixed. 
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Jan 17, 2020 20:07
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I believe it was a memory leak, but yeah, it was something they just could not figure out but the Expansion Pak made it work.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:13
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Sadly, the correct solution would have been to not release Donkey Kong 64.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:16
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Maxwell Lord posted:I believe it was a memory leak, but yeah, it was something they just could not figure out but the Expansion Pak made it work. What exactly is a memory leak anyway?
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Jan 17, 2020 20:16
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VanSandman posted:What exactly is a memory leak anyway? Lets say you have a level with 100 objects. The player finishes the level, so you tell your game engine to clean up each object. Oops, you missed a pot in the corner of the room. So now that pot's data is ready in the game's memory, waiting to be deployed at any time (without any loading!). That's fine, it's just a pot, maybe 50 vertices and a texture, nothing too bad. But it's actually in a room that the player needs to go through repeatedly, so every time the level loads, it loads 100 objects, and only discards 99 when they leave. So that pile of unremoved pots, vertices and textures, just starts piling up in the corner, until the game suddenly says "Hey I want to load 100 objects" but you've got 4000 pots in the corner, and not enough memory to load the 100 objects it needs. So it crashes.
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Jan 17, 2020 20:22
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Morpheus posted:Lets say you have a level with 100 objects. The player finishes the level, so you tell your game engine to clean up each object. Oops, you missed a pot in the corner of the room. So now that pot's data is ready in the game's memory, waiting to be deployed at any time (without any loading!). That's fine, it's just a pot, maybe 50 vertices and a texture, nothing too bad. But it's actually in a room that the player needs to go through repeatedly, so every time the level loads, it loads 100 objects, and only discards 99 when they leave. So that pile of unremoved pots, vertices and textures, just starts piling up in the corner, until the game suddenly says "Hey I want to load 100 objects" but you've got 4000 pots in the corner, and not enough memory to load the 100 objects it needs. So it crashes. Quoting this so I can find it for the next time I need to explain the difference between a memory leak and just general lovely programming to someone. There used to be a lot of PC games with memory leaks in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Like, after an hour or two you’d have to save and kill it in task manager so it didn’t poo poo the bed on you.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:09
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Morpheus posted:Lets say you have a level with 100 objects. The player finishes the level, so you tell your game engine to clean up each object. Oops, you missed a pot in the corner of the room. So now that pot's data is ready in the game's memory, waiting to be deployed at any time (without any loading!). That's fine, it's just a pot, maybe 50 vertices and a texture, nothing too bad. But it's actually in a room that the player needs to go through repeatedly, so every time the level loads, it loads 100 objects, and only discards 99 when they leave. So that pile of unremoved pots, vertices and textures, just starts piling up in the corner, until the game suddenly says "Hey I want to load 100 objects" but you've got 4000 pots in the corner, and not enough memory to load the 100 objects it needs. So it crashes. Thank you, I've always wondered.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:19
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Memory leak is lovely programming btw. The reason you don't see games hard crashing anymore is because your mem buffer now means gigabites instead of kilobites. Also common toolchains like Unreal Engine that make it easy to spot that sort of thing. (disclaimer programming is not easy) edit: Also memory protection that came hand in hand with the fact theres now enough memory to run memory protection Vic has a new favorite as of 21:29 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 21:22
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Lego Rock Raiders was the bomb when I was 7, but I knew something was up when it always crashed after one consecutive hour of play. Bloodborne initially had a hilarious exploit, whereby after 12 consecutive hours of play the enemy AI gets dumb and sluggish and all the bosses become DS2 predictable.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:47
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Vic posted:Memory leak is lovely programming btw. The reason you don't see games hard crashing anymore is because your mem buffer now means gigabites instead of kilobites. It’s lovely programming, but it’s a specific type of lovely programming. Someone in the steam thread a week or two ago referred to a games high CPU usage as a “memory leak” and I was kind of baffled.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:17
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isnt that the basis to blood moons in BotW? systemically resetting the world state back to neutral to avoid memory leaks?
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Jan 17, 2020 22:24
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Olaf The Stout posted:isnt that the basis to blood moons in BotW? systemically resetting the world state back to neutral to avoid memory leaks? No, that's part of Calamity Ganon's evil powers.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:45
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No blood moons are gameplay mechanic. Memory wise its pretty straightforward to remember where the moblins were and if they are dead or not. Modern games use most of the available memory for things like physics and textures. If you made botw 2d it would be just as simple as link to the past.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:56
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Vic posted:No blood moons are gameplay mechanic. Memory wise its pretty straightforward to remember where the moblins were and if they are dead or not. And yet it’d still have lovely frame rate on the switch. Yes I’m still annoyed about Link’s Awakening.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:00
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Not to toot my own horn but I’ve never had any problem with memory leak when programming.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:49
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Olaf The Stout posted:isnt that the basis to blood moons in BotW? systemically resetting the world state back to neutral to avoid memory leaks? Nah you can delay bloodmoons indefinitely and there aren't any issues
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Jan 17, 2020 23:52
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oldpainless posted:Not to toot my own horn but I’ve never had any problem with memory leak when programming. more like old loopless
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Jan 18, 2020 00:17
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Tunicate posted:Nah you can delay bloodmoons indefinitely and there aren't any issues How can you delay them?
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Jan 18, 2020 00:39
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Noita's approach to fixing memory leaks is hilarious to me: When you hit the "start a new game" button after dying it just shuts down the game and relaunches it. Like it's guaranteed to work with almost zero effort but it's one of those "Wait... really?" moments the first time you hit the 'new game' button.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:42
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Sunswipe posted:Do you remember the good old days when the whole point of consoles was they were a thing you just played games on? No loving around with hardware to decrease loading time, no updates or installation of software. Just put disc/cartridge in and play. I'm with you buddy. I don't get to play much anymore and it loving sucks to boot up my xbone, wait for a software update, wait while I install the game, start up the game then get another software update before I finally play the game. So god damned annoying and even better if the internet connection drops or the thing goes to sleep while it's doing its thing which has happened.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:43
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Leavemywife posted:How can you delay them? when I spent days loving around in the hyrule castle area I had the sky do the blood moon effects every single night, but never got the cutscene announcing it and it didn’t do anything. Then the first night where I wasn’t around the castle, the blood moon finally triggered for real.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:52
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Gay Rat Wedding posted:when I spent days loving around in the hyrule castle area I had the sky do the blood moon effects every single night, but never got the cutscene announcing it and it didn’t do anything. Then the first night where I wasn’t around the castle, the blood moon finally triggered for real. "Sure you can delay the blood moon, you just have to live in Murderville where everyone is actively trying to kill you"
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Jan 18, 2020 00:54
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The blood moon is on a set timer, it's X in-game days which amounts to like... uh, 3 and a half real-time hours or so? It was detailed pretty well in a reddit post i haven't read in like two years, so i'm not positive on the exact time frame anymore. Game only counts time not actually spent idling in place. That said, you can delay them basically infinitely by just not being in the overworld when they happen. I haven't heard about the hyrule castle trick yet, but i don't doubt that it would work, since you get a different map and all. It might be sorta instanced or exempt for reasons like beating a tough miniboss and having it respawn in your face in an expansive, hostile area. The easiest way tho is to just teleport to a shrine when the blood moon nears, going down into the shrine at 23:55, waiting a couple seconds within the shrine for the date to roll over, then going back up. If you never see the actual cutscene for the blood moon, the blood moon never actually happens. The game will just re-schedule the blood moon to happen the next time the clock hits 24:00. But... you can jsut use a shrine again. I delayed the blood moon for like a week (real-time gaming during a vacation) like that once, depopulating a significant part of the game map like that, to see when the game would get cranky due to "memory issues". It never did and i eventually got bored of it. And i wanted the loot to respawn.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:05
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It's like the quantum moon in Outer Wilds. If you don't observe it, it doesn't exist
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Jan 18, 2020 01:09
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https://zeldamods.org/wiki/Blood_moonquote:
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Jan 18, 2020 01:55
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Morpheus posted:I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment, and man, it is full of a lot of bullshit isn't it? What's your faith stats look like? Faith affects magic pretty hard. A wizard who doesn't believe in magic is going to have a hard time hitting people, do less damage and also take less damage from magic. Similarly people with low faith scores are going to take less damage from spells, but get healed for less from healing magic. High faith is the inverse; a high faith wizard will kick all kinds of rear end, and if your dudes have high faith they'll get blasted real hard, but you can also just heal them for full all the time. That's before you factor in the best/worst of the zodiac and all that.
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Jan 18, 2020 02:18
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Huh. That's really smart.
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Jan 18, 2020 02:23
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Nuebot posted:A wizard who doesn't believe in magic Found my next D&D character
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Jan 18, 2020 02:25
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So I've been loving Kenshi a whole lot, it's right up my alley in terms of being a weird and unapproachable game. But there's one thing that bothers me in the whole mess; almost every item seems to be considered stolen. People die and looting their bodies is still a crime, and items looted from dead people is still considered stolen, and I then have a risk of getting a bounty for selling it to someone else. The game really is an entirely up hill fight against a lovely world that hates you, and it makes the slow progress of success fun.
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Jan 18, 2020 15:18
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BotW Blood Moons are a game mechanic and something to handle memory. It resets the world state in some ways (resets enemies, and respawnable items), and while it's normally on a timer, and you won't otherwise see it, you can force the game into a state where it'll initiate what is sometimes called a Panic Blood Moon. The game just fires it off, no matter if it's the middle of the day or what, though you can also have the game in a state where it can't fire it off (this is trickier). ETA: Whoops, didn't see this was already said.
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Jan 18, 2020 15:30
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Nuebot posted:So I've been loving Kenshi a whole lot, it's right up my alley in terms of being a weird and unapproachable game. But there's one thing that bothers me in the whole mess; almost every item seems to be considered stolen. People die and looting their bodies is still a crime, and items looted from dead people is still considered stolen, and I then have a risk of getting a bounty for selling it to someone else. The game really is an entirely up hill fight against a lovely world that hates you Sounds a lot like real life. Except the bit I snipped out.
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Jan 18, 2020 15:58
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AngryRobotsInc posted:Panic Blood Moon I forgot about it until just now, but I remember randomly getting one of these when I first played through the game and being confused by it. That was back in the Wii U days, I wonder if it's more common on that system than the Switch, I've played a ton more on the latter version and never saw one.
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Jan 18, 2020 18:00
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Morpheus posted:Lets say you have a level with 100 objects. The player finishes the level, so you tell your game engine to clean up each object. Oops, you missed a pot in the corner of the room. So now that pot's data is ready in the game's memory, waiting to be deployed at any time (without any loading!). That's fine, it's just a pot, maybe 50 vertices and a texture, nothing too bad. But it's actually in a room that the player needs to go through repeatedly, so every time the level loads, it loads 100 objects, and only discards 99 when they leave. So that pile of unremoved pots, vertices and textures, just starts piling up in the corner, until the game suddenly says "Hey I want to load 100 objects" but you've got 4000 pots in the corner, and not enough memory to load the 100 objects it needs. So it crashes. For people to latch onto a real example they might be familiar with: Ash and goo piles in Fallout 3, and New Vegas. I've actually used this to explain the concept to my dad, who's not very good at computers. Bethesda's games have an approach to refreshing the world that generally works, and in fact is probably the basis of BotW's blood moons: Outside of particular cells, containers, and any persistent NPCs, the world is refreshed every (I believe) three in-game days. That basically means that the game only has to remember about three days of rampant adventuring, looted containers, and dead bodies before it can reset a bunch of that and stop keeping track of it, thus letting the game's RAM consumption and save files stay at a manageable size. But Fallout 3 introduced a problem: Energy weapons. Energy weapons have a chance of reducing a killed target to a pile of ash or goo. Functionally, all this does is convert the dead body into an 'ash pile' or 'goo pile' container and transfers the inventory over. But, because of some quirk of how they actually designed that functionality, those piles weren't reset after three days like normal containers or bodies were; they stayed there. That meant the game has to always keep track of them and their contents, all the time, leading to bloated save files and ever-greater RAM usage. New Vegas actually had it worse, both because of far more common energy weapons as well as some frequently-traversed areas with randomly spawning hostiles. It would lead to the game becoming unstable, because it would gradually have to deal with a more and more unreasonably large amount of persistent items in the game.
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Jan 18, 2020 18:07
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