News and updates

Warning: May contain traces of cynicism

9th of December

I was recently reminded* by these guys about the existence of my crimson skies patch, and the fact that I couldn't fix the ATI black squares issue at the time I first wrote it because I didn't have any appropriate hardware available to test with. I do have ATI hardware now though, so it was time to take another look. Sure enough, I can replicate the problem all too easily. It's very obviously z-buffer related; the squares appear where things move away from the screen, and disappear if terrain is very close to the camera. There's a few forum threads around about it, most of which end up blaming it on removed 16 bit z-buffer support in new drivers. I'm not quite sure where that came from though; 16 bit z-buffers are still supported just fine, and in any case, crimson skies uses a 24 bit z-buffer if one is available. (Which is always, these days.) That the squares are multiple pixels across does suggest some sort of driver weirdness, since that's an effect that would be pretty darn hard to do by accident via a game bug. After playing with it for a bit, my best guess is that it's a driver bug that shows up when a z-buffer is used backwards. (i.e. when 1.0 represents the front camera plane and 0.0 the back, rather than the other way around.) I'd be surprised if any game was written like that these days, so someone on the driver team probably thought making that assumption would be a good optimization. Alas, back in crimson skies' time before hardware T&L, when games tended to do their own maths to transform vertices instead of using the standard DirectX functions, it wouldn't have surprised me one bit. I'd be interested in seeing if any of the other games that exhibit the same black squares problem also use backwards z coordinates. A new csfix release is up with a fix for the black squares, and which also fixes the briefing screen flickering that occurs when using a custom resolution. (I've left the old one up too, since the new build wont run on win2k.) Personally, I'm still of the opinion that graphics card manufactures should offer safe reference drivers, (or heck, throw in some reference hardware too, if needed,) with no optimization and which match the reference rasterizer pixel by pixel in all cases at whatever speed hit is required, even if it's going to be 50-90%. Alas, even then, the fact that many (or most?) game glitches are legitimate game bugs, (as was the case with the crimson skies font problem, for example,) probably means it wouldn't actually help very much.

Edit: I notice that another game which appears to share the same problem is mechwarrior 3, for which a fix is already available. More interesting to me was the analysis that accompanied it. I know that's not the case for crimson skies, even if it is for mechwarrior 3, because as mentioned already crimson skies prefers to create a 24 bit z-buffer when possible, and furthermore clears it each frame via IDirect3DViewport3::Clear2, rather than via a blt. My 'fix' is simply to call IDirect3DViewport3::Clear2 again, which is every bit as silly as the mechwarrior 3 fix of locking and immediately unlocking the z-buffer without doing anything. I echo Fuddley's comment: "In the end, this is an unsatisfying fix because I don't really know why it works, but if it works for everyone and not just me, I won't let it bother me!". Aren't driver bugs great? :p

In other release news, sfall is up to 2.17, with some motion scanner unhardcoding, an expansion to the maximum size of encounter tables and a bugfix or two.

Skyrim is out, but as I've already mentioned I'm not going to be modding it. As with FO:NV, I'm going to be holding off for the goty/ultimate/whatever edition with all the DLC included and the obligatory fan patches and UI mods ready and waiting. Kaburke is still the 'official' maintainer of my old mod manager code base, although given how much it's changed since then I don't really want to call it mine any more. I suspect it's going to see less use (at least for skyrim) this time around, if the steam mod tools stand up to the hype, but the strong nexus integration and multi-game support are still very interesting additions. One thing I did notice is that in the absence of the official CS, the version of TESsnip bundled with FOMM is seeing some pretty heavy use in this early modding scene, since the skyrim esps are apparently compatible with it. Had I been paying attention earlier, I'd have at least knocked up a standalone TESsnip version, but reading through the threads I see other people have been playing with it already so I'll leave them to it. (In thee olden days, when we were waiting for the FO3 CS to be released, I wrote an improved version of my oblivion TESsnip to allow basic mod creation, but by the time I was done FO3Edit was available and was much easier to use. I then moved on to writing a script compiler, but again, a couple of days after I was done the official CS showed up. I'm really not good at getting there first, although at least in the case of the script compiler I did score a theoretical if not practical victory. :p)

And finally some random gaming news I feel the need to comment on. Back when I was playing xenoblade, I commented (at length) about how first party nintendo games tended to be bug free. Now I have to correct myself: They've gone and added another blemish to their record with skyward sword, which appears to contain an actual, real life, serious bug. Also, Origin seem to be doing pretty much everything evil that their platform allows, from forced exclusives, EULA terms allowing them to force you to rebuy DLC if you don't play it for a while, to spyware, to locking people out of their purchased games due to bad forum behaviour, or, allegedly, no reason at all. It's like someone over there is working off a checklist'o'evil, possibly while wearing a monocle and stroking an elderly white cat.

*Via the paypal donate link, which is always a good way of getting my attention. :p

7th of October

Time for another round of time for something new. I've been trying to work my way through some of my GoG backlog since finishing xenoblade, and at the moment am running through an interesting rpg called Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator. GoG made sure it runs, but it still has a few technical issues; windowed mode only works if you have a 16 bit desktop, movies only work on win 7 if you use win xp compatibility mode, etc. I've made a little patch to fix them, as well as to add a couple of extra controls. (Middle click to run and follow the pointer, and right click portraits in combat to queue up moves.) The movie fix is a little involved, hence this is one of my few patches with an installer, which tries to convert them automatically. In case it fails, you'll have to convert them manually. The movies are unfortunately a little big to include in a download. :(

17th of September

I finally finished xenoblade, after 87 hours of playtime. That included most early and middle side quests, but very little of the end-game content, (say, anything lv80+) which I'm running through again now. I may as well give it a few spoiler-free bullet points worth of thoughts on it.

Dialogue is great, but some of the quotes can get repetitive. In battles in particular, the 3-way ending conversations are generally brilliant, but you don't really want to hear them several hundred times. The voice acting is good, and British voice actors are amusingly unusual. I think someone needs to introduce the brit's to the letter 't' at some point though. The original Japanese voices are available too if you want them, which is always a nice addition.

The in game tutorials are good, as are the options to turn them off in stages when you're done with them. (Although I must have been a dozen hours in before I spotted the option to remove the story memo icon...)

The story was pretty good, albeit a little contradictory in places. The ending was just plain odd. There also seemed to be a lot of people not telling other people stuff just so that they could dramatically reveal it later, when from a more realistic perspective it would have made more sense to share their knowledge earlier.

There's too many copy/pasted side quests, with just the type of monster you need to kill/materials you need to find/dialogue changed. Saying that, the only ones that actually got annoying are the materials quests, because I was often sent to find things that I'd just discarded moments earlier to make room for something else. Some materials used by future quests get a vision scene to warn you when you pick them up, but not all of them. It should either have been extended to all possible quest items, (and the items needed for colony 6,) or even better remove the inventory space limit on the number of monster bits you can carry.

The new game+ feature sucks. I'm not quite sure what the point of it was supposed to be. You're forced to carry over levels, which completely breaks the story: There are many boss battles that you're not supposed to win. That's fine the first time around, because generally you don't, or even if you're slightly overlevelled and would probably win if left in peace for long enough, it's usually close enough the the story kicking in isn't that much of a breaker. It gets a bit silly when you're so overlevelled that you take the boss down to half health in a couple of hits, and then it just sits there unable to hit you and your hits not doing any damage until the story shows up and and tells you that no, actually you just got badly beaten up, and were obviously looking at your screen wrong. You also carry over gear, which completely breaks the story again. (Characters wearing outfits at their introduction that make no sense, handing people swords they're already holding, etc.)
It would have been useful if you just wanted to rush through and make some different decisions in side quests, but those side quests mostly require high affinity with areas and affinity doesn't carry over, so you need to do all the boring fetch quests again first. (On which note, when selecting which materials to take, they should have had the future quest tags in place.) Really there should have been more choice on what you carried over, and/or there should have been changes to the story. For a game whose whole premise was seeing the future, I'm sure there was room to make the whole previous playthrough a vision or something, to give you an excuse for knowing everything and being overpowered. That would have improved replayability somewhat. (ok, to be fair, I'm not sure how much replayability you need in a 100+ hour game, so I should probably just be thankful that there's a new game+ feature at all...)

The landscape is gorgeous. There's plenty of large, varied maps to explore, each one with its own unique visual style. Apparently it works nicely on dolphin at 1080p, which I would have liked to have given a try, but moving the save file from my real wii would be a pain now, on top of which none of the disk ripping software works with any drive I have in the house and downloading a copy would be a rather big download just to admire the view.

On a similar note, I strongly disagree with people who want a quest compass for all the side quests. The markers on the minimap are already sufficient for finding stuff once you know the general area, and side-quest markers would take away the exploration. I would have quite liked quick step gems to cap somewhere far far higher than they do, but I can see why they don't: Even at default running speed, it's possible to run past npcs in busy areas before they finish loading. If you were moving at 2x or 3x the speed, you'd probably never see anyone, and start causing problems with world objects/monsters too. I'll put that down to wii hardware limitations forcing too short cutoff distances for loading things. (In fact, pop in in general is a bit of a problem. Pretty much everything could have done with loading at a much longer range than it does.)

I love the background music. (In fact, I'm listening to it now while typing this.) I'm not sure my musical tastes are particularly well aligned with those of the world at large though, so take that as you will.

Continuing the console theme, sony just changed their PSN TOS again, making it clear that you don't own anything you purchase, adding restrictions on when you can sue them and banning you from taking part in class action lawsuits against them. My first thought was 'there's no fricking way that's legal.' My second was 'hang on, haven't I seen this somewhere before recently?'. My third thought was 'the american legal system really sucks, doesn't it?'* Personally, my preferred method of a corporation avoiding class action lawsuits, (or being sued at all, for that matter,) would be for them to not do anything evil to be sued over. (And, to keep things fair, everyone else not suing them for stupid reasons.) Alas, such a world is not this one. :( For the moment, I'd settle for sony not being evil just for long enough for me to buy a ps3 in good conscience. I want disgaea, dammit!

*Yes, so does ours. So do most of them. Money > law and all that.