What are your impressions so far?
Clunky controls, hopelessly inadequate tutorial, uninteresting setting/characters/plot, impossible to tell what’s going on at any given moment during combat, and is it really necessary to give me a letter grade every time I open a treasure chest?
Edit: And it just keeps getting worse. Giving up now.
Yeah, I think I picked the best time to get into this, as with 2 discs, I get basically everything connected to the series, and I just wrapped 1, so I still have a lot to get through before 3 becomes a thing.
I went into this expecting to hate play, and then found myself jokingly debating which of the various logos in the game would make the best tattoo. And still trying to map out the cosmology of the game universe, which is nuts.
I am hype that chain of memories is the next one.
The PS2 port of CoM is balls. The GBA version is where it’s at. Completely different game.
The whole Live-Action-Card-Duel works a lot better when combined with a classic 2D beat em up IMO
Blurring/smoothing the pixels of a texture when rendered. The basic comparison is the sharp but pixellated look of PSX games next to smooth but blurry N64 textures, or software-rendered 3D PC games of the era next to smoothed hardware-accelerated textures.
When you work on sprites for a 2D game you’re drawing pixels in different elements at the resolution they’ll appear on the screen. But in 3D (or if you’re doing sprite scaling in 2D), you almost never see that texture at a 1:1 map of the texture pixels (properly called texels (texture elements)) to the screen resolution. When it gets drawn to the screen pixels, then, for each pixel on the screen the renderer looks up the color of the texture at its current scale and rotation. It’s almost certainly not one texel entirely, but a scattershot of different texels; you’re trying to get one point of 2D data out of a 3D box. It has to either pick one texel or another (effectively rounding up or down), which produces uneven blockiness (an artifact).
Filtering causes it to search nearby texels for each pixel and blend them together. This is more work but produces cleaner results.
The N64 was in the unfortunate spot of having just low-enough average texture resolution that applying filtering was questionable, but at higher resolutions it’s assumed to be correct (which is why it being disabled in certain games on certain textures is interesting! and maybe a bug or maybe not)
RDRAM was never not a terrible mistake
I’m not familiar with how this impacted textures (and doesn’t the PS2 use RDRAM?)
Even if it’s high-latency it’s still significantly more memory than the PSX which naively makes me think the issue was cartridge space, yeah?
the PS1 had much more flexibility with its framebuffer than the N64 did with its pitifully small amount of designated texture memory, and the PS2 even struggled with texture memory vs. the Dreamcast in its early days before people learned to work around it. the issue with RDRAM was that it was always a) expensive, and b) designed around very deeply pipelined architectures, so it wasn’t terribly efficient, and it always led to skimping on memory size
ah there it is, the 4KB texture cache
When you say skimping on memory size, do you think the N64 would have had more than 4MB main RAM in '96 (compared to a '95 system’s 3MB) and the PS2 would have had more than 32MB in 2000 (next to 2001’s 43 and 64) had they not gone with RDRAM?
I had put “VRAM size” but deleted it because that’s more intuitively correct than technically correct. The issue wasn’t with the overall memory per se.
And those systems used RDRAM for both VRAM and main RAM?
yup!
OR: the non-RDRAM pool was always too small. the PS2 had 4MB of designated “texture memory” compared to the Dreamcast’s 8 because it was thought that they could also just partition the main RDRAM pool as needed. this didn’t really work out in practice.
danke
Aww, boo then, because the PS4 port of the PS2 game is the one I am playing next, ha.
I hope you can enjoy it. I remember being excited when it came out. CoM on the GBA was my first Kingdom Hearts game. Then I spent the $25 on the PS2 version, played it for a few hours, then brought it back. They were kind enough to give me a full refund lol
I will report back on it once I get going.
I also like how the PS4 totally galaxy brained this problem by making VRAM its main memory (again, more intuitively than technically)
which is basically the same thing you see with zero-copy rasterization when using Intel graphics under Wayland or OSX
I remember how excited we were when we learned 8 gigs
didn’t realize how badly poor single-threaded performance would hurt us with early-version Unity
yeah Unity tends toward really bad bottlenecks when it has to scale in a way that it hasn’t had to do before
right now it’s experiencing a new thing where its concept of asset streaming is, like, sub-UE3, so you’re seeing a lot of newer releases that can use up real memory for the first time just hang briefly on loads off of a spinning drive on PC
oops
i’m on an rpg binge, most of which i haven’t been finishing before starting another one.
i played through DQ1 (SNES port) for the first time and enjoyed it, and i’m partway through DQ2 now. i started playing FFRK on my phone, and had that gacha addiction for about a week, but it just made me want to replay the real FF games (and play the ones i haven’t yet).
so i impulse-bought FF9 (i haven’t played it since it was new) for iphone, but as the game wears on my feelings have gotten more and more mixed. now i’m at the beginning of “disc 3” (weird landmark for a phone game) and i just don’t know anymore. the home city of one of the main characters just got destroyed by a ~new mystery villain~, and the next thing i find myself doing is a fetch quest to brew a potion.