The cool down on her ranged attack is immense
Better to just pick Rean / Laura and mash their field attack until you can make your way around the enemy and stun them
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XSEED: Trails of Cold Steel PC Blog #2 (feat. Durante, talks PC enhancements)
- Thread starter Dragoon En Regalia
- Start date
The cool down on her ranged attack is immense
Better to just pick Rean / Laura and mash their field attack until you can make your way around the enemy and stun them
Dragoon En Regalia
Member
Timing attacks for advantage really comes down to enemy hitboxes, the more I think about it. Rean's fast cooldown makes it easy to run from a mistake or two, which I found more valuable in my playthrough, but I should properly learn how to use Fie's field attack.
Remember, we're gonna to have talk about this again once we've learned how field attacks behave at 60 FPS. I wonder if there'll be much difference.
Remember, we're gonna to have talk about this again once we've learned how field attacks behave at 60 FPS. I wonder if there'll be much difference.
There's no timing involved, you just have to stand a bit further away from the enemy and she automatically shoots. You shouldn't really ever use her up-close attack. There's almost no danger at all in doing this at all since you can stay well outside of the enemy's range.
CSI NeoGAF.I see Durante avoids answering a specific set of pushy questions, I think we can guess what to look forward to in his next blog post.
It was considered, but the implementation challenges are really significant
A launcher that allows navigation with a gamepad? Brilliant!
I hope more ports will use the launcher once Durante open sources it.
One thing tho that annoys me about launchers. I have yet to see one that scales with the used resolution. They are always so tiny on my 4K TV that I can barely read them.
I hope more ports will use the launcher once Durante open sources it.
One thing tho that annoys me about launchers. I have yet to see one that scales with the used resolution. They are always so tiny on my 4K TV that I can barely read them.
IIRC Danganronpa did this as well. Those ports were pretty good I'd say.
CertifiedFP
Member
Man, the suspense is killing me here on that programming-intensive thing that will make a few people happy. As much as I want to try and decipher what it could be from what graphics-programming knowledge I do have, I keep drawing a blank here as the most complicated thing I can think of is already confirmed >.> - And I mean, anything more I can think of that I would personally be surprised by XSEED approving (Like Nvidia features) seems like stuff way out of the scope of a port of a 4 year old game.
?
Mirrors existed but they didn't work, just a wall texture. Are you saying you know for a fact that those mirrors now 'work'?
I know for a fact that the mirrors are still textures
Seriously, it's not going to be anything which requires changing 100s of individual assets, think of the logistics here.
By the way, here's a larger version of the "shadow casters" setting comparison:
Top is the default/console setting, bottom is full shadow casters.
Seriously, it's not going to be anything which requires changing 100s of individual assets, think of the logistics here.
By the way, here's a larger version of the "shadow casters" setting comparison:
Top is the default/console setting, bottom is full shadow casters.
I know for a fact that the mirrors are still textures
Seriously, it's not going to be anything which requires changing 100s of individual assets, think of the logistics here.
By the way, here's a larger version of the "shadow casters" setting comparison:
Top is the default/console setting, bottom is full shadow casters.
I know for a fact that the mirrors are still textures
Seriously, it's not going to be anything which requires changing 100s of individual assets, think of the logistics here.
By the way, here's a larger version of the "shadow casters" setting comparison:
https://abload.de/img/shadow_casters_defaulensnb.png
https://abload.de/img/shadow_casters_fullecstc.png
Top is the default/console setting, bottom is full shadow casters.
That's very nice! But I guess the GPD Win is not up to the task of these kind of enhancements. Or I'm wrong? :O
I know for a fact that the mirrors are still textures
Seriously, it's not going to be anything which requires changing 100s of individual assets, think of the logistics here.
Well, you say that... but the work you've already put in here is absolutely bonkers for a port. At this point we don't know what's possible and what isn't!
By the way, here's a larger version of the "shadow casters" setting comparison:
Top is the default/console setting, bottom is full shadow casters.
Port ruined. What you apparently don't realize is the way the shadows are cast is foreshadowing the events of Trails of Melted Iron, how could you possibly miss that?
All joking aside, were the shadows in the original version set by hand or is there a logic behind it? It looks so random.
The original version (and the default setting in the port) has, in each scene file, a manually set flag for every scene object and every character indicating whether they should cast a dynamic shadow. It's pretty clearly a performance optimization IMHO.
The scene in the comparison above is one of the ones with the largest number of visible characters in the game, so I assume that's why the shadowing was really minimal by default.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense, since the ones casting shadows (bellow their chairs) on the original version seem to be main characters. How taxing is casting such shadows?
Well, ultimately each shadow is another draw call (of a skinned mesh in case of a character, which means uploading bone positions).
If you are on a modern PC, it laughs at that. If you are on a Vita, it probably doesn't.
Actually, reconsidering, that's wrong:
Characters are between 6 and 12 draw calls each. The evaluation still looks the same.
But it does mean that if you have ~70 characters in the scene + as many chairs, making them all cast shadows means almost 1000 additional draw calls, most of them skinned. Still not all that relevant on a modern PC, but I'm sure it's relevant on a Vita.
Thanks Durante. It sounds a bit inefficient for my ignorant point of view, but what do I know.
A more general question, (so, not necessary for Durante). Is this game story tied to the previous Trials games? This wasn't on my radar since I want to play them in order and I just recently finished Trials in the Sky 1 on my GPD Win, but looks like it would be a great game to have on my device.
A more general question, (so, not necessary for Durante). Is this game story tied to the previous Trials games? This wasn't on my radar since I want to play them in order and I just recently finished Trials in the Sky 1 on my GPD Win, but looks like it would be a great game to have on my device.
Kain-Nosgoth
Member
I only now realize that the chairs didn't cast a shadow before, but only the character models. Must be a really special kind of chair they are sitting on.
special orbments can do wonders in this world!
ResourcefulStar
Neo Member
I have a question about the High Quality Depth of Field setting. Does turning it off disable DoF completely or merely lower its quality? I'm not a fan of effects that make the picture blurrier, and an option to get rid of DoF entirely would be appreciated.
Yes, it takes place two years after Trails in the Sky and there are returning characters. It also spoils some events from TitS SC. I would advise finishing the Sky trilogy before playing Cold Steel but that's up to you really.
Kain-Nosgoth
Member
which one was it?
SC late game spoilers:
Olivert revealing himself as a prince of Erebonia while playing both Estelle and his country like a damn fiddle. Loved that scene so much. But IIRC CS spoils both his identity and his previous mission.
Kain-Nosgoth
Member
ho this one yeah, obviously a big spoiler, everyone should play FC and SC before cold steel!
Come one xseed, announce zero and ao please
Shake Appeal
Member
Going forward, are there any Trails games that are simply impossible to bring to PC? I remember being told at some point that Cold Steel wasn't going to happen.
Nope. People thought licensing for Ao/Zero would be an issue, but now XSEED is porting Ys 7 to PC despite it already having a port by the same company that also ported Ao/Zero. So, potentially, there would probably be a way of making Ao and Zero happen as well if they want to.
SC and The 3rd didn't exactly set the world on fire, so if they can justify localizing Ao/Zero is another topic altogether, sadly.
Nothing is impossible, but some have higher entry barriers. Zero and Azure for example.
DoF is only in cutscenes in this game when specifically asked for by the cutscene script, not during normal gameplay.
That said, the option only makes it higher quality, it's not disabled when it's off. I'd post a screenshot to show the effect, but it's only really a big deal during animations (the not-so-high-quality original effect has some artifacts with movement, especially camera movement).
That was the time when Xseed in shorthand of people that could port Falcom's console games to PC. It wasn't until Little King's Story where Xseed worked directly with Durante for the first time where they finally meet a fan and genius programmer that could helped them massively with their PC port. With Cold Steel and Ys 7, they definitely have set up even further possibilities for Ao/Zero.
As for the already existing PC port of Ys 7 and Ao/Zero, they were originally from a Chinese company and have terrible port quality. Xseed probably couldn't get their hand on them since the original company apparently planned to release them on Steam (but got pulled later on).
Kresnik258
Member
I had most of my frame rate drops in Roer actually. Heimdallr had a few and Legram was absolutely fine.
Also no issue with battles (talking about Vita version).
ResourcefulStar
Neo Member
Thank you. I can live with DoF limited to story events. It primarily bothers me when it gets in the way of admiring pretty outdoor locations.
I also have a feature request as an avid user of the windowed mode, although it's most likely too late for this. Could you separate the window size and the rendering resolution settings from each other? I'd like to be able to play the game in a 1280x720 window, but have it render in 2560x1440, and I want to do it on a 1080p monitor that normally doesn't allow me to choose 2560x1440.
The reason is that I enjoy taking notes when I play games, particularly RPGs, and I prefer to have the game window and the text editor visible simultaneously, next to each other. This often leaves me with underutilized GPU resources, and it would be cool if I could spend them on downsampling.
PCSX2 makes it really easy to do (set the window size to 1280x960 and the rendering resolution to quadruple the native), which is what gave me the habit in the first place, but I'm yet to see this functionality in a native PC game.
This feature isn't in there, but the game supports up to 8x MSAA with 8xTRSSAA, so I think you'll find the image quality adequate even without downsampling
Just a couple of questions Durante.
Do you believe the level of polish that you managed to put on this port, by pretty much rewriting the rendering code to another API, should be expected for all these companies porting PC games? Also, how hard would have been to use Vulcan (or OpenGL) for Linux support?
Do you believe the level of polish that you managed to put on this port, by pretty much rewriting the rendering code to another API, should be expected for all these companies porting PC games? Also, how hard would have been to use Vulcan (or OpenGL) for Linux support?
GhostTrick
Banned
I think that level of polish really is about passion. I mean, I may be talking out of Durante's mouth, but you clearly see the guy loves gaming and is really careful about IQ to implement features to remove aliasing from geometry but also transparency. Most of these companies basically follow a task: Port X software to this API.
Not really, no. A few things were really challenging (as in computer science / engineering challenge). I could do them in a reasonable time (and thus cost) for XSEED, but there are problems there for which, if you don't have anyone in a team who comes up with a good solution you might spend a week or more. The problem here is the "intuitive" nature by which some of this happens, at least for me personally. It's not like you can set a fixed budget for an average team and expect this type of undertaking to work out in the general case.
That's all just my opinion of course.
The reason I could even attempt this in a viable cost/timeframe is because the underlying engine already had DX11 support -- the game just never targeted it and did a lot of things that wouldn't work with the DX11 rendering backend without some significant changes.
Porting the complete engine to an entirely different API is not at all viable in the timeframe (a couple of months) and budget (sub 6 figures) that we are talking about here.
JoeyJungle
Banned
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to play this! I've had the PS3 version sitting on my HDD for a few months now and was planning to go through it with PtBi, but these tweeks are alll just... omg so good. Aside from all the graphical enhancements, FoV in particular is what I'm most excited for. That can be a huge annoyance to me in 3rd person games that don't offer any options, Kingdoms of Amalur was literally unplayable for me because the camera was zoomed in so closely behind the character (there was a mod that tweaked it, but gave the camera an exaggerated fisheye lens as you zoomed out).
Have you heard anything from Xseed about Falcom's thoughts on your port? I'd imagine the team there must be really excited to see their four year old game suddenly looking so spiffy.
Have you heard anything from Xseed about Falcom's thoughts on your port? I'd imagine the team there must be really excited to see their four year old game suddenly looking so spiffy.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
Figures. The game chugged like crazy when more than a couple dozen were on-screen at once for some scenes even with this shortcut, and even on PS3!
Ultra Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 1 EX +@, indeed!
HINT HINT PEOPLE.
Dragoon En Regalia
Member
Interesting. We should be glad to no longer worry about slowdown whenever all of Class VII's on-screen for a cinematic, that always bugged me more than it should.
When I strike it rich, I plan to commission XSEED to go through with the ports.
Any day now.
Yeah, those were the most noticeable on PS3.
Those were also the scenes where my PC dropped below 60 FPS in the version using the OpenGL/Cg rendering backend, which is what ultimately made me go ahead with trying to switch to DX11 (even though I had previously decided that would be to much work).