Freedom = $1.05
Banned
Holepunch said:
Dude, get Fraps and give it a go. No PC gamer is going to accept a best estimate for FPS, especially after all the crap this port has gone through...
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Dude, get Fraps and give it a go. No PC gamer is going to accept a best estimate for FPS, especially after all the crap this port has gone through...
http://www.fraps.com/
Just download it and have it running while you're playing the game. Will give you a framerate reading in the corner so you can be sure. Don't record video or screencaps or anything, just play as normal.
Just download it and have it running while you're playing the game. Will give you a framerate reading in the corner so you can be sure. Don't record video or screencaps or anything, just play as normal.
I just always assumed FRAPs had to be bought, and didn't have a limited version I could use. Kind of an idiot like that.Freedom = $1.05 said:
So anyways, I ran the game with Fraps. Same test as before, running around the first town in the game at 1680 x 1050 resolution. Results are positive. The framerate was always above 90, on average hovering around 110 or 120. Highest I've seen it go was 180. Again this is with a 9800 GT videocard which seems to be heading to the lower end these days.
Thanks Scitek for pointing out I could run around if I hop first.
bumpkin
Member
So I can see that it's gotten a little quieter in here and saw Freedom's surprising post about Stranger, but I'm just wondering, how well does Munch's Oddysee run? I've been debating downloading it, but have an older PC (1.6GHz Celeron-M with integrated Intel graphics) and wonder if it'll even run. I know chances are probably pretty darn slim, but a guy can hope.
I didn't notice a lack of sun, didn't see any bodies of water, didn't see any t-posing. Nothing noticeably wrong with the audio or anything at all really. Even if there was this isn't a build with bugfixes, it is purely a build addressing performance issues. It is NOT the patch you'll be seeing next week.scitek said:
The three bugs I did notice were
-360 controller is no longer detected (they're adjusting the auto joypad configuration)
-Cannot move Stranger from a standing position.
-Seems to run underneath the windows taskbar. Window mode?
All of which I explained to Stewart who told me were temporary issues and once again, wasn't the purpose of the build and won't be in the patch released.
Performance wise, this game seems on track. At least for my build:lol
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
They talk about First person issues with Nvidia but did they fix the crashing issues? I can't even get it to not crash let alone first person. And are these fixes for both games? I want to play Munch's Odyssey. 
GoldenHelmet
Member
Morning guys ...
Oh Holepunch, Holepunch, Holepunch ...
Firstly guys, HP is _not_ the guy I was talking about; but he is one of the 5 people outside our office who has run it.
The guy I cited was actually someone who contacted us directly via info @ jawltd.com
So whilst HP is semi-right that he was a guy, he was not THE guy. Again though, HP has said he is running at around 90fps on his machine, sounds like a small victory I think.
Anyways ...
Things we've done and things we're doing to Stranger ...
Done:
1. Rendering performance:
This has been taken care of, we literally found 2 small steps in the rendering pipeline that were gimped. We were using an OpenGL extension that isn't fully ratified as a result on most machines it isn't supported in hardware, so defaults to doing the same process in software (= SLLLOOOOOOOWWWWW), this gave us a jump from ~20fps to ~45fps on my 4 year old DELL nvidia 8400 laptop. Then we discovered we were actually doing the final draw to screen TWICE (yes dumb mistake) but that then gave me an increase from ~45fps to ~60fps on my laptop again. So yeah right now I'm pretty happy with the performance now.
But we're still looking at some memory usage speedups too, as there is a couple of little bottle necks.
2. Save Games:
In Vista/Win7 the "Program Files" folder usage permissions changed, we WERE saving save games to the install folder, this caused problems, as a result we're now using the users "roaming" folder, which resolves this issue.
3. We have REMOVED (as HP mentioned) the joypad auto-detect. Now you need to chose your input device of choice via the launcher app.
4. First Person mode = broken on nvidia chipsets, this is now fixed. To get this to break you need the latest nVidia drivers, which were released in Early December, you'll have to forgive us there as we last updated internally in November so didn't see the issue until everyone said "hey assholes, this shit is broken!". Anyway it's fixed.
Being Done:
1. Screen Resolutions:
We are going to "quiz" the machine and say "What resolutions can you run at" and offer those options to the user in the Launcher App. No more "Low", "Medium" and "retarded". We will also be looking at PROPER widescreen modes, not just stretched.
2. Controls:
So you guys want to be able to set your own keyboard/joypad config... Ouch. The hardest part of doing that is NOT the actual input itself, but making sure any onscreen messages that cover input display the correct key, EVEN if you change it. Right now the language files have fixed tokens for the buttons/keys; but we will get to this.
3. Fixing a couple of broken achievements, and adding some more for fun
4. Audio problems - As most of you know it's hard to fix something if you can't repeat it, and so far the ONLY audio glitch we've managed to repeat is in the intro movie, and as it happens that glitch is ACTUALLY in the movie itself.
If anyone has any REPEATABLE audio bugs (IE audio stopping or corrupted sounds) can you email them to us at info AT jawltd.com
5. Crashes - This is a tricky one, as the only crash we've repeated is the exit one. So for those that are having crashs in Stranger, again, please email us full details, and if possible, if you have a save game from just before the crash that would be helpful too, send them again, to the usual address of info AT jawltd.com
ATI Users:
Ok so people are seeing "corruption", "little black boxes", "stuff not animating", "characters in t-position" etc.
You may also have seen via the thread over on the Steam forums that these issues come and come with different ATI Drivers.
The ONLY problem that exists with the latest ATI drivers is the "corruption" or "little black boxes"... These are related to transparencies. We know this as we've looked into it pretty hard and the areas in the game this issue is, is when alpha blending etc is used.
Firstly we looked at our shader code, which works on other OpenGL cards, but that was fine, then I thought I'd play one of Mr Carmacks games, so I fired up Quake3, which I still play, on the new machine I bought at xmas with an ATI 5470 chipset and as it turns out, anything with an id shader in it, that uses transparencies is just BLACK.
So I fired an email to an old friend of mine who works at AMD now, who used to work at nvidia, and before that used to work at 3dLabs (remember those guys), Richard is part of their driver/developer support team; he's put me onto one of their guys in the driver team itself and they now have the game, and have told us ...
"We were able to repro the issue and are now going to look at what maybe the cause..."
So ATI are aware of the issue, and either they'll come back and say "actually you've not initialised this correctly" OR "oops our driver is broken we'll fix it."
So as we stand right now, performance is fixed on all cards, nVidia has the first person mode fixed, and ATI still has issues with transparencies.
What I would like however is to hear from anyone with an nVidia GeForce 103(m) chipset. If you have this board/chipset please send me a DM.
Thanks guys, and a Happy New Year!
Stewart
Oh Holepunch, Holepunch, Holepunch ...
Firstly guys, HP is _not_ the guy I was talking about; but he is one of the 5 people outside our office who has run it.
The guy I cited was actually someone who contacted us directly via info @ jawltd.com
So whilst HP is semi-right that he was a guy, he was not THE guy. Again though, HP has said he is running at around 90fps on his machine, sounds like a small victory I think.
Anyways ...
Things we've done and things we're doing to Stranger ...
Done:
1. Rendering performance:
This has been taken care of, we literally found 2 small steps in the rendering pipeline that were gimped. We were using an OpenGL extension that isn't fully ratified as a result on most machines it isn't supported in hardware, so defaults to doing the same process in software (= SLLLOOOOOOOWWWWW), this gave us a jump from ~20fps to ~45fps on my 4 year old DELL nvidia 8400 laptop. Then we discovered we were actually doing the final draw to screen TWICE (yes dumb mistake) but that then gave me an increase from ~45fps to ~60fps on my laptop again. So yeah right now I'm pretty happy with the performance now.
But we're still looking at some memory usage speedups too, as there is a couple of little bottle necks.
2. Save Games:
In Vista/Win7 the "Program Files" folder usage permissions changed, we WERE saving save games to the install folder, this caused problems, as a result we're now using the users "roaming" folder, which resolves this issue.
3. We have REMOVED (as HP mentioned) the joypad auto-detect. Now you need to chose your input device of choice via the launcher app.
4. First Person mode = broken on nvidia chipsets, this is now fixed. To get this to break you need the latest nVidia drivers, which were released in Early December, you'll have to forgive us there as we last updated internally in November so didn't see the issue until everyone said "hey assholes, this shit is broken!". Anyway it's fixed.
Being Done:
1. Screen Resolutions:
We are going to "quiz" the machine and say "What resolutions can you run at" and offer those options to the user in the Launcher App. No more "Low", "Medium" and "retarded". We will also be looking at PROPER widescreen modes, not just stretched.
2. Controls:
So you guys want to be able to set your own keyboard/joypad config... Ouch. The hardest part of doing that is NOT the actual input itself, but making sure any onscreen messages that cover input display the correct key, EVEN if you change it. Right now the language files have fixed tokens for the buttons/keys; but we will get to this.
3. Fixing a couple of broken achievements, and adding some more for fun
4. Audio problems - As most of you know it's hard to fix something if you can't repeat it, and so far the ONLY audio glitch we've managed to repeat is in the intro movie, and as it happens that glitch is ACTUALLY in the movie itself.
If anyone has any REPEATABLE audio bugs (IE audio stopping or corrupted sounds) can you email them to us at info AT jawltd.com
5. Crashes - This is a tricky one, as the only crash we've repeated is the exit one. So for those that are having crashs in Stranger, again, please email us full details, and if possible, if you have a save game from just before the crash that would be helpful too, send them again, to the usual address of info AT jawltd.com
ATI Users:
Ok so people are seeing "corruption", "little black boxes", "stuff not animating", "characters in t-position" etc.
You may also have seen via the thread over on the Steam forums that these issues come and come with different ATI Drivers.
The ONLY problem that exists with the latest ATI drivers is the "corruption" or "little black boxes"... These are related to transparencies. We know this as we've looked into it pretty hard and the areas in the game this issue is, is when alpha blending etc is used.
Firstly we looked at our shader code, which works on other OpenGL cards, but that was fine, then I thought I'd play one of Mr Carmacks games, so I fired up Quake3, which I still play, on the new machine I bought at xmas with an ATI 5470 chipset and as it turns out, anything with an id shader in it, that uses transparencies is just BLACK.
So I fired an email to an old friend of mine who works at AMD now, who used to work at nvidia, and before that used to work at 3dLabs (remember those guys), Richard is part of their driver/developer support team; he's put me onto one of their guys in the driver team itself and they now have the game, and have told us ...
"We were able to repro the issue and are now going to look at what maybe the cause..."
So ATI are aware of the issue, and either they'll come back and say "actually you've not initialised this correctly" OR "oops our driver is broken we'll fix it."
So as we stand right now, performance is fixed on all cards, nVidia has the first person mode fixed, and ATI still has issues with transparencies.
What I would like however is to hear from anyone with an nVidia GeForce 103(m) chipset. If you have this board/chipset please send me a DM.
Thanks guys, and a Happy New Year!
Stewart
GoldenHelmet
Member
Zaraki_Kenpachi said:They talk about First person issues with Nvidia but did they fix the crashing issues? I can't even get it to not crash let alone first person. And are these fixes for both games? I want to play Munch's Odyssey.
Hey,
With regards to Munch, as I think you know we did NOT write PC Munch, merely inherited it in November. We've assembled a small team here to work on 3 updates to Munch during January. Whilst I'm not going to go into detail about these updates yet, as we're just finalising those lists now, our aim in short is to fix it, and by "it" I mean munch in general.
We actually released a hotfix right before Xmas for Munch that resolved the most prominent crash at the start of the game, for the MAJORITY of people, have you tried that update yet?
Cheers.
benjipwns
Banned
Glad to see you coming back and being so transparent on the efforts to make things better and fix a mistake.
Such simple methods go some distance with the consumer when so few even come close. One reason somebody like Valve gets a lot of passes that somebody like Activision doesn't.
Such simple methods go some distance with the consumer when so few even come close. One reason somebody like Valve gets a lot of passes that somebody like Activision doesn't.
GoldenHelmet
Member
wwm0nkey said:Hey Golden, mind if I test out the patch as well
We're going to be some extra "beta" testing next week of the patch after we finish up a couple of other things, so I'll be in touch then if we need more, guinea... I mean testers ;-)
GoldenHelmet
Member
Right now we're not looking at 3DS but who knows, and I've no idea what a PSP2 is?!? sorry.
You should give it a quick look when the system comes out in march.GoldenHelmet said:
Also the PSP2 is the future PSP that hasn't been officially announced yet...but there is leaked screen shots of it floating around and rumored specs point it to be able to play PS3 launch title grade games. Oh also it has 2 analog sticks.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
GoldenHelmet said:
Was there an Nvidia patch also? I thought there was only an ATI that's why I asked the other page. You wouldn't happen to have a link handy to the hotfix by chance would you?
Edit: Hey Golden, I don't know what fix you guys had but my going into Program Files->Steam Apps-> Common->Oddworld Munchs Odysee->Bin->Munch.exe then right clicking the Munch.exe and going to properties->Compatability->Windows XP SP3 and then launching the game by double clicking munch.exe instead of going through steam seems to fix it. I got this from another board after googling and I played around 15 mins in the hydrovats and it was fine with no crashing before where it was crashing less than a minute previously and I'm on 260.99 for my 8800GTs which was the most up to date about a week ago when I did it. I don't know if you were talking about another fix or if you heard about this working before so I thought I'd post it. I also don't know if that means anything to help you with patching but it's worth a shot.
brain_stew
Member
Why aren't msaa and af support even in the upcoming list? The whole point of porting this to PC should have been to take advantage of modern PCs, trilinear filtering looks hideous.wwm0nkey said:
At least they've finally realised that performance in the original release was unaceptable, they could have just asked.
brain_stew
Member
Bullshit excuses and spin aren't how you treat your customerd after royally shafting them several times already, Stewart's latest reply seems to acknowledge this, which I appreciate. So lets not go back to the sorry old ways, OK?scitek said:
Out of 200+ games I've played on my PC this is lierally only the decond game that doesn't allow me to atleast force af. If 99% of games spread accross a 20 year period can manage it, then JAW can as well. It would go a long way to rebuilding respect snd goodwill, and these games simply deserve it. Do you really want to be the guys responsible for leaving a classic like this forever ugly? One little tweak will totally transform the visuals of the game and ensure its preserved as it should be.
Whoops:lolGoldenHelmet said:
Sorry, the parallels between what I told you and what was put in that post were pretty strong. It was posted a day after I gave you my results with the only difference between what I said was it being 1920 width not 1680. Hell, I mentioned the PC controls were really bad and the MSpaint was laughable were mini-points in that post. Although neither of those statements are original...
Sorry about that. Just curious why you reported a lone tester getting a 40 fps boost when if you have several testers getting boosts? At least you got a 90 fps confirmation out of my mistake.
LocoMrPollock
Banned
GoldenHelmet said:
Please do not do that. That's almost as bad as the low/medium/high thing, and it never works right.
Just give us an option to run it at whatever we want, please.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
wwm0nkey said:awesome, thanks
EDIT: Oh kind of a random question here but any chance of Strangers Wrath or future Oddworld titles hitting the 3DS, I would love to play this game on the go :lol
Remember friends share.
GoldenHelmet
Member
brain_stew said:
Hello,
It wasn't so much that performance was unacceptable, I think it was more as I said we just didn't get that it WAS unacceptable, but thanks to a bug and a fuck we we did we have resolved performance, like I said in my "come back" post my personal expectations were vastly out of date, and NO ONE else connected to us said "er guys..."
So we screwed, we ARE sorry.
Anyway, something else you mentioned in a later post was about "games over the past 20 years" as someone who made 6-7 PC games from 93 to 99, I really don't think PC's were powerful enough in those days for MSAA and AF, e.g. in 1993 we had 16Mhz processors.
Anyway, and again I stick my hand up and say "WTF?" I know what MSAA, but what's "af" ? I'm the business guy now, NOT an actual developer so that term is lost on me.
Thanks.
GoldenHelmet
Member
LocoMrPollock said:
Really? we can't let you run whatever you want as the machine may not be able to do it.
What I mean is quiz the hardware, it says these resolutions are available, and we present you with a list of ACTUAL resolutions that come inside the hardware provided list, IE..
Hardware says 640x480 to 1600x900 - So we allow you to chose a resolution between those.
Is this not desirable?
Metalic Sand
who is Emo-Beas?
GoldenHelmet said:
I cant believe you aren't considering 1650x1050 or 1920x1080. BLOWS MY MIND. Not much of a choice there...
Someone needs to pull you guys to the present, You are living in the past. A simple google search would have let you guys know what is required of PC games today. Stop giving excuses throughout the thread : /
Backfoggen
Banned
What? Every game works like this, doesn't it? Otherwise dumb asses will just select 2560x1600 or something and then it won't start.LocoMrPollock said:
GoldenHelmet said:
We know what our machine is capable of running. We've been setting up our own resolutions for years. Some of us even hack resolutions.
Just let us decide between 640x480 to 2560x1600, we know what's best
AF = Anisooptric Filtering. It makes you're textures look crisp in the distance. It's also been around since the late 90's before these games were originally made.
Metalic Sand said:
He meant 1680x1050
Backfoggen
Banned
AF can be forced through the drivers, AA will probably work as well once they fix the thing with drawing the image twice.
Metalic Sand said:
Dude calm down, you're misunderstanding him... the resolutions he quoted were an EXAMPLE. If your machine can run 1080p you'll have that option. It's basically what every game does nowadays, or else it would let idiots choose resolutions higher than their monitor can run and blame the game when shit happens.
GoldenHelmet said:
That sounds like what all modern games do, so yes, it's very good.
Clever Pun
Member
Ledsen said:
That's how I read it as well. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention (I usually find the highest resolution my monitor can handle and ignore everything else), but is it normal for games to let you choose resolutions your monitor can't handle?
LocoMrPollock
Banned
GoldenHelmet said:
Oh okay. Nah, that's fine. I was afraid that "quiz" meant it would auto-config the system and lock out what it thinks the PC can't run, which is a terrible system that never gets it right in my experiences with it.
Metalic Sand
who is Emo-Beas?
Ledsen said:
Sorry I didn't even realize this. Total misunderstanding then, I wont post in this thread anymore. Yea i was angry...
Dead Space (2008) didn't support AA until January 4th of this year, and only through beta nvidia drivers that just came out. The AA supported in game is very slight at best.GoldenHelmet said:
Divinity 2 (2009) doesn't support AA at all.
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) doesn't support AA at all.
The Longest Journey (2000) has numerous bugs when AA is forced.
Starcraft 2 (2010) allows forced AA. It is not supported natively.
Mass Effect 2 (2010) allows forced AA. It is not supported natively. Speaking of which, very few if any UE3 games support AA natively.
Beyond Good and Evil (2004) has numerous bugs when AA is forced. The AA supported in game is slight at best.
All I'm saying is that if a person expects AA in every game, they're not going to get it.
riceandbeans
Member
Looking forward to buying this when the patch is the released.
Kind of worried about the strategy here. Instead of releasing incremental patches to help bit by a bit you guys are planning to release one big patch to fix everything? That's leaving no room for error, so whats the plan in the likely scenario the patch hits and unforeseen bugs crop up?