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Modder 'fix' Tales of Zestiria on PC, it's now running at 60fps

Firestorm

Member
People are saying Bandai Namco should be ashamed but this port was honestly so good I'm considering upgrading my PC for other titles. My 2009 PC is running the game at max settings with no problems at a smooth framerate. Didn't have any of the issues that were leading me to switch back to console gaming for everything but multiplayer titles.

Probably not going to bother with this as I don't really feel like tweaking anything and dealing with any effects if they happen but I'm glad it exists for those who want it. Modding community around this stuff is great :)
 

Corpekata

Banned
Do have one issue, it seems to hook into Rivatuner's overlay and puts it on EVERY game. What do I need to turn that off?
 

Alex

Member
As someone who really doesn't mind 30 FPS too much, the Zestiria 30 FPS never really felt all that fluent in my opinion. This is a night and day kind of change, game just cooks now.
 

Momentary

Banned
Damn man... Just seeing the first 2 Seconds of the particles popping up for the start screen had my heart jumping for joy. Menu navigation is such a joy now and feels less cumbersome. Combat feels satisfying due to better response and smoother animtions. Even the character splash art for special moves look so smooth now.

I'm so glad I didn't go through the entire game yet. This is going to be a real treat. The combat system just got a major boost in fun department for me.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Great news. Any known issues with this yet? Haven't played this yet but it would be nice to use this when I do.
 

Knurek

Member
I'm so glad I didn't go through the entire game yet. This is going to be a real treat. The combat system just got a major boost in fun department for me.

I just hope this doesn't turn out to have major issues down the line.
I can't possibly fathom going back to 30fps for a prolonged duration. It's amazing how much of a difference this makes.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
Okay guys, this is me eating crow right now.

Crow tastes really really good.

Mmmmmmmmm.

...

..........

Wow.

Durante coming up with new nicknames cause his tag is getting too long

rofl

People are saying Bandai Namco should be ashamed but this port was honestly so good I'm considering upgrading my PC for other titles.

People saying BN should be ashamed are only half justified at best. Not trying to take away anything from the effort here (hey, I mod shit too) it's easy for a modder without a contractual commitment to a product functioning properly to mess around with stuff and share results. If stuff is broken and he can't fix it, he can just walk away. In contrast, it's a developer's responsibility to make sure nothing breaks, and if it does, to fix it. That alone can mean a lot of QA time, which can or cannot be justified. A business is a business. Man hours don't come out of thin air.

(That being said, 30fps for a port meant to last a generation (PS4) and perpetuity (Steam) kinda stings still)

You know what the best part is? This bodes really well for Symphonia on Steam down the line, too.
 

Durante

Member
I thought Durante confirmed 60 wasn't possible. What's going on in the world if you can't trust the big D!
I never "confirmed" that. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite.

Here's what I posted about it a few weeks back:
Durante said:
For some reason people elsewhere on the internet and in this thread are under the impression that I "confirmed" that this game would be "impossible" to run at anything other than 30 FPS.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I've actually repeatedly gone on record that every game can be made to run at arbitrary framerates, the only thing which differs across games is the difficulty of accomplishing that.

What I have "confirmed" -- or rather, stipulated -- in my PC gamer article, after just a couple of hours of playing around with the binary, is that for Zestiria, it's nontrivial to do so entirely correctly. Unlike some other games which really seemed to ship with framerate limits just for the heck of it.

The sad thing about these issues is that a concerted effort by motivated and competent people with source code access would probably fix them quite rapidly in the vast majority of cases.

"Nontrivial" doesn't mean "impossible" ;)
 
Ok, so did anyone try this:

Code:
[Render.D3D9]
TargetFPS=120

Someone has actually asked that, and got this response from the modder:
"We hardcoded the multiplier to 1 for 60 FPS. It's an integer so we can't change it to fractions like 0.5 for 120 FPS.

This multiplier gets loaded as a decimal in many places across the game's code, so theoretically it might be possible to find them all and change those rather than the original value. But this would be very unsafe and the likelihood of various glitches increases the further we push the framerate, so while I can't speak for Kaldaien, I don't think it's a good idea."

Anyway, here's another 60fps video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUVAqhvjzoA
 

Rhapsody

Banned
Game plays really nice with this patch. However, for some odd reason the games would slow down a tiny bit at the start of certain things (areas/battles) but then it'd play really solid for a good while. My computer shouldn't have any problems with the settings, but maybe I should lower them just to see.
 

Momentary

Banned
If you got some massive down sampling going on that could be the case. I had to tone it down from 5K to 1440p to get no drops.

I still can't get over how aesthetically pleasing this game looks just from doubling the framerate. I'm more impressed with that than the responsiveness.
 

petran79

Banned
I agree that it would have been worth dedicating resources to supporting 60fps, but the costs associated with professionally developing enhancements like this, pushing them through QA, and testing on a wide configuration of hardware are not to be underestimated.

Clearly plenty of amateur modders produce work of a very high quality, but they are doing so free from many of the burdens of professional development. If this mod results in problems in some circumstances, people can just opt to not use the mod. If a game ships with similar problems, customers might want refunds, and the publisher is risking damage to their brand and reputation.

I think despite these issues, the returns on investment on doing the best ports of games possible is usually worth it, but I can understand why a publisher like Namco might feel differently.

If this was a PS3 port like Dark Souls, I'd agree but PS4/XB1/Windows parity is now more feasible than ever.
Also at that price tag a game is supposed to have that feature. It is not a 10-20 $ indie game, many of which run at 60 fps btw
 

Soodanim

Gold Member
What Bamco don't realise is that when I saw a thread title saying it was locked to 30, they lost a potential customer. I watched one video of this game I've never played at 60 and I have 2 thoughts:

1. That game looks fun, I'll have to wishlist it. Definitely looks like something I'd play
2. How did anyone ever play it at 30? It looks far too high paced to not suffer from being 30, especially with what looks like active control during battle.

There aren't many people like myself, but the Framerate Police group does exist on Steam and if your game is 30fps in 2015 you will lose some sales. I know they were new when they did Dark Souls, but it's about time they sorted that out.
 

artsi

Member
If this was a PS3 port like Dark Souls, I'd agree but PS4/XB1/Windows parity is now more feasible than ever.
Also at that price tag a game is supposed to have that feature. It is not a 10-20 $ indie game, many of which run at 60 fps btw

Well actually it is a PS3 port to both PS4 and PC. The game came out in Japan originally for PS3 only, and was designed for it.
 

hesido

Member
People saying BN should be ashamed are only half justified at best. Not trying to take away anything from the effort here (hey, I mod shit too) it's easy for a modder without a contractual commitment to a product functioning properly to mess around with stuff and share results. If stuff is broken and he can't fix it, he can just walk away. In contrast, it's a developer's responsibility to make sure nothing breaks, and if it does, to fix it. That alone can mean a lot of QA time, which can or cannot be justified. A business is a business. Man hours don't come out of thin air.

A business that refrains from putting the best product possible is indeed still a business. Hence my "lazy" comment. Make a 30fps game, build it in a way that's tied strongly to the framerate (a development model that should have long been banished), and then just out of saving QA times sake, do not bother to put 60fps at least as an option.

The least I would do, in a state that is uncaring of potential customers, to put that as an option and warn the user that the option is "experimental" and save files are at risk or whatever.
 

MaLDo

Member
Damn man... Just seeing the first 2 Seconds of the particles popping up for the start screen had my heart jumping for joy. Menu navigation is such a joy now and feels less cumbersome. Combat feels satisfying due to better response and smoother animtions. Even the character splash art for special moves look so smooth now.

I'm so glad I didn't go through the entire game yet. This is going to be a real treat. The combat system just got a major boost in fun department for me.

Many people still don't believe that this improvement occurs in all games, regardless of the type of game. Although it is an exclusive game. Although it is a game designed for only be played at 30 fps.

60 fps improves gameplay. A lot.
 

cheesekao

Member
Many people still don't believe that this improvement occurs in all games, regardless of the type of game. Although it is an exclusive game. Although it is a game designed for only be played at 30 fps.

60 fps improves gameplay. A lot.
That is true for the most part but you're not gonna find anyone who says 2d pokemon plays significantly better at 60fps than 30fps. Some genres don't benefit as much from high frame rates.
 

Ekai

Member
I still fail to see the difference whatsoever between 30 and 60 but if it makes more people try the game out, I guess that's a plus. I hope people enjoy it.


What Bamco don't realise is that when I saw a thread title saying it was locked to 30, they lost a potential customer. I watched one video of this game I've never played at 60 and I have 2 thoughts:

1. That game looks fun, I'll have to wishlist it. Definitely looks like something I'd play
2. How did anyone ever play it at 30? It looks far too high paced to not suffer from being 30, especially with what looks like active control during battle.

There aren't many people like myself, but the Framerate Police group does exist on Steam and if your game is 30fps in 2015 you will lose some sales. I know they were new when they did Dark Souls, but it's about time they sorted that out.

I pretty much beat the game (am at 2 secret bosses from sorta game-long sidequests and the final boss) and not once did I "suffer" from playing at 30 fps in comabt. Game was perfectly fluid and controlled fine for me, especially in combat. To be fair, I did have some bits of noticeable slow-down a few times running on the field but that really only happened a few times and if I was streaming the game and in a place with a lot going on on screen....so story points where cities were populated generally. So I can see and feel when a game is going quite slow fps wise. Outside of those times it was a pretty smooth experience really. Though I also still fail to feel or see any difference with a supposed 60 fps vs. the 30 I experienced so if other people actually do then I can see how having that would make it a better experience for them.



As for the FPS Police, that group has it's own problematic issues. Like the fact that the dev of Guild of Dungeoneering got harassed by some of them and even TB had to step in and tell those followers of his to stop being assholes, more or less, in a group announcement. Because at the end of the day, it's a card game. I mean, really. It's incidents like that that sway me to thinking that this whole 60 fps thing shouldn't be such an end all be all for people on so many games. It sometimes feels like a binary tag that can lead to people ignoring whether the game even needs that feature in the first place.
 

Airan

Member
Are there any learning resources for how to do this? I'm very intrigued. Just feels like black magic that you're able to manipulate a game's framerate externally (I know about resolution and shader hacks, but FPS?). Seems to me that for this fix it's just scouring through memory looking for a multiplier value?
 

Stuart444

Member
I still fail to see the difference whatsoever between 30 and 60 but if it makes more people try the game out, I guess that's a plus. I hope people enjoy it.

To me, you don't see it but you feel it when you're actually playing. Everything feels smoother.

Only issue to me so far is that in-engine cutscenes feel a bit too fast to me but apart from it, it's working good enough.
 
Whattt? I skipped the game because of the locked framerate, now there's no way I'd buy it at full price without Symphonia.

Guess I'll wait until it's at least half the price, but this is great news!
 

Ekai

Member
To me, you don't see it but you feel it when you're actually playing. Everything feels smoother.

Only issue to me so far is that in-engine cutscenes feel a bit too fast to me but apart from it, it's working good enough.

I don't really feel it either, to be perfectly honest.
But I'm glad it's working well for you.

I have heard of that issue happening before actually. I don't know how to mod too much but I imagine it's fixable.
 

Lain

Member
Are there any learning resources for how to do this? I'm very intrigued. Just feels like black magic that you're able to manipulate a game's framerate externally (I know about resolution and shader hacks, but FPS?). Seems to me that for this fix it's just scouring through memory looking for a multiplier value?

The Steam forum post would be a good start and probably should be included in the OP here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/351970/discussions/0/490123938441506815/
 

Stuart444

Member
I don't really feel it either, to be perfectly honest.

I don't know why, if you play it at 30 and then at 60, I'd think you would feel it... BUT people have different perceptions and stuff so I guess I understand why you may not feel it. It's just one of those things :)

Anyway I don't plan on going through the whole game again for a long while but I guess it's nice having a 60fps option along with JP audio for a second play through on the PC :) (completed it on PS4 at the end of last month lol)
 

Durante

Member
Are there any learning resources for how to do this? I'm very intrigued. Just feels like black magic that you're able to manipulate a game's framerate externally (I know about resolution and shader hacks, but FPS?). Seems to me that for this fix it's just scouring through memory looking for a multiplier value?
The case you mention is one of the easier ones.

If you look at e.g. the Dark Souls 1 FPS fix, it boils down to reverse-engineering the game code, finding the part of it that does the framerate control, and actually calling the physics functions with current time step values.

The thing is, unlike resolution modification, it's often very different for every game. Generally, I start by various forms of timer/sleep manipulation, to get a rough idea of what does what. If you can fix it just with that you're really lucky, but when it's nontrivial (like in this case) you need to, at the very least, scour memory for values, and perhaps even surgically replace entire regions of code (as with Dark Souls).
 

Ekai

Member
I don't know why, if you play it at 30 and then at 60, I'd think you would feel it... BUT people have different perceptions and stuff so I guess I understand why you may not feel it. It's just one of those things :)

Anyway I don't plan on going through the whole game again for a long while but I guess it's nice having a 60fps option along with JP audio for a second play through on the PC :) (completed it on PS4 at the end of last month lol)

Mhm.

Does make it sound like the definitive version, eh? :)
Though honestly I don't mind the english va in Zestiria. I actually did most of the game like that. I do like having the option though. I wish more games gave us that language option if they were recorded in the first place.
 

Lanrutcon

Member
The case you mention is one of the easier ones.

If you look at e.g. the Dark Souls 1 FPS fix, it boils down to reverse-engineering the game code, finding the part of it that does the framerate control, and actually calling the physics functions with current time step values.

The thing is, unlike resolution modification, it's often very different for every game. Generally, I start by various forms of timer/sleep manipulation, to get a rough idea of what does what. If you can fix it just with that you're really lucky, but when it's nontrivial (like in this case) you need to, at the very least, scour memory for values, and perhaps even surgically replace entire regions of code (as with Dark Souls).

Yes yes, that's all well and good, but how many goats and black candles is what we're asking.
 

Siddiqui

Member
A lot of people said this was way too difficult because the game logic was tied to frame rate. We've seen modders fix framerate to a higher rate in situations like this before and we are just seeing it again. I hope at least a few more people are more skeptical now when devs try to talk about how difficult it would be to change the frame rate.

As for the issue of QA testing - this is why Namco should have made these changes along with the other changes and adjustments they made during development of the port. Namco didn't just make a few changes - they ported an entire game to PC. They had to comprehensively test the entire game forwards and backwards anyway. If you're saying that making this one change would cause more bugs to pop up then that's really grasping at threads. If additional QA for every change is so hard why bother adding anything to the port at all such as keyboard and mouse support, pointer support in menus, various graphics options, etc.?
 

Dio

Banned
Does make it sound like the definitive version, eh? :)
Though honestly I don't mind the english va in Zestiria. I actually did most of the game like that. I do like having the option though. I wish more games gave us that language option.
It's not always about giving the option, sometimes it's beyond control in certain ways. Chara-Ani is notorious for being stingy with its voice actors. Falcom can't do anything about that really, meaning that voiced Falcom titles (they use Chara-Ani for their VA) are dub only in the west because XSEED would have to go through heroic efforts to get them to agree to let their VAs into foreign releases.
 

Stuart444

Member
Mhm.

Does make it sound like the definitive version, eh? :)
Though honestly I don't mind the english va in Zestiria. I actually did most of the game like that. I do like having the option though. I wish more games gave us that language option if they were recorded in the first place.

The english VA is awesome imo :) I just like having the option for replayability XD.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
The least I would do, in a state that is uncaring of potential customers, to put that as an option and warn the user that the option is "experimental" and save files are at risk or whatever.

Sounds 'lazy' to me.

:^)

edit: To clarify a bit, I wasn't trying to be snarky against that idea. I'm saying that even if BN did that, if e.g. save data went south people would still be up in arms about it. I'm personally all for PC versions being the wild wild west experimental playgrounds, and I'm just pointing out the devil's advocate reasoning as to why companies may wish to stick with what isn't broken. Game breaks, and you will not hear the end of it. That's painfully obvious in the year of Our Lord 2015, i.e. the year of the shitty, broken Batman port.
 

Rhapsody

Banned
If you got some massive down sampling going on that could be the case. I had to tone it down from 5K to 1440p to get no drops.

I still can't get over how aesthetically pleasing this game looks just from doubling the framerate. I'm more impressed with that than the responsiveness.

I guess it's running smoothly now for me after a restart. Only slowdowns is when you touch an enemy on the field, so I'm fine with that while leaving all my settings as they are. And yeah, the game just seems a bit more pleasing overall. It's not just the battles that impress me.
 

Maffis

Member
Im glad i only played around 5 hours. I started playing TF2 again so Ive been holding off. But this looks like it will make put TF2 on hold instead.
 

Seronei

Member
I'm definitely getting double speed in game with this mod, couldn't tell you why it's not working properly for me. On a i5 2500k and AMD 6950 game running off an SSD.

The aspect ratio fix leaves lots of text outside their textboxes as well. I'm using a 16:10 monitor.

EDIT: Mod does not work properly in full screen mode? It's not double speed in windowed, but now it feels slow motion instead (But that might just be cause of the speed I had in full screen mode)
 
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