Oh God the horror D:


squaresosig

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So I was admiring Ingo Reis's latest video, showing off the very noticeable speed improvements of drastic, and thought to myself, I wonder if this means Chinatown wars will finally work ?

But unfortunately there is still something far too demanding for any emulator to handle..... scrolling text -.-

https://www.youtube.com/embed/p-ifWyHr91w?feature=oembed

It might just be a setting I have wrong but really ? scrolling text ? I suspect this may be more rockstar's fault, anyone who has played GTA4 on an older intel machine will know that they can make some very buggy stuff D:
 
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Hey,  the text in the cutscenes aside,  it's actually seems to be fairly well playable now.  In previous versions it was almost impossible to play past the first scene and if you actually got to a vehicle, you were pretty much blind, and had no control once you got in.  In this version I was able to play it through to the end of the first mission with little problem. 

- Neelix
 
I was expecting some sad story of a destroyed Pandora with that post title.
 
Hey,  the text in the cutscenes aside,  it's actually seems to be fairly well playable now.  In previous versions it was almost impossible to play past the first scene and if you actually got to a vehicle, you were pretty much blind, and had no control once you got in.  In this version I was able to play it through to the end of the first mission with little problem. 

- Neelix
Well thats good :) im still curious just how they managed to make scrolling text so demanding though...

at least its better than the psp version on pandora
 
It's because they display it via an incredibly inefficient use of the  the 3d engine.     You'll see the same thing (to a lesser extent) in Phantom Hourglass. (which is also really well playable in this version)    Honestly I don't think this was worth the melodramatics.

- Neelix
 
I was expecting some sad story of a destroyed Pandora with that post title.
not quite, all though mine is a little beat up, and I'm starting to notice audio quality issues with it :/ I guess its not well shielded
 
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It's because they display it via an incredibly inefficient use of the  the 3d engine.     You'll see the same thing (to a lesser extent) in Phantom Hourglass. (which is also really well playable in this version)    Honestly I don't think this was worth the melodramatics.

- Neelix
sorry s: was just a silly joke that's all, and rockstar seem to like their inefficiencies :/
 
Phantom Hourglass slowdown during text isn't because of how it uses 3D but because it gets into a bad self-modifying code loop where it has to flush every frame. This happens because Phantom Hourglass has branches that go to nowhere, which bring in a bunch of garbage in the recompiler, including what's normal data that gets changed sometimes.

Chinatown Wars also appears to be going through a heavy SMC loop here, although I don't have further information on whether or not it happens for a similar reason.

In the future I'd like to protect this by making hot modified blocks not eagerly link at compile time (not link until the blocks are actually called). That'll hopefully prevent SMC from being triggered like crazy.

I know of at least one game that actually does do real SMC repeatedly, that one currently doesn't work at all on ARM (Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story) because the SMC isn't even detected properly. I didn't add support for this since I knew it'd just be very slow. Ultimately I'll need to have some separate translation cache for blocks that change a lot.
 
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