Star Ocean: First Departure

[kurehayagami]

Thanks for the hardwork, now there's no more black screen if I use Direct 3D9, just as the one above me stated.

But another problem is, the screen can't stop flickering if I do anything as much as walking.

Any help, please?

[[Unknown]]

What graphics card are you using? Have you tried adjusting the frameskip setting? Also make sure you're using buffered rendering.

-[Unknown]

[kurehayagami]

(12-25-2014 04:09 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  What graphics card are you using? Have you tried adjusting the frameskip setting? Also make sure you're using buffered rendering.

-[Unknown]

Thanks for the reply, but it's already solved.

The cause is the multithreaded option, the screen stopped flickering when I turned it off. My laptop's graphics card is intel onboard btw, but the same also happened on my desktop pc, using nvidia 5200m.

[danielcastilhos]

I have a Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730 wich have intel atom cpu and a powervr sgx544mp2 gpu in the game the character are invisible when the player is not moving. I checked all the settings and they are right.

[delonge_one]

Eh guys, I've noticed that in the recent builds that the game stutters as a whole whenever you try to move around in town. Its not in issue in the 0.99.1 stable build but was an issue before that and recently. Just wondering what can be done to fix this.

[Silenti]

I've encountered some sort of bug in the game where if you hover over a certain blank spot where it looks like an item the game makes static noises and the game freezes (kinda), You can still listen to the music of the game but the whole screen freezes.

Does anyone else have the same problem or is it just me? and I also experience it when I try to sell things, it appears near the end of list when you scroll down.

Can anyone help me with this or is it a persistent problem?

Also its not my pc, since I can run the game fine without problems, only the attachments of the bugged blank item is the problem.

Lastly the bug only appears in Weapons/Material section and Selling section when you sell things

[ShadowfoxEX]

So after some fiddling around, I found that with non-buffered rendering, the game runs quickly but then all the actors are transparent of the walls and fixed objects. When going to buffered rendering, there's little to no glitches whatsoever, only the severe slow transitions when entering and exiting menus, rooms, towns, battles, really any transitions. When looking around, I think when you do the non-buffered route, it feels like it doesnt bother doing the stencil test, which I found as I tried disabling it with buffered rendering and resulted in the same transparency through the buildings, but at the same time, the transitional lag still present, even lowering all my graphics settings to as minimal as possible.

[[Unknown]]

Yes, the game uses buffers when it does the stencil test. Disabling the game's buffers will prevent it from working.

What device are you using?

If it's slow even with stencil testing disabled, then it's probably related to other settings. Some settings that could cause problems / slowness:

1. Render resolution, depending on the device. Try 1x and see if it's still slow. For example, even on a relatively powerful desktop, 6x is less than half the speed of 1x. This will be much worse on mobile, since 6x takes 36x as much work compared to 1x.
2. Display resolution on an Android device. Try 1x also.
3. Texture scaling, on any device. Try off. Anything above 3x is probably massive overkill and may cause slowdowns in various games even on a powerful desktop.
4. Retain changed textures may make this game slower.
5. Any customized (non-default) cpu speed could theoretically cause problems.
6. Multithreaded can make this game faster but not sure if it becomes unstable.
7. Enabling rewind snapshots (System settings) will make pretty much any game get progressively slower on weaker devices.

Is it only transitions that are slow, or whenever panning the screen?

-[Unknown]

[ShadowfoxEX]

It's only the transitions that are slow, going throughout the world map, or battle from beginning to end, it's completely fine.

Even on "Low" settings that I've looked around at, it still exists, is something slowing down during the buffering period?

[[Unknown]]

The battle and world map do not use the stenciling thing. What I mean by panning is this:

1. Go to a town.
2. Go to the right side of the town.
3. Move left such that the camera moves, even though you are not moving to a new area.

Is that slow? If it's related to the stenciling, that will be slow.

-[Unknown]

[ShadowfoxEX]

Camera pan is fine. No lag, no fps drops or freezes. Pressing Triangle to open up the menu, freezes, sound and everything, then resumes. Leaving town, entering buildings, etc. same issue. Lowering the the display resolution lowers the length of the pause though it doesnt remove it. Bear in mind that this is during buffered rendering.

Non-buffered rendering, the pause doesnt exist, though it forces the stenciling to not exist, hence the characters being transparent through what would be considered objects and buildings.

I should clarify, these are two separate issues. Either I play with a pause/lag, or I play without stencil tests, which feels weird.

[[Unknown]]

Well, the stencil thing isn't an issue. When you disable the game's ability to use buffers by choosing that option, effects that require buffers will break. That's intentional and expected behavior. For older phones and devices, the speed boost of non-buffered rendering (because it skips all these effects and all this buffering the game does, etc.) is worth it, since it's the only way to make games playable.

For me (using an underclocked NVIDIA 9800 GT), a render resolution of 5x gives me 1500% speed in a particular area (with fast forward on, but frameskip during fast forward off.) Constantly pressing triangle/circle quickly drops that down to 1000% speed, and the menu normalizes at 1100% speed.

In the menu it might be cpu limited (I'm testing this with a Core i7 3.6Ghz.) It spends 36.6% of the time or so in jit, and about 43% of its time drawing + decoding music. The other lost 20% is probably also drawing, but in the GPU driver, I'm not sure.

Travel between a dungeon area and the world map seems to drop me down to 800% temporarily. Transitioning in and out of battle seems to have little impact. Transitions between areas inside a dungeon seems to have little impact.

If I turn on texture scaling, obviously the impact of transitions is much more significant. At 3x, opening the menu is pretty slow. I'm guessing you're using texture scaling? Try turning it off.

-[Unknown]

[Crowmeister]

So I just decided to replay the entire series and therefore just booted up this game yesterday.
I haven't read through all 14 pages but could you tell me if there are any specific settings I should use or avoid for this game? (OpenGL or not?)
Seeing as there are some (minor) issues with it.

My PC is pretty powerful, haswell i5 and a ATI 290x, so that shouldn't be an issue.

[Prime14]

(05-15-2015 11:12 AM)Crowmeister Wrote:  So I just decided to replay the entire series and therefore just booted up this game yesterday.
I haven't read through all 14 pages but could you tell me if there are any specific settings I should use or avoid for this game? (OpenGL or not?)
Seeing as there are some (minor) issues with it.

My PC is pretty powerful, haswell i5 and a ATI 290x, so that shouldn't be an issue.

OpenGL, buffered rendering, simulate block transfer. There's a minor problem with using buffered rendering tho, transitioning to a new area causes the sound to skip.

Resolution to 1x to remove black bounding boxes on animated backgrounds.

[Crowmeister]

(05-15-2015 02:09 PM)Prime14 Wrote:  

(05-15-2015 11:12 AM)Crowmeister Wrote:  So I just decided to replay the entire series and therefore just booted up this game yesterday.
I haven't read through all 14 pages but could you tell me if there are any specific settings I should use or avoid for this game? (OpenGL or not?)
Seeing as there are some (minor) issues with it.

My PC is pretty powerful, haswell i5 and a ATI 290x, so that shouldn't be an issue.

OpenGL, buffered rendering, simulate block transfer. There's a minor problem with using buffered rendering tho, transitioning to a new area causes the sound to skip.

Resolution to 1x to remove black bounding boxes on animated backgrounds.

Sweet, thanks a lot. Seems I'm playing this game at the right time seeing as it had some troubles in the past