Wii Build: Test reports

Thank you for adding that :slight_smile: Now I can just save right away if I see something wrong while playing. Well, except for code dumps. :stuck_out_tongue:

Speaking of which, would it help if I take a picture of any code dumps I get? I got a code dump one time trying to save while playing Someday (this was before I was using the Debug menu version, so it’s not related to that). I didn’t think to take a picture of the code dump unfortunately. It was also completely random (I haven’t seen any other problems in the game so far, nor had it happen again)

Anyway, here’s the bugsaves for Fleshchild. The latest version of the game is available here. Make sure you get the patch 7 update as well.

(Btw, neither .lsd saves or .zip files are uploadable here. I dunno if you were aware of that.)

Slot 3 leads to the 0 fps room on Wii if you go up.

Slot 2 is more complicated because the problems are random. There’s some switches in the area spread across several rooms. When hitting switches and moving between rooms, trying to solve the puzzle of what to do in the area, I kept occasionally randomly getting either a freeze or code dump when going through doors. (I didn’t think to take a picture of those code dumps either).

There’s no reliable way to trigger it. But if you keep flipping those switches and then going through doors a crash or a code dump should happen sooner or later.

I did notice that crashes and dumps were more common if, after you go through a door, the music fails to play. Either there’s a message about a sound file failing to play, or there’s a constant high pitched whine instead of music. When that happens, often going through another will lead to a crash or freeze.

I haven’t played Fleshchild on pc so this may all be Wii specific.

On another note, the game The Looking Glass freezes on Wii when starting a new game. On PC it’s fine but no matter whether you choose to skip the introduction or not it freezes on Wii.

It’s actually hold B and press 1 multiple times on Wiimote (or on classic controller hold X and press B). I didn’t have any trouble figuring that out but I wanted to mention it in case the wrong buttons would get listed when the change goes to the regular release.

That’s also a clever idea, having a button combo to force the menu like that :slight_smile: And it can be done during cutscenes too. I didn’t even know that was possible.

Ah, I see. I’m guessing that’s also why I’m getting RTP missing messages when playing 2003 games with the 2003 Steam RTP installed to data\RTP\2003. That happens on both pc and Wii.

I decided to just use the unofficial ones after all. But that leads to another problem. Applocale doesn’t appear to be available for download anymore :grimacing:

The download link on the wiki, the download link on the install guide that the wiki links to (which is a different download link), even the wikipedia page’s download link (which is a different link yet again) are all dead links.

Searching Microsoft for Applocale doesn’t bring up anything useful either.

Btw, I’ve been meaning to ask if you want links to Yume Nikki fangames for that preservation project?

There’s a Yume Nikki fangame wiki that tries to list everything and even has separate categories for engine used, including 2000 and 2003. Unfortunately their download links aren’t always up to date though.

There’s also some hard to find things. Like for example games that were started in 2000 or 2003 engine and then later remade in VX. The original engine version isn’t always so easy to find, even if it was pretty far along. One example is Me v0.10 (the last version for 2003) which was mentioned on the fangame wiki but the only link to it was hidden away in the middle of a long thread on one site which had a ton of different links strewn throughout.

I tracked it down for my own use but as it was difficult to find I figured I’d mention it case you wanted it. If you’re looking for things like that I’ll post any more I find to the conservation thread.

Thanks for the extensive bug report again :slight_smile:

Code dumps will not help us much because we don’t generate debug symbols for the wii build. There is only one corner case: When you use the latest continious build and provide a screenshot before it is recompiled by a newer one we can recover the symbols :smiley:
But because it only happens on the Wii it’s unlike to be a EasyRPG bug. Maybe the Wii runs out of memory.

No we weren’t. This fixed now. Though no idea how many attachments are allowed per post.

Use Locale Emulator instead. Or Don and RPG Advocate, they have ASCII filenames.

Woah that Yume Nikki wiki has tons of fangames. Yeah a collection of downlaod links for fangames that use 2k/2k3 would be nice. That preservation project is not really progressing but I have lots of games downloaded already. You can post links to games in that preservation project topic. Basicly applies to all games that are not easily to find. :slight_smile: Thx for your help.

Edit
.flow is now playable without engine override (better heuristic). Same applies to Yume Nikki (encoding autodetection improved)

I don’t know what happened but in build 543 every single game plays loud static instead of music on the title screen, and then codedumps after a few seconds. Including games that were definitely working well before like Yume Nikki.

I tried downloading the most recent build again to double check (seems like 543 is still the latest build) but even after a redownload that’s still happening.

Btw about codedumps. I know there are some wii homebrew that when a codedump happens they show a short countdown timer and then automatically reload after a few seconds. WiiMC is one of them, for example. Considering that you said codedumps aren’t very useful to you anyway, could something like that maybe be added to EasyRPG Wii?

I’m asking because having to physically power off the Wii whenever a codedump happens probably isn’t too healthy for the Wii in the long run, nor any hard drives connected to it.

This is a bug in our new WAV code which is already being fixed, we forgot to test it on the Wii :confused:

I have no idea how to add a countdown timer, so we can’t do this.

We also have still no idea why Yume Nikki e.g. hangs at certain locations. Looks like the audio thread continues but not the gameplay but we don’t know why this happens.

EDIT:
Player build #545 fixed the crashes for WAV playback. And as carstene1ns said debug info is now on so you can send photos :smiley:

Will add the reload on exception timer then. Btw., you can also reload the Wii without standing up and pressing reset, just press Z button on a GC pad connected at Port 1 and it will also reset the console (or even A button for a hard reset)… :smiley:

Apropos coredumps: They are useful, if we get the addresses from the stack and also have saved the debug information from the executable. So, if you make a photo of that coredump screen and use one of the last 5 builds or the last release build, we can exactly tell you in which part of our code it crashed.

Wait up, you can reset using a gc controller? Does this mean that gc controller support for actual gameplay is possible? Because that’s something I couldn’t do the last time I tested on Wii and I would love to see (goodbye batteries)

Yes, GC support is possible. He was talking about the crash dump screen which always used the GC controller for restarting. EasyRPG itself does not currently support the GC controller. But adding it would not be very hard at all.

And good news: Build #546 and newer have a slight speed improvment (~5-10%) when weather is rendered.
More interesting performance improvments come in a few days. Stay tuned. :smiley:

I’ll test it tomorrow if I can

@Mr.Faq2014 and @gravity

Have something to test for you on the Wii.

The first link (25) should reduce lag of sound effects and the sound effects should have correct speed now (before they were too fast or slow). Best game for testing is Yume Nikki with that hispeed movement bug.
Only have dolphin for testing, could you confirm that this works for you?
I dont get random crashes in yume nikki anymore :open_mouth: . Though makes no sense that this fixes it

https://ci.easyrpg.org/view/Pull%20Requests/job/player-wii-pr/25/

The 2nd link (24) makes Tone changes faster. Tone changes are these effects that recolor the whole screen. Could you test if the performance for Tone change situations improved? I’m not sure which games use this and where. The first one I can think of is Ib after looking at the ??? picture. Best is you test some situations that were slow before. ^^

https://ci.easyrpg.org/view/Pull%20Requests/job/player-wii-pr/24/

Can’t download pr 23. Testing pr 24 right now

Hu that’s strange. I updated the links. PR25 is the new PR23

All right, managed to test both pre-releases. Right now I don’t have much time so I won’t write the results, but a small summary: it’s been one of the greatest tests I’ve ever made, pitched audio and even normal audio plays normally :smiley: hopefully I’ll be able to write properly in a couple of hours

OH WOW. These are such huge changes that playing on Wii now is almost like a different game :slight_smile:

PR24:
I noticed that tone change fix seemed to be included in 25 as well so I mostly tested with that. There’s a tone change in Fleshchild that happens every time you leave the base area where you start the game in, and the tone changes back when you head back to the starting area. That used to sometimes be incredibly slow.

There’s no slowdown with that at all anymore. There’s a place in .flow where I know a tone change is too. That wasn’t really slow before but now there’s not even a trace of lag anymore. I have to say tone change lag is completely gone :+1:

I can confirm those freezes are gone on actual Wii now too.

But tone changes were causing the freezes? In areas that don’t even have tone changes O_o

Ironically that does fit with Yume Nikki’s surrealness.

With those freezes gone I’ve now been able to get the last two items and get the ending, so Yume Nikki can be completed on Wii. :grinning: Actually, Fleshchild can be played through to its current end too, though it doesn’t have a real ending yet. The author has said it will be a long time before there will be any more updates though.

But with Yume Nikki there is a caveat. There’s some areas with a 8 bit graphical style called the FC/Famicom World (because NES was called Famicom in Japan). The menu is also changed when in the 8 bit areas, to fit the graphical style. That disables debug saving, which isn’t really a big deal. But for some reason the Effects menu is missing graphics in 8 bit and the only way to select an item is by either memorizing item positions or guess and check.

There are also areas in the 8 bit world that require use of a specific item (particularly the lamp) in order to get through them. I don’t think item switching in 8 bit world is needed at any point–at least not to find all the items in the game and get the ending of the game. But it is needed to see at least one special event–the Glitch event on this page.

(I have seen all those events now on Wii except for two, btw–Takofuusen and Uboa–so all other event are confirmed working)

Here’s a save Save09.lsd (33.8 KB) where you can get to 8 bit area by going up. Actually I think you have to go down a little then go up because I was too close to the room transition when I saved.

One other YN bug (seen in PR25, didn’t check 24) a 0 fps room which didn’t use to have 0 fps before :frowning: Save11.lsd (22.6 KB)

Going through the door in front of you will put you in the room with the highest amount of creatures in the entire game. If you enter with the knife equipped (which makes creatures run away) it will take several seconds of black screen before the room shows up, and then it will be 0 fps.

But this is a worse 0 fps than the room with The Thing With The Quivering Jaw that I mentioned some posts ago (btw the creature’s jaw sound works in that room now with this update, though it’s still 0 fps). Because in the quivering jaw room at least you can open the menu or leave the room.

The many creature room lags so bad with the knife equipped that if you’re lucky enough to be able to escape it takes several seconds for each frame of the door opening to advance before you’re finally let out of the room. The first time I went in that room with the knife I couldn’t even get the game to take input so I could leave it. It wasn’t due to a hard freeze though, because holding the power button on the the Wiimote did turn the Wii off.

I’ve also found it impossible in that room to get the menu to come up so you can unequip the knife.

In an earlier test version on Wii (sometime after Yume Nikki buttons were added so you could save) I remember using the knife to stab a bunch of the things and see what’s hidden at the bottom corner of the room. I don’t know when the slowdown showed up because this is the first time I went back in the room since then.

PR25:

:+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

That about says it all. You should consider calling it the Thumbs Up update.

Every Yume Nikki inspired game I’ve seen with noises when you walk (which is all but one game which doesn’t even have sound AFAIK) used to suffer with music distortion and slowdown when you were moving. I’m pretty sure I mentioned that but I can’t remember.

Moving faster would make it worse too. Yume Nikki with the bicycle (2x speed), and Fleshchild even has a dedicated run button. And the ultimate slowdown–using the speed glitch in YN with the bicycle (which give you 8x speed) would turn movement into something of a slideshow, with fps dropping below 10 and often around 0.

ALL of that is gone now. Even using the speed up glitch in YN, with the bicycle, and even with it freaking raining too–still I was seeing 60-61 fps in areas that didn’t have a lower fps to start with. The jerkiness that would happen when moving is now gone. Even with 8x movement speed there’s only slight hitches here and there, and if I hadn’t been watching for it I’m not sure how much I would have noticed.

It’s the same with other games I tried. Music distortion is gone while moving and there’s not much difference in performance between using EasyRPG on PC or Wii anymore.

I see. I don’t always have easy access to a digital camera. Is it possible to make codedumps automatically get saved to a text file? That would make it really easy submit any that happen.

Btw do you know if being able to use a GC controller to reset at codedump is universal, or is that something put specifically into EasyRPG?

@Mr.Faq2014
You can skip most of your writing, @gravity did it for you, except if you want to add something :slight_smile:

Thanks to both of you as usual for testing.

Not really, at least this wasn’t on purpose

I have to admit that I made tone change faster was a lie. Technically the tone change is just handled in a smarter way. Before it was a screen effect, this means it was calculated every frame for the whole screen. Now tone change has two modes: Gradient and static.

Gradient is when the tone changes every frame (usually when tone change is currently being executed and does the fade). This still does the screen effect.

Static is when the tone stays constant for at least two frames. In that case it will apply single Tone blits to the screen objects: Sprites, TileMap, Panorama & co. This is slower then screen because when e.g. a sprite overlaps part of the tilemap you waste time with calculating the Tone of the tilemap because it will be overdrawn by the Sprite. But: Sprites & co. support effect caching, when the effect (here: Tone) and the sprite don’t change it will only calculate the Tone once and afterwards it is for free :slight_smile:

So in short: The fade is as slow as before, the rest is faster.

No, this was concerning the sound effects. Maybe the audio code that we used for SE before had a bug and corrupted something. And @carstene1ns updated all libraries we use on the Wii, maybe this was also related to the crashfix, no idea :smiley:

This really sounds like a bug that could be reproduced on the PC, will test. And the debug menu should never dissapear :open_mouth:

Okay this can be also analyzed at the PC with tools. I like it when problems are not too Wii specific :smiley:

Wellll compared to a PC the Wii has a really bad CPU. But we tried our best :D. And since the first release it took 3 years to make the Wii version finally playable.

That’s a universal thing.

Another new feature will be an improved image cache with the goal to reduce disc access. But for this I don’t need testers, the only problem I currently have is that it eats too much memory on the Wii and runs out of memory :frowning:

[quote=“Ghabry, post:60, topic:197, full:true”]
@Mr.Faq2014
You can skip most of your writing, @gravity did it for you, except if you want to add something :slight_smile:[/quote]

Yeah, I can confirm most of the stuff that Gravity said. Indeed, tone changing doesn’t slow down the player and audio plays properly (it will still get distorted if the game slows down though, whether if caused by the bgm/sound effect or other reason, but works, way more better than I expected).
Gotta say that I would have answered eariler, but I’ve been sick these days (I still am, but hopefully it’s easing off) and didn’t turn on a computer since I wrote the previous message.
Anyway, the games I tested were mostly the usual ones I tend to test, and mostly all of them work as intended (still have to export .flow 0.192 to rm2k). However, I have a couple of things to mention:
-The first one’s related to Paranormal Syndrome. If you remember, I said that despite having the flag to let the player know that the game has japanese encoding, there would still be missing textures. Well, this didn’t happen when I tested PS with pr 24. The missing textures (and some sound effects now that I remember) were properly implemented. However, when I moved to pr 25, the textures and sounds were missing again.
-The second one is related to midi music. If the game instructs the player to reproduce a midi with different speed as some rm2k/rm2k3 games do, the player will slow down/speed up the midi properly, but it will also change the pitch as actually vx/vxace do (mixes up everything, which is pretty cool, but it mightn’t be intended for some songs).
Both things are just details, just worth mentioning them. Well, imo this two pre releases were a huge step. Awesome work, keep it up! :smiley:

Thanks to you and the team for such an awesome project :slight_smile:

But we improved the detection heuristic for .flow a while ago and it should detect it automatically as RPG2k, do you still need your custom version?

This makes no sense at all :sweat: I can’t think of a reason why it should influence the file loading :frowning:

This has technical reasons (MIDI library limitation), maybe will change someday, you already had to wait 3.5 years for proper Audio playback on the Wii :wink:
If you want proper pitched music you have to delete the timidity folder, then it uses our built-in MIDI player which supports proper pitching. But it sounds different and is not resource friendly at all (= slow on Wii :frowning: )

Both changes are now in the normal nightly version. We have another change pending that will make image loading more efficient (better caching) but this won’t need a Wii test before, is not a complex change as SE and Tone.

It turns out that is a bug in Yume Nikki itself :disappointed_relieved:

There’s a fanmade alternate ending version which has a room that describes the problem. If you have all the effects in the game, that’s what causes the effects menu to glitch out in the 8 bit areas.

Dropping an effect in the room with all the doors before going to an 8 bit area will allow the effects menu to work correctly in the 8 bit areas. I checked and it does work.

It would still be cool if that could be fixed anyway. But I don’t know if you’re looking to fix game-specific bugs which aren’t related to EasyRPG itself?

I think I worded that badly. The debug menu doesn’t disappear. The 8 bit world uses a different menu system than the regular one. Debug doesn’t show up because of the custom menu:

On another note, I started playing LcdDem (final version, 0.30) a couple days ago and found a few areas with significant movement slowdown even with PR25 improvements. I don’t know if this is useful but I think I might have noticed a pattern. In those areas there’s a lot of animated tiles. It seems the areas with the greatest fps drop also have the most amount of animated tiles.

Save06.lsd (7.9 KB) Biggest consistent slowdown, every tile is animated.
Save04.lsd (8.6 KB) Walk on the animated tiles often causes major fps drop.
Save07.lsd (7.8 KB) Much fewer animated tiles. Much less fps drop though music often distorted/crackles when moving.

Btw, the uploader is a little confusing because if you drag some small files onto it, it doesn’t actually say that anything happened. I dragged those saves onto it several times before I noticed that every time I dragged them it was adding extra copies of them to the greyed out preview window behind the uploader. :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t know if there’s anything you can about that though.

I’ve been meaning to mention that .flow has areas where textures just won’t show up. I’m guessing engine detection is probably the cause as I’ve never tried converting .flow (or even know how to do that).

Save05.lsd (4.7 KB) Go through the elevator in front of you to see absolutely nothing :stuck_out_tongue: Or go down and to the right and take the first door you see, then take the door in that room. Some stuff visible there, some not.

I have Don’s RTP v1.32 (installed 1.0 then 1.32, then moved it to data/rtp/2000) so I don’t know if that’s a possible cause for missing textures. Is there any disadvantage to having 2000 rtp version 1.32? I mean is it better to have 1.32 or just 1.0 to have best compatibility?

As for Yume Nikki, if I remove the encoding=932 line there’s missing textures. Without the encoding line, the unofficial alternate ending version has half the textures pure black and the player character is invisible. (All of this was on PR25 but I doubt game detection has been updated since then).

Speaking of RTPs, I have a suggestion. Allowing data/rtp/(2000 or 2003) to go into the EasyRPG folder would make it possible to have an easily portable installation. Just copy the whole EasyRPG folder and you’ve got the entire thing backed up or on a new pc all ready to go, no extra stuff needed from anywhere else :slight_smile:

Just curious, would that have an effect for people who use sd for EasyRPG?

We currently have no way to apply game specific patches. We are against applying Hacks to our code like menu console emulators do because it makes the code unmaintanable.

What we plan is to have a game database someday which contains per game information like Name, Engine, Encoding, Patches, … that is shipped with the Player. Patches is for game specific modifications (mostly a problem in German games, many use a modified RPG_RT), and maybe can be abused to patch events… but we never thought about this.

This is worth a retest when the Bitmap cache is ready.

Just don’t use the uploader at all and simply drag the files in the text box :smiley:

No idea. We just noticed that file IO is slow in general on some systems, worst offender is the 3DS.

Sounds good, we consider this in an update.

The latest Player build for the Wii finally supports the ICU library. We use ICU for auto detecting the language of games, it is no longer required (for most games, the detection is not 100% perfect) to set the encoding manually in RPG_RT.ini.

The Wii version was the only one that lacked ICU, the reason for this is the CPU of the Wii (PowerPC). PowerPC is “Big endian” and most other platforms (like your PC or Android) are “Little Endian”. The endianess influences how bytes are stored, e.g. Big stores as AA BB CC DD and Little as DD CC BB AA, so you have to swap the data (we do this when reading LDB and other files). To compile for Wii we “cross compile”, that means we use a compiler on our PC, that generates PowerPC code for the Wii (that’s faster and more convenient), but ICU doesn’t support mixed endian builds (because there build system involves running some tools on the PC which don’t support byte swapping). :frowning:
But we were finally able to submit a patch to ICU which fixes this :smiley: .

The only additional platform that will profit from this is the WiiU, because it has a PowerPC, too. The Switch won’t, will use ARM.

Hm, will paste this explanation in the blog post for 0.5.1 :wink:

sweet! Look forward to 0.5.1 :slight_smile: