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Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 12:23 pm
by Lonheartda60

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 2:16 pm
by khmr33
this is confusing...

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 3:20 pm
by Marc
They took the translation of the text being finished to mean the entire project was done.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 4:47 pm
by midori_fox
Wait whats done?

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 5:52 pm
by KOJIMASAN
Seems like someone needs to get on these forums a little more often oh well I share their entusiasm.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 7:15 pm
by Marc
midori_fox wrote:Wait whats done?
The translation of the game text has been done for a couple years.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 10:59 pm
by midori_fox
So what are the bugs and whats left on the game?

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 11:07 pm
by slowbeef
midori_fox wrote:So what are the bugs and whats left on the game?
I'm currently trying to do something with the pSX end credits issue. (They don't display correctly in ePSXe, either)

There's another relatively tough feature where we want the game to actually exit back to the Konami logo when you Quit.

Artemio's working on opening credits, Jonathan's telop, and Ed's telop (all video overlays).

We have to audit summaries and finalize the name badges.

Those are the Killer7.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 4:48 am
by Lonheartda60
*Pours out liquor for Project S*

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 7:23 am
by khmr33
Back when Killer7 came out... did anyone else instantly realize it was a 3-D Snatcher? This realization made the game 10 times more awesome than any review I read. Not one published review that I read mentioned the Snatcher connection.

If quitting Policenauts doesn't return to the Konami logo, where does it go? The title screen? I'm curious about the reasoning here...

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 8:23 am
by Charlie Johnson
khmr33 wrote: If quitting Policenauts doesn't return to the Konami logo, where does it go? The title screen? I'm curious about the reasoning here...
It goes nowhere, it ends at some kind of "Farewell" screen and the only way to leave it, is to reset or turn off your console.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 9:07 am
by khmr33
Ohhh... I'm familiar with that kind of annoyance.

What about a soft reset? I know Tekken3 had one. Would that be easier or harder?

If one could add a manual soft reset function... perhaps you could trigger it automatically at the quit screen.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 9:41 am
by Lonheartda60
Lol can't we just not quit?

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 9:47 am
by Marc
Initially we wanted to remove it altogether, but then we remembered it appears on the game over screen.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 10:02 am
by slowbeef
khmr33 wrote: What about a soft reset? I know Tekken3 had one. Would that be easier or harder?
It did? Oh neat! Actually, that is on my list of possible solutions, but I was worried it was a cheap way out. But if Namco did it, that's okay by me! I guess I'd imagine it being a small ASM hack that says "instead of doing normal SZ stuff, in this special case, do a system call to reset"

...Come to think of it, that really might be the only way around this.

Policenauts uses (don't 100% quote me on this, it's really hard to infer this stuff from an assembly leve) some operating system nomenclature. If you open up your CD, you'll see a file "KERNEL.SC" and if you open that up in notepad or something, you'll see it spawns all sorts of process like "open" (the Konami logo and title movie) and "english" (that Engrishy opening if you wait awhile), etc.

The game itself is a process called "ITP" (short for interpreter - oversimplifying a little, but Policenauts actually works a little like a Java Virtual Machine or a Perl/Ruby Interpreter)

The problem is that there doesn't really seem to be anything - as far as I'm aware - that tells the interpreter to kill itself, or just die. And I'm also not really sure what would happen if it just died, honestly. I assume it would return control to KERNEL.SC and restart the game (launching "open" and "english" etc. again).

I can actually get the game to "restart" by launching "open" on Quit. Ta-da! You get the Konami logo and everything...

...but the game crashes soon after because you didn't *really* quit. You just restarted the game open process as a child of the ITP process... essentially restarting a new game, while your old game is actually still running. This really messes things up.



But that feature is kind of a "nicety" feature and right now, I'm spending my efforts on knocking out the most necessary looking one - the pSX compatibility problem. I'm currently trying to find "What kills this thing" by S-L-O-W-L-Y trying to inch forward in terms of game instructions and see the exact moment where the thing kills pSX.

To be honest with you, this is the only bug that really "worries" me insofar as:

- If we don't really fix it, I have to tell people to not use pSX if they want to see all the content, and also that brings on a lot of ePSXe Plugin Configuration questions. And even then, the end credits don't scroll correctly in ePSXe
- If I "fake it" by fixing the end credits in ePSXe (i.e. change the graphics to make them scroll correctly), I risk making them NOT work on the hardware/PSP emulator... which they do now.

Sigh.

It's a tough one, and it is wholly unlike any other bug/feature we've had, but the good news is that in the meantime, Artemio is working on 3 bugs and Marc is finalizing the script, so it's not like we're entirely stuck on this.

My current method of ROM hacking this is "advance 500-1000 instructions near the crash, and if it didn't crash, play a level of Spelunky and do it again" because hitting F8 to step to the next instruction is a tedious nightmare.

If I get too frustrated, maybe I'll get the Quit one out of the way via soft reset after all.

Re: Current Project Status (4/1/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 6:31 pm
by midori_fox
Make a psp version and a pc epxs verion. psp version could possibly be released first =D

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 1:48 am
by Jack
Current PSP Status: finally installed custom firmware: 5.00 M33-2! :mrgreen:

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 2:48 am
by akor1108
Please make an epsxe compatible version! That emulator has been good to me. it may not be perfect, but I like it.

I thought everybody thought epsxe was the best overall, so I got it. it's pretty decent. it got update too so it works better now.

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:52 am
by Kassius
Hello there, long time lurker and follower of this topic's progress.

First of all, on behalf of myself and the countless other lurkers who have been keeping tabs on this project, let me offer my sincerest thanks, respect, and appreciation. You are giving the opportunity to people to experience something fantastic.

Now as the list of bugs grows shorter and shorter, so to grows the anticipation and excitement. :)

Any chance for an ETA? dun dun dun.

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 4:45 am
by The Prince II
Image

a beta related image. in related news. got my policenauts copy now. so don't do a dnf on us guise.

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 5:39 am
by snatcher1996
In case you have to make a decision, please don't dump a version that would run on real hardware in favor for an emulator. After all, the purpose of an emulator is to act like the real thing, so by my estimation, if epsxe crashes where a Playstation does not, it has to be something wrong with epsxe, not the game itself.

Thanks for your effort!

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:06 am
by Fly
snatcher1996 wrote:In case you have to make a decision, please don't dump a version that would run on real hardware in favor for an emulator. After all, the purpose of an emulator is to act like the real thing, so by my estimation, if epsxe crashes where a Playstation does not, it has to be something wrong with epsxe, not the game itself.
This this this, although you probably were going to do that already and the choice won't come up. ♥

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 11:54 am
by slowbeef
Yeah, I'm not gonna purposefully break one version to fix another or anything. I'm gonna shelve this problem and work on another until inspiration hits.

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:30 pm
by nomad
I like the idea of releasing two editions that work for their respective software, if you have too much trouble fixing all the bugs for both.

Re: Current Project Status (4/10/09): 7 Bugs Till Beta

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 5:18 pm
by Solfieri
So, lemme ask you something, comrade slowbeef. What will be of Policenauts: Private Collection? Is it on the plans? Sorry if the question already was answered, but still I need to ask.