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Troubleshooting / All about those pesky wind barriers.
« on: 2021-01-08 19:08:10 »
Throughout time people have had issues trying to get past these barriers on PC. To wit
1) The timing is pickier on PC. I haven't confirmed this by comparing the field scripts but other people have said this. I suspect that this is a tuning change that didn't exist in the earlieqr version used as the basis for the PC port. it' also not very obvious where the actual dangerous spot IS, which doesn't help.
2) Sometimes the wind never dies down. This is a purely graphical bug, but it does make it impossible to time your passage. For vanilla 1.02, activating riva/tnt mode causes this. Using upscaled backgrounds also usually causes this as well. This is because dynamic palette adjustment is used to change the colors on the constantly scrolling background layer to make the wind visually die down. Riva mode simply turns off the palette adjustment capability, because those cards had no 8 bit palette textures support. You had to go to software mode just to resolve the issue. Replacing the background with a mod causes a similar issue. the palette changes won't register, so the wind never goes down. Aali's driver eventually implemented this, so everything based on it has this fixed (all releases after the square enix store one, plus all modded drivers currently available) NX may have this fixed when using upscaled field textures. PSX is always fine. If this happens to you on non vanilla, you must remove your texture mods for woa_1,woa_2, and woa_3, restoring the original ones for the area.
3) Often the green tornados get out of sync with where the game thinks they should be. This does not happen on psx version. This is because in the PSX version, there is code to stop the bg scroll whenever a field script is interrupted while in the whirlwind maze. On every PC version i can play, the scroll continues while the field script pauses for menu and/or battles. This means opening the menu while on woa_2 or woa_3 will desync it, and getting zapped desyncs it. this is fixable by entering and leaving the screen, or entering and leaving the menu until the tornado looks right. The tornado is animated by background scrolling, and the field script can't actually check the position of the background layer, so it just uses some variables as counters to determine when it's safe to pass. For the one without the lightning, I recommend the menu method. for the third, it's much harder to tell if it's out of sync, so you should leave and reenter if you get tagged.
The lightning in screen 3 can't go out of sync, as it's animated a different way that's foolproof (parts of layer 1 are added and removed). it does three zaps, a random pause, then two zaps, and another random pause. but it's always long enough to slip past during the pause, provided the wind is also low at the time.
1) The timing is pickier on PC. I haven't confirmed this by comparing the field scripts but other people have said this. I suspect that this is a tuning change that didn't exist in the earlieqr version used as the basis for the PC port. it' also not very obvious where the actual dangerous spot IS, which doesn't help.
2) Sometimes the wind never dies down. This is a purely graphical bug, but it does make it impossible to time your passage. For vanilla 1.02, activating riva/tnt mode causes this. Using upscaled backgrounds also usually causes this as well. This is because dynamic palette adjustment is used to change the colors on the constantly scrolling background layer to make the wind visually die down. Riva mode simply turns off the palette adjustment capability, because those cards had no 8 bit palette textures support. You had to go to software mode just to resolve the issue. Replacing the background with a mod causes a similar issue. the palette changes won't register, so the wind never goes down. Aali's driver eventually implemented this, so everything based on it has this fixed (all releases after the square enix store one, plus all modded drivers currently available) NX may have this fixed when using upscaled field textures. PSX is always fine. If this happens to you on non vanilla, you must remove your texture mods for woa_1,woa_2, and woa_3, restoring the original ones for the area.
3) Often the green tornados get out of sync with where the game thinks they should be. This does not happen on psx version. This is because in the PSX version, there is code to stop the bg scroll whenever a field script is interrupted while in the whirlwind maze. On every PC version i can play, the scroll continues while the field script pauses for menu and/or battles. This means opening the menu while on woa_2 or woa_3 will desync it, and getting zapped desyncs it. this is fixable by entering and leaving the screen, or entering and leaving the menu until the tornado looks right. The tornado is animated by background scrolling, and the field script can't actually check the position of the background layer, so it just uses some variables as counters to determine when it's safe to pass. For the one without the lightning, I recommend the menu method. for the third, it's much harder to tell if it's out of sync, so you should leave and reenter if you get tagged.
The lightning in screen 3 can't go out of sync, as it's animated a different way that's foolproof (parts of layer 1 are added and removed). it does three zaps, a random pause, then two zaps, and another random pause. but it's always long enough to slip past during the pause, provided the wind is also low at the time.
