http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDzDYo8OjP0For a while now I have been banging the drums about menu's opening at a faster rate, cursors moving at a faster rate and the credit screen moving at a faster rate than the PSX game.
Well, I have gone and looked into it properly rather than making uneducated guesses and it seems that it wasn't an FPS issue after all. Well...I am not totally convinced yet but certainly this could all be down to a porting problem or limitations with the PC game. Hopefully some of my questions can be answered and some of these issues can be resolved.
Credit Screen:In PSX game, the text traverses a 320*240 grid. This is why the PC text moves faster. It is compensating for the 640*480 grid. This seems to be ok, however 2 things are wrong here:
a. The font the PC uses is crap compared to the PSX imho. The PSX is larger and seems to meld better when the white and black text meet.
b. The PC credit screen ends up lasting much longer than it should because the text takes a much longer time to start it's movement along the screen. As soon as 1 text fades in the PSX game, the next one begins. On PC there is a large gap that shouldn't be there.
MenuThe normal menu takes less time to open. It takes around 15 frames from the arrival of a box to the completion of the opening menu. In PSX this is 20 frames. If I run down the list of options from ITEM to SAVE it takes the PSX 36 frames. It takes PC 27.
Both of these seem to indicate a difference of 25%. The actual animation seems to be better in PSX than in PC. I can't work out why there should be a difference here but perhaps as Gemini told me it is a limitation of input into the PC that they had to speed it up? In any case, the menu opening of PSX, including limit dialogue boxes is much smoother than the PC and takes 25% longer to appear (again possibly it is animating more? I am not sure)
Tifa's Slots:They appear to be much more jittery than the PSX. Gemini told me this could be because of differences to how the PC and PSX handle the menu. In PSX the menu runs at a different speed to the 3D elements. On PC the whole screen has to run at the same speed of 15 fps. This problem is most likely with all slot animations in battle.
I am not sure if anything can be done here.
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I will prepare some videos now to demonstrate this.