FF8 worldmap lag??

[Faeranicus]

Alright, here's the deal.

I notice the worldmap feels a bit choppy on ff8, finally after getting tired of cd3 I took a break, and decided to pop in ff7.

ff7 however, has a worldmap that is completely lag-free... yet the game runs on software, as ff8 runs on d3d...


Is there any small fix for this ff8 problem, or should I just ignore it?

[Aaron]

Depends on your vid card.  I had an old old old 2 meg vid card that ran the world map perfectly, but when I upgraded to my 32 meg TNT2 the world map was all choppy.  It is fine on my GeForce4 Ti.

I dunno if anyone can explain it, but it seems to me that a world map lag doesn't affect the gameplay that much.

[Goku7]

Ah, I'd been working on some theories for this on my free time.

The first one is that the FF8 World Map code is more CPU/System RAM  dependent than Gfx card dependent.  The one thing I have to support this was that on my old 233Mhz P1 it ran slow on the 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI I used at the time, but when I upgraded to a 1.5Ghz P4, it ran at FULL SPEED with all the map effects turned, on that same V3 2000 PCI.

If it was more Gfx card dependent, upgrading the CPU would NOT have made much difference.

My second theory, is that it may be the map effects THEMSELVES that are CPU dependent.  The only evidence I have for this, is that the 233Mhz P1 ran the map at full speed when I had practically all the effects turned off....as in, the world map speed ran on par with the PSX version, but of course I didn't have any of the effects on.

The one thing that we do know for sure, is that the game was probably not coded as good as it should have been.

[Faeranicus]

PC Specs


AMD 1600+ (1405 Mhz clock speed)
512 DDR 2100+ Ram
ATi Radeon 8500LE (128 meg)

[Aaron]

When I said it ran good on the 2 meg card and bad on the 32 meg, they were both in the same 950 MHz system.

The rest of the game ran pretty crappy on the 2 meg card too, but the world map was surprisingly smooth.  It ran FF7 perfectly.  The TNT2 ran everything fine except FF8's world map.

[Goku7]

Hmm...in the Official FF8pc Configurator (the one that came with that game, aka FF8config ver1.0), it lists "Paletted Textures" as one of the features it looks for...

..yes, that's the same "Paletted Textures" feature that FF7's config looks for, and the same one that needed to be bypassed for nVidia cards running FF7....and here we are, noticing the nVidia cards seem to not take doing the FF8 world map well....

It's a shot in the dark, but perhaps the world map uses more paletted textures than the rest of the game, and nVidia drivers aren't as fast in supporting it?

Again, the only evidence I have that would point to this, would be nVidia not really caring about having Paletted Texture support in its drivers (hence the need for the test bypass in the FF7 config), and may have done a "half-assed" (pardon my french) job in coding for that support.

On a side note, I used to run FF7 on an old Trident 2mb 2D-only card, before I got that V3 2000 PCI that I've used for so long.... the only test the Trident card would pass was, ironically, "8-bit Paletted Textures".  I wouldn't be surprised if your 2mb card had the same test results.

On the other hand, it could have been that the card had an uber-fast DirectDraw driver (assuming you had to play it in Software Rendering).

[Aaron]

Hmm, come to think of it, the TNT2 always failed Palleted Textures and the other card passed it I think.  May be the problem right there.

[Goku7]

Hmm, come to think of it, the TNT2 always failed Palleted Textures and the other card passed it I think.  May be the problem right there.

That would probably explain it....also, have you tried using your GF4TI with the dets you used when you had the TNT2, to see if its a fault of the drivers or of the card?

If a card as fast as the GF4TI is giving the same performance results as the TNT2 when you use those dets (despite the inhereint speed increase between the TNT and GeForce architecture), then that would pretty much confirm the theory, to, oh.....~90%?

[Sir Canealot]

The world map runs pretty smooth on my system:

Atholn XP 1600mhz
512 ram
Elsa GeForce 3

Not 60fps, but pretty smooth. It used to run really bad on my old system though:
Atholn 650
320 ram
Elsa Geforce 3

Same grx card heh, so it probebly is a processor thing. One thing for sure, its just one of those things and its probebly just a case of bad coding.

[The End 007]

I think it's to do with how the map was modelled, I get a lot of lag when I move quickly around the map in the ragnarok, but only over land, and even more lag when I pass of Esthar.

My theory is that in FF7 if you got a chocobo you could walk on water across the whole map so the map was on solild object, a sphere which was then manipulated to form the terrain.

But in FF8 there wasn't anything (other then the SeeD ship at the start) that went out onto the deeper water so they created a sphere which they covered in water texture, then they added the terrain and close to shore coast as seperate 3d objects, and they did the same with the cities, this is why the map lags more as there are a lot of 3d based objects to load and more detailed and animated textures.

Don't quote me on this I am not a programer but I have done map modelling for Renegade and I know what does and doesn't cause lag on 3D maps because of it. Though the engines are different so I don't know if it is definatly the reason, and if it is the way they modelled the world map.

[Srethron Askvelhtnod]

Having not played FF8 (although I do have it), I can only offer that I know FF7's World Map engine definately uses tile mapping extensively. Obviously the World Map itself is a 3D space, but there are only a handful of other 3D objects, and they tend to be static (plus they just pop into view once they're within draw distance.) ...which probably means very little processor load.