Not a comment on the post, but I sure wish Jira would load even half as quickly as this site.
Perhaps it's hosted on a disposable vape?
commenting from dillo running on a disposable vape which boots desktop linux using a ram expansion
Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#82Literally unplayable, someone should fix that. Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.
Fun fact: Doom is now a Microsoft property, along with Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, all of the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, and of course Halo. Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. Which is what they've wanted since 1996 or so.
They own Minecraft as well.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#832038 is going to be a fun year.
Fixing that is my retirement plan.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked. (I also never managed to get it)
I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.
This is a significantly better handling than the previous game (final fantasy viii). My disk 1 (it had four disks) got scratched over time (I was a child after all), and the failure mode was just to crash - thus the game was unplayable. The game had a lot of cutscenes.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.
Incorrect. I’m looking at the source code. It’s not perfect but it’s not just “slowed down to 50hz” like people claim.
When you say looking at the source code, what do you mean here?
AFAIK the source for FF9 PSX (and all the PSX ff games) has been lost as Square just used short term archives
Also, FF9 does not run at a constant framerate. Like all the PSX FF games it runs at various rates, sometimes multiple at a time (example: model animations are 15fps vs 30 for the UI)
In terms of timers, the bios does grant you access to root timers, but these are largely modulated by a hardware oscillator
(Incidentally, the hardware timing component is the reason a chipped PAL console cannot produce good NTSC video. Only a Yaroze can support full multiregion play)
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#86Literally unplayable, someone should fix that. Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.
I'm under the impression that since Doom Eternal (the first after Doom 2016), the gameplay has considerably shifted to an "interconnected arenas" style, and with more sophisticated combat mechanics. Many games have started adopting this design, for example, Shadow Warrior 3.
I also dislike this trend. As a sibling comment noted, boomer shooters are generally closer to the old-school Doom gameplay, although some are adopting the newer design too.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#87Quick! John Carmack needs to be brought into this immediately.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. So valve next?
They missed that window when Sierra was still the publisher for Half-Life. Besides, Valve is not a publicly traded company and Gabe Newell as former manager at Microsoft has no interest in getting back together. Valve is betting everything on Linux right now to be more independent from Microsoft.
"Valve is betting everything on Linux right now"
Not everything, but they do invest in it.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#89Does that hardware traps overflows or something? I had read an article about how DOOMs engine works and noticed how a variable for tracking the demo kept being incremented even after the next demo started. This variable was compared with a second one storing its previous value Doesn't sound like something that would crash, I wonder what was the actual crash
Signed overflow is undefined behavior in C, so pretty much anything could happen. Though this crash seems to be deterministic between platforms and compilers, so probably not about that. TFA says the variable is being compared to its previous value, and that comparison presumably assumes new < old cannot happen. And when it does, it could easily lead to eg. stack corruption. C after all happily goes to UB land if, for example, some execution path doesn’t return a value in a function that’s supposed to return a value.
Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
#90About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die. Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow. When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58
There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...
Am reminded by this quote from Ferdinand Porsche:
"The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts."
Games fit this philosophy, compared to many other pieces of software that are expected to be long-lived and receiving a lot of maintenance and changes and evolve.