This is the official Trismegistus with Ex 0.9 download thread

[Verdite]

I got no slow down on my pc with ex and SoM, dunno whats going on there.

Only slowdown i get is when i get prompted to take an item, given the yes / no option it lags

[Holy_Diver]

UPDATE: Turns out my USB soundcard was slowing things down while moving. Not Som/my CPU. FYI: Disabling hardware "acceleration" via dxdiag fixes things.

I got no slow down on my pc with ex and SoM, dunno whats going on there.

Whatever it is is not Ex related. I just posted it in this thread for the hell of it. Everything seems to drop to its knees whenever Som rebuilds the scene... ie. when you move. It does reveal though that Som is doing a lot more work when you're moving, so Ex could definitely take advantage of that and turn on antialiasing techniques when not moving... which are not needed while moving because everything is moving too much to notice jaggies anyway.

I tested it in F4 mode today to make sure it wasn't related to collision simulations or anything just to be sure. It definitely doesn't make sense that whatever Som is doing it would make a 1.6Ghz processor drop to its knees. It may just be the processor (http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/2009/05/17/slow-intel-atom-stay-away/) .... it does hickup a lot but does pretty good with modern apps which is saying something. Strange though my machine is marketed as a game machine, but most games these days don't abuse the CPU so. That link says my CPU may be equivalent to 800Mhz which is getting closer to Som's minimum specs. I'm interested to see how KF1 performs, since it should be compatible with From's specs. Anyway, I think the next Ex release like this will be KF1.

Som relies on the CPU way too much in general. When I start digging into the .mpx files / fixing the vanishing tiles and stuff, I'll probably go one step further than optimizing away the map (if even) and just turn all the map tiles into like the equivalent of two triangles or so, so Som won't waste time with them.

Only slowdown i get is when i get prompted to take an item, given the yes / no option it lags

I'm aware of the Take this item? jankiness. I don't know what causes it. There is something strange about that menu. Som polls the inputs twice instead of once like all the other menus. It seems to be bugged, but the problem only shows up sometimes, and generally on slower machines. Even though the menu screen usually goes at 60fps. I've only seen it happen in games with the picture menu. So anyway, it's happening on Vista/7 for you? I've never had it happen with 7. I'm pretty sure there is a bug with Som there, but under ideal conditions it works itself out.

Does it get slow? Or are the key just not responsive? Like you hit cancel/confirm over and over but nothing takes until it eventually does


PS: The real problem with Som I think is the website says you need a minimum of "8MB of VRAM" and anyway Som works more or less within those constraints rather than scaling properly. So it shuttles it's 8MB of video memory every frame where now days we have at least 128MB to work with, which is more than you need to keep everything in video memory permanently and heaven forbid more room is required D3D will manage that for you automatically (with a little paging overhead)

[Holy_Diver]

I just fired the KF remake up for the first time outside of som_db.exe.... either that or the movies did not work before. Anyway I was surprised the movies went so hard in the photo realistic direction considering the limitations of Som... err it's inability to hold a candle to that

Anyway its performance was a lot like Dark Destiny's only a little better. For some reason Trismegistus never really makes it up to full speed. Maybe because it's so much outdoors.

The technique I used in Trismegistus to adjust the player's eye level does have a flaw. I think I prefer to do it the way it's being done versus screwing with the memory. But anyway it doesn't take into account the arm, so it's like you're moving the eye level but not the arm level. Which is ok for Trismegistus (no arms) but it's gonna take some work to figure out what to do about the arm. I plan on smoothing analog in the same way, so that's going to be a prerequisite for true analog behavior.

Edited/offtopic: The KF1 movie looks a lot better with Ex because it plays at full resolution and is filtered between texels. But you can still see plenty of compression artifacts. Especially because of the higher resolution. If From Software still has a raw file for the movies it might be possible to convince the company to release it somehow after restoring the game a bit. Funnily I can't get the movies to play except in the game itself, so I guess I can't cheat and see the ending

I also noticed the candle in a dish object that you see everywhere in the game looks really good, but whenever you see this object in other games its messed up... probably worth looking into.

[Verdite]

'Like you hit cancel/confirm over and over but nothing takes until it eventually does'

Yeh thats the problem i have. The thing is though my machine is pretty high end and works well with most modern games...

[Holy_Diver]

'Like you hit cancel/confirm over and over but nothing takes until it eventually does'

Yeh thats the problem i have. The thing is though my machine is pretty high end and works well with most modern games...

Go ahead and drop a GAME.EXE file in there and see if it does the same way. I'm kinda baffled myself why it does that way sometimes. It's hard to imagine Ex could be at fault. If it is it's probably just some random bug unrelated to input or anything that happens to show up that way. I think it's pretty clear Som does things different on that screen for no good reason. I'm thinking at some point we'll be able to make sense of it, but for now I don't feel like driving myself nuts about it. It is annoying when it happens though. I think you'll find that it doesn't always, even in the same game / with the same setup.

EDITED: It's definitely a bug that's internal to Som. Because what's weird is the arrow keys work basically but the confirm/cancel keys don't. And what really makes it clear is the confirm/cancel buttons on the joypad don't work either. So for whatever reason Som is choosing to ignore them.

EDITED: I think I will try to setup a fix that waits for the player to hit confirm or cancel and then just bombards Som with those keys until it leaves the screen. It's a pretty simple screen.

[dmpdesign]

Just curious Holy,  the KF1 vids you are watching, are they the originals or the english dubbed?

[dmpdesign]

For the record Ex Tris looks great on my laptop but I can't really play as it chugs my computer down to a crawl.  I dont have a great graphics card or anything, its simply an integrated chipset, but the rest of the computer should be decent specced.  I dunno, I wonder, is there an .ini toggle to make the game run full screen rather than windowed?

[Holy_Diver]

I'm pretty sure the reason the Take this item? menu is bugged is because on the frame you leave it, Som tries to go thru the next 3D frame without completing the menu frame (which it draws on top of... if so) and if the inputs get polled once for the menu and once for the 3D (which is more likely to happen when the 3D framerate is low) then you actually end up back in the menu all in one frame. You'd think committing to yes would put the item in your inventory / off the field immediately but apparently it doesn't. Either way it would still be bugged on cancel.

The problem for Ex is it needs an frame to tell what's going on, and Som can poll the inputs a number of times between frames... especially when things are slow... so you don't know what kind of input it's looking for for sure between frames. I can't figure out what the hell determines the polls per frame at fullspeed. It's different in every game, but it's gotta be a combination of moving and turning speed. Wicklow is only 1 at full speed. DD is 4. Tris is 5.

I'm not sure why it happens really only in Tris. That I see anyway. I'd say it's because of the picture menu, but I think it still happens if I strike the filename out of the .dat file, which seems to put it out of picture menu mode. In picture mode the field is not drawn. I'm thinking there is probably a more elegant fix than trying to take over the controls.

PS: I vote we call the "3D" context the "field" from now on. Not only does it sound good, it rhymes with King's Field

PPS: @Todd I'm watching the originals. And if Som sans Ex runs ok on your computer, then changing some settings should have some impact. In my case the graphics stuff makes no diff whatsoever. The bottleneck is in the CPU. Fullscreen is a little buggy in this release. Basically you just change the Ex.ini settings related to fullscreen/window modes. There are two.

[Verdite]

Btw i just read your reply to an earlier post. What i should have said was... When can i use ex in fullscreen mode rather than windowed?

[Holy_Diver]

Btw i just read your reply to an earlier post. What i should have said was... When can i use ex in fullscreen mode rather than windowed?

I still don't follow. There is not a maximize feature yet. But if you change to a resolution that is either as tall or wide as your display you will be in fullscreen mode. If there is no such resolution available then you can't without either putting in a custom resolution in the .ini file or changing the Ex.ini file.

To answer something Todd asked about fullscreen. There is nothing in the .ini file that isn't changed from within the game. It's not supposed to be hand edited. Stuff in the Ex.ini file on the other hand cannot be changed from within the game.

If you look at your Ex.ini file you should be able to figure out what to change. All the settings you'd require are already in the file. Just turn them off or on.

That said I'd tested the fullscreen modes with this build earlier to see if it affected performance. And there were some minor bugs to be corrected. Mainly you may see a bright stripe along one side of the black mattes.

I think the "do_not_compromise_fullscreen_mode" or whatever setting may do away with the mattes altogether. I'm not sure. I'm taking anymore questions about this.


EDITED: If you specify a custom resolution that is not normally enumerated by your display it will probably booger the Options menu. I've made a note to make sure the custom resolution gets enumerated so that won't happen in the future. Ex won't toss out a custom resolution if it's not in the right aspect ratio, but adding one is a different story / a little bit more work.