slowdown in danmaku games. (research)

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 6:40 pm

Can anyone give me any prime examples, bosses or sections in any recent bullet hell arcade games / ports where things begin to slow down, then restore speed after the majority of bullets have gone, so I can hunt for some video examples?

also, if anyone owns any doujin shooters and run then on a less than perfect PC setup, does the gameplay slow down during severe curtain fire, but still moves smoothly or does it attempt to keep a fast speed and skip frames?

not trying to start any debate into slowdown, just looking for reference for research purposes.

Thx

Aru-san · Post by **Aru-san** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 6:42 pm

The final boss of Mushihime-sama Futari would be a prime example...I think. I'm just judging from the videos I've seen on YouTube.

Pda · Post by **Pda** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 6:44 pm

Mushi 2 Futari 1.5/BL Maniac mode or BL God mode.

ESP Galuda 1 and 2

lgb · Post by **lgb** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:06 pm

DoDonPachi has a bit of slowdown on later levels, easily noticeable on stage 5. That might be due to a surplus of enemies than bullets, though.

Nearly every touhou game has such a wait option, but it's disabled by default. Turning it on will prevent you from saving scores or replays.

PC Engine Fan X! · Post by **PC Engine Fan X!** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:26 pm

I was the one who originally asked the shmup topic "Is slowdown artificially induced in shmups?" Gaijin Punch said yes that it was. ^_~

Slowdown is used to benefit the player to his or her own advantage in such danmaku titles.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:43 pm

Boy did that other topic cause a flame fest.

PC Engine Fan X! · Post by **PC Engine Fan X!** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:48 pm

Pixel_Outlaw wrote:Boy did that other topic cause a flame fest.

I did not mean to cause such a flame festival in that earlier topic but you know how such die-hard shmuppers can be, especially the more vocal ones. ^_~

Even the classic DDP-DOJ PCB has a bit of slowdown in certain places.

The framerate does slowdown in the classic 2-D sprite-based isometric shmup title of Desert Falcon (circa 1987) for the 8-bit powered Atari 7800 console when there are too many sprites onscreen, especially at the end-stage Sphinx boss throwing everything (including the kitchen sink as well) at the player. It's easy to hover in a "safe spot" and milk the boss for what it's worth and watch your score go through the roof. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

Taylor · Post by **Taylor** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 8:30 pm

On Maniac and above Mushihime-sama and Futari, pretty much embrace slowdown as a feature and so are your best reference. You’ll find these all over youtube entitled dramatic things like “hardest boss ever!!!11” or alternatively on super-play.

In my experience most doujin shmups will not drop frames but slowdown, I imagine it would be a right pain in the hole to calculate collision accurately with a variable frame-rate. Touhou actually logs the slowdown and puts it on the scoreboard, and shows the users frame-rate during replays, so if people do have an advantage from the game going slower (on purpose or otherwise) other people know about it.

While you didn't mention it in your post, it might be worth also looking at x.x Game Rooms titles for his emulated slowdown, where it slows the logic down on purpose when things become too much, opposed to because your machine is falling to its knees. Blue Wish: Ressurection probably shows this the best (throw it on Hell).

ReKleSS · Post by **ReKleSS** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:18 am

Mihara reported on his blog that the slowdown in DOJ is almost entirely in software.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:20 am

ESPGaluda... when you click the kakusei button on (then off).

Mihara reported on his blog that the slowdown in DOJ is almost entirely in software.

Referring to the port, not the board, right? In that massive interview Famitsu did w/ him he said the hardest part of the port was emulating the slowdown (eluding that it wasn't originally in the software).

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 4:24 am

thanks for the info, (and don't quit the day job for standup GP) I shall take a look at the tohou stuff.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 4:57 am

(and don't quit the day job for standup GP)

I've always got dick dancing as my back up.

Elixir · Post by **Elixir** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 7:29 am

Play something like Blue Wish Resurrection and you'll see that the slowdown begins after a certain number of bullets are on the screen, and the game will remain at 59-60fps the entire time. It's artificial.

Absolutely no slowdown would be punishing and just awkward to play against. As for Touhou, it's the same deal.

MathU · Post by **MathU** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:07 am

Slowdown is lame, intentional or not.

worstplayer · Post by **worstplayer** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:31 am

Slowdown in doujins is definitely artificial. As Elixir said, BWR stays at 60FPS even when there's visible slowdown and it can even be turned off in settings.
ABA games do it even better, when there's slowdown, bullets still move perfectly smoothly and framerate stays consistent. It's Max Payne-style "bullet time" rather than slowdown.
In arcade games slowdown IS caused by CPU overload (at least in older ones). You can test it yourself in MAME. If you "overclock" CPU, slowdown goes away.

ReKleSS · Post by **ReKleSS** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 12:02 pm

GaijinPunch wrote:Referring to the port, not the board, right? In that massive interview Famitsu did w/ him he said the hardest part of the port was emulating the slowdown (eluding that it wasn't originally in the software).

His post is here, I think he's referring to the board.

Mihara wrote:まずアーケード版大往生は基本的に演算処理落ちがないんですよね。

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:03 pm

Yeah, that's indeed what he says there. For extra points someone can go dig through the 3 part interview w/ Famitsu and figure out what he's talking about. Maybe he's a flip flopper (or maybe my mind is just going).

Enhasa · Post by **Enhasa** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:36 pm

worstplayer wrote:Slowdown in doujins is definitely artificial. As Elixir said, BWR stays at 60FPS even when there's visible slowdown and it can even be turned off in settings.
ABA games do it even better, when there's slowdown, bullets still move perfectly smoothly and framerate stays consistent. It's Max Payne-style "bullet time" rather than slowdown.
In arcade games slowdown IS caused by CPU overload (at least in older ones). You can test it yourself in MAME. If you "overclock" CPU, slowdown goes away.

Good post, just want to add that you can use the -nowait switch in ABA games to remove the slowdown. It's especially useful for rrootage.

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 2:17 pm

thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.

PC Engine Fan X! · Post by **PC Engine Fan X!** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 3:10 pm

pixelcorps wrote:thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.

Using a Pentium 200MX powered PC setup with 128MB of RAM and running Win98SE OS, the framerate of running the classic doujin shmup title of X86000 Cho de Sha (excuse my bad spelling of the game title) had slowdown that was good enough to dodge the incoming bullets and play the resulting replay on a faster PC setup and it would look like a Superplay run. Of course, the original PC requirements to run it weren't that high to begin with. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

spineshark · Post by **spineshark** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 9:16 pm

I played Mountain of Faith on a really slow XP machine once. I got 30fps on stages and it would go up to about 50 on spellcards. Thinking about it again makes me want to test IN and PCB to see how far I have to go back before the backgrounds don't make the game suffer more than bullets...

Udderdude · Post by **Udderdude** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:12 pm

PC Engine Fan X! wrote:
pixelcorps wrote:thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.
Using a Pentium 200MX powered PC setup with 128MB of RAM and running Win98SE OS, the framerate of running the classic doujin shmup title of X86000 Cho de Sha (excuse my bad spelling of the game title) had slowdown that was good enough to dodge the incoming bullets and play the resulting replay on a faster PC setup and it would look like a Superplay run. Of course, the original PC requirements to run it weren't that high to begin with. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

If this is happening, it's because the programmer made it lag instead of dropping frames when it can't hit 60 FPS. This is fine for PCBs, because it's standard hardware for every game. Not a good idea for PC games, where everyone has a different set of hardware.

worstplayer · Post by **worstplayer** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 6:15 am

Udderdude wrote:
PC Engine Fan X! wrote:
pixelcorps wrote:thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.
Using a Pentium 200MX powered PC setup with 128MB of RAM and running Win98SE OS, the framerate of running the classic doujin shmup title of X86000 Cho de Sha (excuse my bad spelling of the game title) had slowdown that was good enough to dodge the incoming bullets and play the resulting replay on a faster PC setup and it would look like a Superplay run. Of course, the original PC requirements to run it weren't that high to begin with. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~
If this is happening, it's because the programmer made it lag instead of dropping frames when it can't hit 60 FPS. This is fine for PCBs, because it's standard hardware for every game. Not a good idea for PC games, where everyone has a different set of hardware.

No. Dropping frames in a shmup is unacceptable no matter the platform and it's especially unacceptable on PC. In Windows there are things that can slow computer down at any moment (various updaters, scheduled task etc.), and it's better to be slightly annoyed by slowdown than killed without being able to do anything about it.

pixelcorps · Post by **pixelcorps** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 6:57 am

indeed, either that or pass through bullets as you jumped over the collision point.

Chi_Ryu · Post by **Chi_Ryu** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 10:47 am

Death Smiles has plenty of slowdown (especially Whroon - the boss of B-1 when on level 3 - there's a bit with two apples spinning across the screen firing bullets where it slows then regains normal speed as the move off screen), and whenever someone is in fever mode and there is plenty of pretty stuff going on.g. during the volcano stage (C-2).

Goshi · Post by **Goshi** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 12:35 pm

MathU wrote:Slowdown is lame, intentional or not.

Agreed though most games with artificial slowdown often have the option to turn it off as well. The Saturn version of Twinkle Star Sprites is one example.

Keade · Post by **Keade** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 1:32 pm

pixelcorps wrote:thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.

It won't be exactly as if you actually had a small computer, but you could use a program such as CPUgrab to "keep your CPU busy" while running other programs.

Dodonpachi's Hibachi has a nice pattern, the 1st one, where the game runs fine for a few seconds, then gets very slow all the time the screen is flooded with bullets, then get back to normal speed again, after he stops shooting (very dangerous because the acceleration is sudden)

PC Engine Fan X! · Post by **PC Engine Fan X!** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:38 pm

Keade wrote:
pixelcorps wrote:thanks for the info so far, I wish I had a lower spec PC to see what framerates are like on stuff like BWR and touhou stuff.
It won't be exactly as if you actually had a small computer, but you could use a program such as CPUgrab to "keep your CPU busy" while running other programs.

Dodonpachi's Hibachi has a nice pattern, the 1st one, where the game runs fine for a few seconds, then gets very slow all the time the screen is flooded with bullets, then get back to normal speed again, after he stops shooting (very dangerous because the acceleration is sudden)

That is because the CPU is hard at work trying to push the maximum number of bullets on-screen. IIRC, it would at 266 bullets at the most. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

8 1/2 · Post by **8 1/2** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 6:53 pm

I've been playing a lot of Muchi Muchi Pork, and the slowdown in that game is really inconsistent. It doesn't feel like it's on purpose at all. It stutters pretty badly, and I often lose a life due to it suddenly speeding up on me as I navigate a slow cloud of bullets. The later stages are actually a lot easier to me because the slowdown is more consistent once a lot of enemies are on screen. It doesn't have the elegant flow of Mushi or others where it really feels like part of the gameplay. No fun to squeak through a tough pattern only to have it suddenly ramp up in speed and send me flying into a bullet because I have a direction held on the joystick. I've learned to compensate, and it doesn't really hurt the game in the longrun, but it's still a pain and hurts the overall look of the game.

EOJ · Post by **EOJ** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 7:22 pm

Yeah, MMP has some choppy slowdown, it's not a very smooth game really. Even the start of stage 2 has some jerky scrolling, for some weird reason. Yagawa's previous game, Pink Sweets, has much smoother slowdown (very similar to the slowdown found in Ikeda games), but I think that may be due to the fact Yagawa programmed the game with Yuji Inoue (who also works on all the Ikeda games) who probably smoothed out all the slowdown. Yagawa programmed MMP by himself.