Cave and the slowdown

[gray117]

The biggest kind of issue to be taken from this topic is really how this effects play - in a random thought of mine today I considered do you get control lag during slowdown ...?

... I mean I presume you do - especially if the throttle is hardware related and therefore slowing down whatever loop your game is setup in. Alternatively I suppose if priorities are different and/or even parts of the hardware are operating differently could it be technically possible to move the player in the game even if the refresh isn't rendered on screen...

... Could details behind such mechanisms play fundimental parts in how a port would have to be different from original hardware?

... I'm a rubbish player, but for some this could be a huge issue? ... Any preferences on how this is/could/should be managed?

[Ex-Cyber]

Alternatively I suppose if priorities are different and/or even parts of the hardware are operating differently could it be technically possible to move the player in the game even if the refresh isn't rendered on screen...

It's possible to code an engine that works this way, but screen updates are the time reference in typical old-school arcade/console engines, so they would generally only read the controls once per screen update. If a physical screen refresh is missed, it just finishes the current update and displays it the next time a physical refresh rolls around; there's no skipping or other adjustment to try to compensate for the missed frame. That's why you see the flow of the game actually slow down instead of just getting jerky. It's also why PAL consoles are notorious for running games slower than NTSC consoles.

[GaijinPunch]

This would be different than for most games then, as today's modern games generally spend more time on levels, scripts, and graphics than on the engine itself.

Yeah well... most of today's modern games suck.

However I would point out that scoring systems could be argued to fall more on the design side of things. It's probably more of an issue of definition.

Yeah, semantics. Sometimes the designers have their hands in the the level layout as well.

I don't disagree that many companies do utilize 3rd party engines to save time.

I've been reading a lot of interviews w/ some old school developers. Apparently outsourcing parts of games is nothing really new. Data East claims to have done it quite a bit, as well as Taito. My guess is they all did it then, just like now. Now it's just larger scale, as are the games.

[dcharlie]

people forget things like TUME etc etc

though not outsourced, the idea of using external engines/systems/etc is nothing new.

for the new gen, you don't need to reinvent the wheel each time

i am personally laughing at SE for making the white engine which a) looks 10 times worse than a number of off the shelve packages b) has taken years and cash to create and c) was abandoned as an ongoing engine before the first game even came out on it.

fail fail fail.

[GaijinPunch]

for the new gen, you don't need to reinvent the wheel each time

This can be more or less accredited to the evolution of programming in general. At one point, maybe with object oriented (someone correct me if I'm wrong) the whole name of the game was reusability. Maybe it was before, but the arcade trend was to put out a handful of games on new hardware, then move on. So there was some wheel re-invention going on.

Now, just like the code, the developers seem to be a bit more modularized. Even 5pb freakin' outsourced a game they licensed (whoops!).