3SOE Title Update, Update #2
3SOE Title Update, Update #2
We’ve been getting some requests via email and twitter for an update on the 3SOE Patch, so here’s a summary of where we are at.
· We have decided to wait on submitting the 3SOE TU to Microsoft and Sony until after Darkstalkers has shipped. As some of you may know 3SOE, MvCO, and Darkstalkers share a common codebase that handles stuff like GGPO, profile information, etc. Several of the fixes in this forthcoming 3SOE TU came from us finding and fixing bugs when we shipped MvCO. Given that, we’ve decided the best thing for the TU (since this is almost certainly the last one for 3SOE) is to close out Darkstalkers, see if we have fixed anything relevant to 3SOE during that process, and pull those fixes into the TU. This will give us every possible chance to make sure 3SOE is in as good of shape as possible.
· We have decided we are not going to do anything about the game speed issue. The reasons why are complicated, but the summary is the Arcade version of 3S doesn’t really run at a reliable frame rate. It can fluctuate on a stage-to-stage and character-to-character basis that we’re not confident we can properly reproduce, given that this is a port and not straight CPS3 Emulation. On top of that, if we did decide to hardcode some of these speed differences versus the Arcade cabinet, it would be extremely difficult to test as we’d need to look at every combination of character on every stage and make sure we didn’t make things worse for some of those combinations in our quest to alleviate the speed issue. Given that we’re measuring differences in fractions of frames in some instances, we’re not confident we can catch every little timing variation between the two games. Because of this we’ve elected to leave it as it’s been since launch.
· We’ve been getting a steady stream of bugs from players since the last update, and fixed the ones we could. Most of these are semi-rare issues like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLK6cd3uB38&feature=relmfu which was fairly easy to reproduce once we saw the video (thanks, 01lp0w3r) so if you’ve got bugs like this, and can throw the reproduction steps up on YouTube that would be amazingly helpful. If you can find something that will affect a lot of players and we have the time we will try to fix it.
· We have stopped looking into the “Dropped EX” issue, as we are unable to reproduce it here, and it appears many people on the forums can’t figure out how to get it to reliably happen (or happen at all). If anyone can identify reliable reproduction steps we will take another look at it.
There’s a bunch more information to share about what we did fix, what we chose to leave alone, and why, but I’m going to save the exhaustive patch notes for when we get out of submission with the patch as some of this stuff can change as we discover/fix new issues.