[Scummvm-devel] Kyrandia pathfinding issues

Pierre-Yves Gérardy pygy79 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 12:37:49 CEST 2009


Regarding DOSBox, I think that Joannes meant to use the PC version which
allows to tweak the emulated processor speed, to see if a slowdown
also occurred in the original engine. But it's irrelevant, since the bug was
recently introduced.
PY
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On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 12:06, Neil Millstone <neil at millstone.demon.co.uk>wrote:

>
>
> Johannes wrote:
> > Neil Millstone wrote:
> >
> >> > I've been testing ahead of the release later this month, and have
> found
> >> > issues with Kyrandia 1's pathfinding.  It seems that it can take more
> >> > than 10 seconds to find a path from one side of the screen to the
> other
> >> > on the DS.  This makes the game almost unplayable.
> >> >
> >>
> >
> > KYRA's pathfinder is rather simple & stupid. I remember it might search
> > through the whole scene borders when calculating a patch. It does so in
> > both directions (counter clock wise and clock wise) and if no
> > possibility is found it tries to find the nearest accessible point. All
> > in all that's *some* positions processed, but 10 seconds sound too much.
> > Just for your information, a scene can contain something like 80*60
> > positions at maximum, but it shouldn't really try all of them. Did you
> > try how fast it is in DOSBox? Since our implementation should be
> > identical to the original such a delay should be noticeable in the
> > original DOS version too.
> >
> I'm not sure what you mean. I can't run Dosbox on the DS, there's not
> enough RAM or CPU on the DS to run Dosbox.
>
> Also, this code ran fine in previous versions, so I'm not sure why it would
> be so much slower now.
>
>
>
>
> > Of course one might think of just implementing a new pathfinder for
> > KYRA. I myself don't have the time for that before 0.13.1 and I would
> > say it would be too risky to adopt a new one for a minor-release anyway.
> > I might look into a new pathfinder after release though.
> >
> I agree, a change like that at this point would be too risky.
> >
> >> > One particular bad case is found on the screen 'Below Brandon's Home'
> >> > right near the game's starting point.
> >> >
> >> > To reproduce this issue:
> >> > 1) Start a new game.
> >> > 2) Exit the room
> >> > 3) Skip the cutscene
> >> > 4) Click the bottom of the screen to travel down on the root
> >> > 5) You should be in 'Below Brandon's Home'.  On the left side of the
> >> > screen there is a root that's slightly lighter than the rest.
> >> > Underneath this is a dark patch of grass.  Click this patch of grass
> and
> >> > the DS takes 10 seconds to calculate a route.
> >> >
> >> > I've tried this on the PC, and there's not even a hitch - but this is
> >> > probably to be expected since my PC is many times more powerful than a
> DS.
> >> >
> >>
> >
> > I can't reproduce that other here either, but I'm not sure which place
> > you are talking about exactly. It would be nice if you could supply a
> > screenshot with the spot marked. There's some debugging code in the KYRA
> > pathfinder which could be enabled to check which positions it searches
> > when trying to calculate that path.
> >
> > // Johannes
> I don't think you'd notice the slowdown if you're playing on a fast
> machine like a modern PC.  The DS is only a 67Mhz ARM9, so is incredibly
> slow compared to anything recent ;-)
>
> I can see some modifications to the pathfinder since the last major release
> but can't try reverting these because of other changes to the codebase
> making the old code incompatible with the current engine.
>
> I'm going to try adjusting compiler optimisation options to help it, as
> I've switched instruction sets since the last build (in order to get around
> the growth of the binary) so it's possible this would have made the
> performance worse. I can optimise just the one file concerned.
>
> If this doesn't work, is it possible to make the pathfinding less accurate
> on a #define without breaking the game?  It's also possible that the
> slowness is down to virtual method calls, or something, where just inlining
> those would fix it without making any changes to the actual algorithm.  It
> all depends on how much time I get to look at it before Saturday.
>
> Failing that, my only other option would be to release without Kyrandia
> support since it's not playable at the moment.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> - Neil
>
>
>
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