Posted: 8/19/2013 4:49 AM
Post subject: Strange/inconsistent frame advance behavior
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Chef_Stef
Editor, Active player (476)
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
NES TAS of 2019 Lucky TAS of 2019 Funny TAS of 2013
I'm running into a problem where Dolphin's frame advance is acting inconsistently. Dolphin's frame advance seems to be capable of running in two different modes: Advancing one render frame at a time (from what I've read elsewhere, this is equivalent to an input frame) and advancing "half" a render frame at a time (i.e. you have to advance twice to get to the next render frame). I haven't found any setting to control this, and it seems to switch from one mode to the other for no reason. I've been trying to do a testrun for Super Monkey Ball 2 and this is really getting in the way (since "twice-per-render-frame" mode is pointless and requires a lot of extra button-pushing). Some examples where I've run into this: 1. I recorded a movie that navigates through the game menus. Once the movie finishes, Dolphin frame-advances once per render frame. I then hex-edited 10 input frames from the movie file. After playing back the modified movie, Dolphin frame-advances twice per render frame. 2. I completed a testrun TAS of the first level with Dolphin in once-per-render-frame mode the whole time. Once the next level loads, however, Dolphin switches to twice-per-render-frame. Does anyone know why this is happening? Does this have anything to do with the game itself? If it matters, I'm using a development build from about 3 weeks ago. I also tried the latest build and the behavior is the same. I can provide the example movie files if it helps.
Posted: 8/19/2013 6:13 AM
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RachelB
She/Her
Player (129)
Joined: 12/3/2011
Posts: 1579
Are you using real xfb emulation?
Posted: 8/20/2013 1:06 AM
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Chef_Stef
Editor, Active player (476)
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
NES TAS of 2019 Lucky TAS of 2019 Funny TAS of 2013
Looks like that was the problem. I had left it in the default setting of Enabled because of the scary warning about glitches if it was turned off. Disabling it solved the issues I was having - frame advance is now locked to input frames, which is perfect. Thanks for helping out - any idea why this setting affects frame advance like this?
Posted: 8/20/2013 2:44 PM
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RachelB
She/Her
Player (129)
Joined: 12/3/2011
Posts: 1579
XFB emulation is disabled be default, and should generally be left disabled.
any idea why this setting affects frame advance like this?
It changes how frames are rendered.