@carlos82 I did look this up and it actually looks pretty terrible at 60fps, so I think this is kind of questionable lol
Lots of hitching and unsynced animations mixed in with the stuff that gets smoothed out, and every video I’ve seen of it specifically calls out that it’s a hacked ISO to break the framerate cap. (Compare to something like Shadow Man, as a random example, that gets a solid framerate just from overclocking.)
@ShogunRok Well if it’s inconsistent that’s one thing, but there actually can be a TON of technical reasons why it can’t hit 60fps, and the other Square PS1 remasters point to the same underlying issue.
The PS1 hardware predates having the compute power to do really good bone-based character animation, so I’d suspect that in order to make it work when it came out, they just baked the animation frames into static states so that the PSX CPU didn’t have to handle those kind of calculations.
Modern consoles and CPUs can do animation with bone systems no problem, it’s been basically a solved problem since the PS2 generation, but it’s entirely likely that the PSX-era games’ animation data is missing most of the information that you’d need to make that kind of thing work.
Without bone data in the animations, then you have the giant technical hurdle of “how exactly do you fill in the between frames” when they were never made to do that in the first place. Do you just go straight from point XYZ to point ABC in between? No, that would just warp and skew the models and make them animate like an old Photoshop morph.
I think it’s still a valid criticism that they didn’t smooth out the animations, but we’re talking about a game published on a console that had no processing power to fill in the gaps and not enough memory storage for animation data that would never be used in game, and then porting the end result of that process to a new console as-is.
It’s a bigger problem than you’d think it is to solve at first, and honestly if the problem is what I think it is, this isn’t technically a performance issue at all, they’re just using the animation data that exists and presenting it to the player in a higher resolution than the PS1 did. That would also mean there’s zero chance of it getting patched, because there’s nothing to patch, it’s working as intended.
Kind of a bare bones approach to things I guess, but the work scope of doing it differently than that would be absolutely enormous compared to what they did to get it to work now.
@ShogunRok I do have a question actually: How is the framerate/performance compared to the game on PS1?
It seemed that this was going to be remastered in the same way that FF7/8/9 were remastered on PS4, and they all had hard-coded framerates that matched the PS1’s rate of performance. I don’t recall S-E ever advertising that Chrono Cross would be any different.
Comments 3
Re: Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition (PS4) - A Shockingly Poor Remaster of a Divisive PS1 RPG
@carlos82 I did look this up and it actually looks pretty terrible at 60fps, so I think this is kind of questionable lol
Lots of hitching and unsynced animations mixed in with the stuff that gets smoothed out, and every video I’ve seen of it specifically calls out that it’s a hacked ISO to break the framerate cap. (Compare to something like Shadow Man, as a random example, that gets a solid framerate just from overclocking.)
Re: Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition (PS4) - A Shockingly Poor Remaster of a Divisive PS1 RPG
@ShogunRok Well if it’s inconsistent that’s one thing, but there actually can be a TON of technical reasons why it can’t hit 60fps, and the other Square PS1 remasters point to the same underlying issue.
The PS1 hardware predates having the compute power to do really good bone-based character animation, so I’d suspect that in order to make it work when it came out, they just baked the animation frames into static states so that the PSX CPU didn’t have to handle those kind of calculations.
Modern consoles and CPUs can do animation with bone systems no problem, it’s been basically a solved problem since the PS2 generation, but it’s entirely likely that the PSX-era games’ animation data is missing most of the information that you’d need to make that kind of thing work.
Without bone data in the animations, then you have the giant technical hurdle of “how exactly do you fill in the between frames” when they were never made to do that in the first place. Do you just go straight from point XYZ to point ABC in between? No, that would just warp and skew the models and make them animate like an old Photoshop morph.
I think it’s still a valid criticism that they didn’t smooth out the animations, but we’re talking about a game published on a console that had no processing power to fill in the gaps and not enough memory storage for animation data that would never be used in game, and then porting the end result of that process to a new console as-is.
It’s a bigger problem than you’d think it is to solve at first, and honestly if the problem is what I think it is, this isn’t technically a performance issue at all, they’re just using the animation data that exists and presenting it to the player in a higher resolution than the PS1 did. That would also mean there’s zero chance of it getting patched, because there’s nothing to patch, it’s working as intended.
Kind of a bare bones approach to things I guess, but the work scope of doing it differently than that would be absolutely enormous compared to what they did to get it to work now.
Re: Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition (PS4) - A Shockingly Poor Remaster of a Divisive PS1 RPG
@ShogunRok I do have a question actually: How is the framerate/performance compared to the game on PS1?
It seemed that this was going to be remastered in the same way that FF7/8/9 were remastered on PS4, and they all had hard-coded framerates that matched the PS1’s rate of performance. I don’t recall S-E ever advertising that Chrono Cross would be any different.