Post by wilderness in Depths of Europa - Demo comments

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I tried the demo, and overall I like it -- especially the atmosphere -- but I have a few concerns:

§ The controls seem slightly unresponsive, like there's a slight latency on input. Not enough to be a deal-breaker, but still noticeable.

§ The game seems to choke very easily, with just a few objects (enemies/bullets) on screen. Even without any enemies and just a few bullets there will be slowdown. You might want to limit the number of bullets allowed at once further to avoid this...

The above two might be related to GBstudio's performance I guess, and if so difficult to do much about...

§ When firing rapidly, maxing out bullets on screen, the firing sound will play even if no bullet is fired.

§ The way the player is turned around when damaged is very disorienting. Though I guess this is intentional, and you might get used to it.

There was even worse latency -- significant latency -- when playing the browser version, but it might be related to me being on Linux+Firefox. Still, it might be something to consider as it doesn't put the game in its best light.

Conan55 days ago

I am also on Linux and Firefox - it runs okay here, but that’s going to be heavily dependent on hardware and how your system is set up - I’m on Wayland and KDE6 with latest Nvidia drivers.

The game itself does have a handful of screens where you can see slowdown, but not generally just by firing with no enemies present. The Observation Deck uses some complex parallax that has a performance impact, and you can see some dropped frames there while all three enemies in the room are still active. The long corridor in Medical can have some because of the AI for the sniping enemies, and the first room of medical can slow down when you approach the door to Surgery if the enemies are still alive and active.

If you don’t mind, what emulator were you using outside the browser? And does the performance of the Demo seem worse than other Gameboy Color games in that emulator?

wilderness54 days ago

I tried it both in Mesen and VBA-M, and the slowdown with several objects on screen (even if just bullets) is present in both. With ~4 bullets on screen everything starts to slow down -- not any extreme slowdown, but noticeable. I noticed it in a bunch of different rooms, not just "special rooms".

Yeah, the browser latency might be system dependent---just thought I'd point it out as (for me) it ran way better in a local emulator and the browser performance was not indicative of the game's quality.

itch.io

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