[Feature Requests]

[RaikouSRL]

Posting up some features i'd like to see happen in this Recomp, i know functionality is the priority but once the release gets to a stable playable point these would be awesome to see added

• Ability to skip in-game FMVs, Tomba Special Edition's very few benefits include the ability to skip any FMV's, things like the pig clear cutscenes, tornado cutscene and 100 yr old man cutscene
• Upscaling, blowing up the window on my 1440p monitor looks pretty rough in its current state, Tomba Special Edition does look nice in this factor, getting it closer to that would be amazing
• On the fly Analog/Dpad switching, the last remaining benefit of Special Edition, they made using the Dpad and Analog stick seemlessly switch between analog and dpad mode, this allows for some faster movement using the analog in some areas aswell as an easier method to skip dialogue in Phoenix Mountain
• Widescreen, this one is quite a stretch but my god would it be amazing
• Above 60fps, as per above, quite a large stretch goal, but would be beyond incredible to play this game at a native 120fps
• Remember settings, everytime i boot up Tomba i have to go into settings and change text speed to auto and turn off Vibration, having the game remember the last settings used on boot would be a nice QoL

i think thats it for now, if i think of more ill edit and add

[mstan]

Following up here to acknowledge. All reasonable requests. I'd like to promise at turnaround timeline but it may take me some time. I want to focus on stability before diving into these types of QoL. Upscaling can probably come a little sooner rather than later, but the rest will probably want to wait until we're able to get through the base game without any freezes.

[mstan]

Went into a discovery spike on widescreen. Likely I'm going to pause on this because I'm struggling considerably on background culling. The ocean and clouds struggle. That mountain also has difficulties staying rendered in in the expanded area. I wanted to also focus on the HUD being not stretched but properly positioned as part of success criteria. It's WIP but likely not something I'll release soon.

[RaikouSRL]

that is incredible progress already tho! no rush on that tbh, functionality is abolutely more important, i did edit this list with a couple more things like 120FPS and remembering in game options on boot, i cant overstate how cool i think this is :)

[mstan]

Doing a bit more investigation here. I was able to ship a new release that has an FMV skip option in the launcher UI. It causes them to basically instantly "auto-skip" as if you button pressed.

Increasing the FPS doesn't look approachable. Maybe interpolation. I think too much is coupled to the game logic. May not be worth ROI. Not suggesting I'll never give it a try, but for now I'm going to deprioritize I think.

I also surprsiingly had a lot of difficulty pinning down the options -- where they persist in memory. So that one is stalled at present too.

I haven't actually played the Special edition. Can you explain what on the fly switching is? Do you mean that both work simultaneously? Or is that a way to toggle it to use one or the other?

[RaikouSRL]

Very awesome to have auto fmv skips!

The analog/dpad switch happened whenever you tried to use either or, use the dpad and it switches to dpad mode, use the analog stick and it'll switch to analog mode, making the use of either modes seemless rather than requiring the press of the analog button on a dualshock controller

All good on the others, I fully expected these to take time, the fact we've got as much as we do thus far is already amazing

[mstan]

I'll take a look at the graceful analog/dpad. Glad you understand on the rest. And agreed! Been having strokes of good luck in dev for the most part. Hoping to keep that momentum high!

[mstan]

https://github.com/mstan/TombaRecomp/releases/tag/v0.2.0-alpha

Knocked a number of these out. I was able to approach them from a different angle and had better luck.

• Options now persist between loads
• Widescreen as an option (experimental; issues with background tiles)
• Initial implementation of analog/d-pad (I added a deadzone option in settings too if you want refinement)

FMV skip was already in as well as upscaling.

I think Widescreen needs a bit of refinement, but the only one I didn't address was 120 FPS. But I think that one may not be something I'll pursue taking a second look. Maybe an external application that inserts frames via some type of interpolation would be best, but I think the lift here would be too substantial for the ROI.

[RaikouSRL]

Widescreen - Already amazing, hoping further developments clean up the pop-in but otherwise thats a huge step forward!
Options - great stuff! works perfectly

Analog/Dpad - not quite what i was going for, the dpad/analog switch is just using them both for dpad mode, analog mode in Tomba has different "physics", tomba will instantly accelerate with analog mode, Special Edition will switch Analog mode on as soon as you start using the analog stick and switch it off when you press anything on the dpad

FMV Skip - also great so far, not sure if its possible to make the game think the FMV files are blank so it instantly skips the ones that cant be skipped normally without using the turbo function? i was testing this with modifying the iso at some point and it worked somewhat

120FPS - no big deal on that one, i think more than anything if it ran 120fps it would be just that little bit more responsive, interpolation probably wont have that affect and if anything make it less responsive, ill take 60FPS over 120fps but unresponsive

another thing i considered, unsure of the work required for it,
Vulkan renderer - the opengl option seems to add a sizeable amount of input lag over software, i'm not sure if Vulkan would make a different and not sure if it would be the better option? just something to consider

once again, thank you for the incredible work :)

[mstan]

Heya!

RE: Analog/D-Pad. I think I understand now. Basically dualshock mode is enabled whenever the joystick is touched and disabled whenever d-pad is touched so the sensitives don't get comingled with d-pad. I'll look into adding a hybrid mode to the launcher in addition to pure dualshock/non-dualshock that behaves this way.

RE: FMV-Skip -- I actually tried that as a first experiment. That's a fair call on the other FMVs though that don't have the skip mechanism. It may also be a more universal method for other ones too. I know way back in the day that some sites would actually legitimately remove the FMVs entirely to make the game sizes smaller for download and basically it behaved how you're describing. I'll look into it!

RE: Vulkan -- I'll look into a vulkan implementation; though it may be possible to reduce lag on openGL too. I'll take a look into both to see what we can do. Even if Vulkan isn't the answer here, this is all benefit to psxrecomp and could work for future games!

[RaikouSRL]

New release is music to my ears, stuck at work so i cant mess with it yet, but ill definitely play with it once i get home

very exciting stuff tho! i think only things remaining on my wishlist would be

• Proper FMV Skip
• The fastest loads possible without turbo

Additionally, if such a thing is possible, an in-game timer for speedrunning would be awesome, obviously we have the final in-game time after credits but it doesn't include seconds and we're unsure what parts of the game the timer even tracks, would be cool to have toggable option in the launcher for speedrun timer to overlay that same timer with seconds included somewhere in the hud

[mstan]

I did a bit more digging. I was finally able to land the fuller FMV skip! It now skips all non-skippable FMVs, including the Whoopee Camp intro, making startup very fast now.

As for turbo, I experimented a fair amount and wasn't able to land it how I wanted. Attempts to suppress the loading screen just caused it to more or less become unstable and it still wasn't much faster.

I set Turbo as a toggleable option in the settings menu, default to off. I suspect for a while that's as good as we're going to get it without proper disassembly annotation from the game. I'm aware that there's a decompilation project ongoing over at https://github.com/hansbonini/psx_tomba . As that project matures, we could reap its benefit here both for load screen bypassing as well as some of the widescreen issues we're seeing as well.