Dogway said:
It's very sad you claim respect and consideration, when an user comes here to give an opinion, and all you do is to quote that user's post to make fun in an external place:
"guy is dumber than average around there, and that's not easy"
Did I make that comment? No, somebody else on there did. Sorry, but this is what you guys look like to people inside coding circles - I don't derive any sort of sardonic pleasure from it - in fact, me posting that there was meant as a nice gesture on my part to deliver the message to you guys to PLEASE STOP with these wild crazy theories on what should probably be included because it's really making zero sense anymore and most developers just tell me plain off the cuff - 'dude, don't even bother responding - talking to ignorant end-users is a pain'. Sorry, but I don't treat people like crap and I'm a very down-to-earth guy - I can assure you that a lot of people are not though and consider every end-user an instant idiot.
So sorry, but this is an unpleasant but necessary outlook into what the general dev community actually says 'off-record'. It's not nice or pleasant to see, but it's reality nonetheless. If you don't like what they say in that IRC log - buck the trend and don't act like it.
Now look at this here - this nice detailed response here is me giving you my most valuable resource - my time - to explain something to you and to take away any pent-up frustration and anger for having read that comment. Now, would a guy that treats people like shit be doing this? Because time is my most valuable resource after all - time is money and me typing all this stuff right now could have been reappropriated into things I should otherwise be doing.
So make up any judgement you want regarding my character based on that. Personally, I would trust the guy who delivers it to you plain rather than talking behind your back, but that's just me.
One thing nobody can holds against me is - I'm a straight shooter - I try not to talk behind your back and even when I do, I let you know what is said and in public. Having been an end-user myself it wouldn't be right for me to treat people like crap just because they are not in a little coding circle.
I also try not to ignore what users say and always try to respond to it and explain myself - and look where that shit gets me most of the time.
Dogway said:
Is this the way you want to be treated around here? I don't know about 360 or PS3, but the Wii community is and has always been very friendly.
I'd say it's pretty much the same (and seeing as I'm the only guy targeting Wii/PS3/360/Xbox 1/Gamecube for development simultaneously, I might be inclined to know) - you've got the guy earlier coming in with his turf war nonsense (because he worked with such and such author on a 'skinning job'), trying (in vain I might add) to pit me against certain developers (happens all the time in other scenes as well - I seem to remember Brittneypairs trying to have a good go at it in the Xbox 1 scene) and then there is the usual GUI adoration and other stuff going on. Oh, and a lot of incredulity that people's ZIP files are extracted of course - because that stuff is of course way more important than the actual idea/concept behind RetroArch and the fact it has all these cores running at very respectable speeds.
One thing you definitely don't have in the PS3/360 scenes at least is know-it-all people trying to argue/debate authors who can be reasonably assured they have a firm handle on what they're talking about - I don't mind arguing with people except when it becomes stupid and as long as both parties are suitably clued up on matters. It simply gets frustrating afterwards.
I must stress this -you have no idea how much 'tolerance' I have towards users - I consider end-users on an equal playing field with devs - however, when it delves into stupidity (like happened earlier in this thread), the reason I react in the way I do is that I'm more or less disappointed and start playing with the idea that - hey - maybe those other devs are right - 'dont talk to them'. I don't want to do that, but then again, trying to argue with people on here on stuff they haven't even tested and are just making up is just frustrating.
I see people here telling me up front - 'oh ANY emulator is better at this point' - then finding out they haven't even tested RetroArch yet - but they have no problem making the comment off the cuff. Now you tell me how I should feel about stuff like that. It's like people fire off their torpedoes of opinion without actually having any knowledge about what they're talking about.
Dogway said:
In the other hand if you use frameskipping, you don't get faster fps (I never said that), what you get is to DISPLAY most number of frames the CPU is capable to render without affecting the aforementioned sucession of events, or timing, or whatever you wanna call it, even if that means skipping frames once in a while.
My question (and you already know I'm not a programmer) is; having an already faster emulator (VBANext), what harm can enabling frameskipping do to frame rendering if as you say it's mostly running at top intended speed already? Most likely you will only get frameskipping on those few clogged places people are reporting or still not aware.
Anytime frameskipping is visible to me - I instantly turn it off. There's simply no point to jerky screen updating - it's unplayable - which the actual FPS without frameskipping would tell you in and of itself.
And it's not 'at top intended speeds' - most of the time it barely breaks even and it's 'just' running a few frames per second above 60fps.
If something doesn't run at fullspeed, it's not worth playing with anyway and either more speed hacks need to be arrived at or the emulator is simply too slow on the host platform, or (most likely) the host system is simply too slow to do it justice. That being said, a lot of these emulators are very naively and poorly coded from a performance perspective so there is a lot of room for improvement.
I'm not going to just throw in frameskipping in there and 'call it a day' - I avoid it like the plague, and the timing code needed to implement it will slow things down in and of itself (and mess up the timing itself). Bottom line - I'm not touching it - I wouldn't even feed it to the dogs. I've looked at the frameskipping code in SNES9x GX and no way in hell would I ever submit that in SNES9x Next.
Bottom line - the best frameskipping is no frameskipping at all - it's a last resort for when you want to give people the 'illusion' (I don't see how that illusion isn't shattered by the vomit-inducing jerky screen update, but whatever) that it's still running decently when really, it doesn't.
Bottom line 2 - further speed improvements done to VBA Next will have to come in the form of speedhacks, improvements to the rendering code - ie. hard work and time being put in. Like I indicated earlier though, a port of gpSP to libretro will also be done.
THAT BEING SAID - other emulator authors can implement frameskipping as they wish in their respective libretro cores - notaz for instance is doing it with PCSX-reARMed libretro. I don't condemn it - i just don't think it would be suitable for SNES9x and/or VBA - frameskipping in 3D games I find to be far more tolerable than 2D ones.
I mean, have you ever thought why frameskipping was ever conceived? It's a mean to play, although what you only aim at is to disPLAY.
It was made so that developers could 'fast forward' through games which probably helped out a lot while debugging and saved heaps of time (note - this is also the same reason every emulator has savestates in it by de-facto standard - it's meant for the convenience of the developer first and for your convenience second). The fact that it also made games 'playable' (if you can call it that) on systems that could not reach fullspeed was an additional side effect that turned out to be a bonus.
MAME/MESSdev operates along a similar philosophy but taken to even more dizzying extremes - if you think I'm radical, you should see these guys someday
.