play! progress report (01/06/2025)

100+ hours into a single game testing was painful, but what about almost 300 hours? That was the case this month, target being King's Field IV. For those that don't know, the King's Field series exist since the PS1, with the 4th game being only on the PS2 and the last game on the series well. Being the "father of Demon/Dark souls" in first person, even moving around the map is as dangerous as it could be (you can die 3 seconds into the game after just some steps, we're only missing a "Welcome to D̶a̶r̶k̶ ̶S̶o̶u̶l̶s̶ King's Field" message). While the game itself isn't that long even if you're doing the best ending, we've sadly found a gamebreaking issue 80 hours into testing it. Let's check the new playables for the month first then we can go into more details:

New verified playable games [05/2025]:

• King's Field IV

• Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity

• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters

King's Field IV: after many hours and many deaths, I've found a door tha leaded me into the void, the map wasn't loading and trying to walk into it would just make me fall off the game world and die. There's some specific triggers in this game that would tell when a specific part of the map should be loaded or unloaded, and for some reason this trigger doesn't work when you're exploring between two far points in a vertical axis, which means that going all the way down into a room and them back up at the central tower would lead to a gamebreaking black void, with no way to avoid it. With this trigger fixed I was still afraid of having the issue somewhere else, so I had to play the game for many more hours than normal just to be sure we could walk the entire world without falling into a black hole randomly. I couldn't find anywhere that would break the game with the fix applied, so there was only one more thing to improve: performance. In some parts the game would run below fullspeed, and in this game this is horrible (the game itself is really slow, so you can imagine the pain of having it running even at 5 frames below 60 fps). With some changes to the rendering code it's much harder to see it drop, so you'll only notice some issue while running the game with a very old hardware (and this is coming from me, the guy using a 13 years old PC...).

Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity: yet another time eater and yet another victim of a gamebreaking issue. I was able to play the game until a specific part and it would "randomly" hang after a mission in a black screen. Some detective work done and it turns out this game goes crazy trying to load the same module over and over again, every single time there's a new scene to load. So let's take a regular scenario that makes it die: avg number of times trying to load the same module is 5, each time you enter a map it's 5, each cutscene before and after the map adds another 5, some maps have multiple cutscenes, up to 3, so that adds another 15, and going out of the battle into the world map add another 5... so we have the same module being loaded 35 times! And that adds up for every single time you enter a map/battle, making the game give up at some point. Changes made to detect the already loaded modules, we can now play the entire thing without further problems + we got a brand new idle detection patch that makes the game run with a very good performance all the time.

PS: while this game was long enough without the issue, I had to wait until the fix was implemented, so I've used this time to grind at the Catacombs dungeon, which made the total time playing this game nearly 120 hours as well... who needs to sleep anyway? ;-;

Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: this game was running fine so I had to put those last hours of my month into it to finally remove it from my TODO list. Everything works as it should and I could rush the game because the performance is so good I could run at 300%+ speed.

The last bonus for the month is the attempt to fix the game Eternal Poison. At this point there's a combo of changes that will at least allow the game to run, but one of these changes could explode in our faces due to timing changes that could break other games as well, so this will only be merged into the main code after many hours of testing. Is this game worth all this pain? I don't have a clue, but we'll figure it out together next month, see you all when we get there and thanks for the support <3

Useful Links

play! site: https://purei.org/

play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List

play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-

play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002