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Unleashed Recompiled : Sonic Unleashed Unofficial PC port released and Xbox 360 Recompiler

kevboard

Member
I'm really surprised the deck can't do steady 60 fps, I thought it did. Are you sure you don't have resolution scaling increased or something? The game is so lite on GPU usage. The only rare times I could sometimes see some drop, but it's extremely rare, only got it like 2 or 3 times in about 8 hours of gameplay, was when there was some smoke, like when stopping in specific places, and only for a very brief moment.

I have the lowest settings, no AA, 100% scale, lowest shadows, no motion blur.

it doesn't hold a perfect 60 when too much is happening.
could be more of a CPU issue, not a GPU one, not sure.
but given that the original game was designed around a 3 core CPU that had really weak multi threading, I could see this being the bottleneck here. (not even sure if 360 games actually made use of the multi threading...)

About the Werehog, the combat isn't Bayonetta, but I think it's not awful awful... it's just pointless, not fun, but it doesn't control badly. The main problem is that the Werehog levels are way too long, they should be at least 50% shorter. And the checkpoints for the werehog are badly made, for example you can have to go through 2 or 3 different wave / arenas of enemies, and then you try to do some platforming to get a moon a bit further, and you fall, you die, and you have to re do all the combats. This can be pretty tedious, it happened to me earlier today.

One big recommendation however is to turn off the battle music in the options (a new feature from this port). It really doesn't feel as awful without it. I know it's just the music and this might sound exagerated, but it makes a big difference. Because the combat feel more seamless with the explore, when you don't have the music switching to battle theme every time there's one enemy on screen. It's still tedious, but not as irritating.

I turned the battle music off yeah.

the combat feels stiff and lacks any dynamism. it's really just a chore every time 😑
blocking feels clunky, dodging feels stiff and clunky... 😮‍💨 just nah...
 
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SomeGit

Member
I'm really surprised the deck can't do steady 60 fps, I thought it did. Are you sure you don't have resolution scaling increased or something? The game is so lite on GPU usage. The only rare times I could sometimes see some drop, but it's extremely rare, only got it like 2 or 3 times in about 8 hours of gameplay, was when there was some smoke, like when stopping in specific places, and only for a very brief moment.

About the Werehog, the combat isn't Bayonetta, but I think it's not awful awful... it's just pointless, not fun, but it doesn't control badly. The main problem is that the Werehog levels are way too long, they should be at least 50% shorter. And the checkpoints for the werehog are badly made, for example you can have to go through 2 or 3 different wave / arenas of enemies, and then you try to do some platforming to get a moon a bit further, and you fall, you die, and you have to re do all the combats. This can be pretty tedious, it happened to me earlier today.

One big recommendation however is to turn off the battle music in the options (a new feature from this port). It really doesn't feel as awful without it. I know it's just the music and this might sound exagerated, but it makes a big difference. Because the combat feel more seamless with the exploration that way, when you don't have the music switching to battle theme every time there's one enemy on screen. It's still tedious, but not as irritating.
The CPU and GPU usage doesn't seem to spike up when it drops, it's probably either bandwidth related since it usually when there is a lot of particles or the game just isn't very multithread friendly and it chokes on the ST performance for draw calls or physics.
 
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kevboard

Member
The CPU and GPU usage doesn't seem to spike up when it drops, it's probably either bandwidth related since it usually when there is a lot of particles or the game just isn't very multithread friendly and it chokes on the ST performance for draw calls or physics.

yeah, I also think the CPU could be an issue.
the 360 had 3 cores, 6 threads. I bet that CPU also couldn't be fully used by games as the 360 did have a pretty advanced and feature rich OS that could handle background music, background downloads and party chat across all games and while switching titles etc.

something the PS3 for example never really could catch up to due to hardware constraints.

the IBM CPU cores were also not that great at multi threading, so who knows if the CPU was even used as a 6 thread CPU or simply as a straight 3 core CPU with SMT disabled.

so it's possible that the game only really uses 2 threads, maybe 3.
 
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Spiral1407

Member
but given that the original game was designed around a 3 core CPU that had really weak multi threading, I could see this being the bottleneck here. (not even sure if 360 games actually made use of the multi threading...)
On the contrary. Strong multithreading performance was the reason the 360 and especially the PS3 managed to last so long in comparison to prior consoles.

yeah, I also think the CPU could be an issue.
the 360 had 3 cores, 6 threads. I bet that CPU also couldn't be fully used by games as the 360 did have a pretty advanced and feature rich OS that could handle background music, background downloads and party chat across all games and while switching titles etc.

something the PS3 for example never really could catch up to due to hardware constraints.

the IBM CPU cores were also not that great at multi threading, so who knows if the CPU was even used as a 6 thread CPU or simply as a straight 3 core CPU with SMT disabled.

so it's possible that the game only really uses 2 threads, maybe 3.
Apparently a small portion of 2nd and 3rd core were reserved for the OS, which is much better than the PS3s solution of reserving an ENTIRE SPE. The 360s OS is actually quite efficient for what it's capable of, reserving only 32MB and having more advanced features than PS3, which used a lot more memory.

And here's an article from Capcom explaining the kind of performance leap you could expect from multithreading. The jump from a relatively weak 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 to a capable (at the time) Pentium 4 EE 840 is pretty big.
 
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kevboard

Member
Nobody thought they were gonna remaster Colours until it happened.

I think Colours was always very likely to be remastered, as it has always been seen as one of, if not THE best boost era Sonic game.


____________________


So, I played Unleashed on the Steam Deck for a few hours now, and I now remember why the game was rightfully panned for its Werehog stages.

The obvious issue is the sub par combat system. it feels stiff, unresponsive, shallow and mismatched with the type of fight scnearios you get thrown into.

But then you notice that the werehog stages also get EVERY SINGLE fundamental platfomer element wrong.

the base movement controls are imprecise. Sonic has a weird turn radius. he has an annoying quirk where if you let go of the stick and he has already come to a full standstill, you still have to wait a second before pressing jump if you want to jump straight upwards, otherwise he will jump like 1-2 meters forward... like wtf.

There are no dot shadows/target shadows... I REPEAT... NO TARGET SHADOWS.

(target example in Mario 64)
mario64.jpg


not below Items/Rings, not below Enemies, and not below Sonic himself.
that is basically a cardinal sin of platformers. it makes it almost impossible to accurately judge distance relative to your character while you or your enemies are in the air.


then on top of these issues we need to add another one, which is absolutely awful automated camera pans and locked camera perspectives that AT NO POINT ever give you an advantage over what your default camera would give you, and always do in fact the exact opposite.
probably the worst locked cameras of any game I can think of right now, simply due to how much they destroy your depth perception and genral overview of your surroundings.


there are actually still people that think this game was wrongfully rated badly, or is wrongfully seen as that Sonic game that's 50% good and 50% awful...
but nah, these less than favourable opinions are absolutely valid
 
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Larxia

Member
I think Colours was always very likely to be remastered, as it has always been seen as one of, if not THE best boost era Sonic game.


____________________


So, I played Unleashed on the Steam Deck for a few hours now, and I now remember why the game was rightfully panned for its Werehog stages.

The obvious issue is the sub par combat system. it feels stiff, unresponsive, shallow and mismatched with the type of fight scnearios you get thrown into.

But then you notice that the werehog stages also get EVERY SINGLE fundamental platfomer elements wrong.

the base movement controls are imprecise. Sonic has a weird turn radius. he has an annoying quirk where if you let go of the stick and he has already come to a full standstill, you still have to wait a second before pressing jump if you want to jump straight upwards, otherwise he will jump like 1-2 meters forward... like wtf.

There are no dot shadows/target shadows... I REPEAT... NO TARGET SHADOWS.

(target example in Mario 64)
mario64.jpg


not below Items/Rings, not below Enemies, and not below Sonic himself.
that is basically a cardinal sin of platformers. it makes it almost impossible to accurately judge distance relative to your character while you or your enemies are in the air.


then on top of these issues we need to add another one, which is absolutely awful automated camera pans and locked camera perspectives that AT NO POINT ever give you an advantage over what your default camera would give you, and always do in fact the exact opposite.
probably the worst locked cameras of any game I can think of right now, simply due to how much they destroy your depth perception and genral overview of your surroundings.


there are actually still people that think this game was wrongfully rated badly, or is wrongfully seen as that Sonic game that's 50% good and 50% awful...
but nah, these less than favourable opinions are absolutely valid
I don't find the werehog controls in combat THAT bad, I think it controls decently, the problem is that these levels are far too long compared to the sonic levels. If there was much less combats and if the levels were at least half shorter, it would have been tolerable... but in the current state, they are pretty tedious, for sure. The game would have been better without the werehog levels.

The sonic parts however, they are really good. The levels are great and I even like the feeling of adventure, going to different countries, with the different hub levels etc... The dlc missions are pretty challening too, but fun (so far).
If we only talk about the sonic content and not werehog, I think this might actually be my favorite 3D sonic maybe, because adventure 1 and 2 didn't age that well.
 

OGM_Madness

Member
Is there any news on other decompilation projects going on? One game I’d like to see ported to PC is that Naruto exclusive game for Xbox 360 developed by Ubisoft. Naruto: Rise of a Ninja

Seems like the perfect game for this kind of project.
 

DanielG165

Member
Unleashed at 4K/60 without needing a NASA computer to achieve such a goal is incredible. Xenia made this game so unbelievably heavy, so being able to sit here and play through this without dropping a single frame is nice. This is honestly the first time I’ve played Unleashed proper at 60 fps, as I’d never gotten around to installing it on my Series X, and the Unleashed Project isn’t the full fat experience, despite being an incredibly good representation of the day stages.

Stuff like this is why I’m a PC-gamer first lol.
 
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