11-26-2023, 03:41 AM
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11-26-2023, 04:04 AM
I'm coming up on twelve myself, which is ridiculous as I think of people like you as ancient veterans who were around aeons before I was.
11-26-2023, 04:06 AM
On the subject of ancient veterans, I guess we've finally dealt with NaturalViolence's complaints about IR not using as good a downscaling filter as SSAA did, and it just took the best part of a decade of him not bringing it up.
11-26-2023, 07:49 AM
Good read!
Any hint what's that big thing that's coming up next? )
Any hint what's that big thing that's coming up next? )
11-30-2023, 07:30 AM
I was both interested and surprised about the JIT Cache Page File growth on Windows.
I'm just going to assume you handled the edge cases like a user with 64GB of RAM who decided "I don't need a Page File" and Windows isn't able to allocate the memory necessary JIT cache. Because no one in their right mind would "ever" try such a thing, right?
I'm just going to assume you handled the edge cases like a user with 64GB of RAM who decided "I don't need a Page File" and Windows isn't able to allocate the memory necessary JIT cache. Because no one in their right mind would "ever" try such a thing, right?
12-03-2023, 02:52 PM
(11-30-2023, 07:30 AM)gamerk2 Wrote: [ -> ]I was both interested and surprised about the JIT Cache Page File growth on Windows.
I'm just going to assume you handled the edge cases like a user with 64GB of RAM who decided "I don't need a Page File" and Windows isn't able to allocate the memory necessary JIT cache. Because no one in their right mind would "ever" try such a thing, right?
Indeed, the use of the page file has been debated for a long LONG time and today I think it's more relevant than ever with concerns over wear on SSD endurance.
Hell I've even recommended disabling it to some, because I know browsers (cough Discord cough) like to pile up boatloads of memory usage, which inevitably ends up in a paging file at some point, yielding high SSD writes, which is a concern on low end hardware.
It also sounds like this would be a process that requires 4G decoding, which not everyone has enabled...? Maybe I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure this is the exact scenario where it is relevant.
12-04-2023, 11:40 PM
(11-26-2023, 04:06 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]On the subject of ancient veterans, I guess we've finally dealt with NaturalViolence's complaints about IR not using as good a downscaling filter as SSAA did, and it just took the best part of a decade of him not bringing it up.
I'm surprised you remember that. It really was a decade ago. I was active on this forum when I was in college, which was 2009-2013.
02-10-2024, 02:57 PM
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2024/02/10/...uary-2024/
The November and December 2023, Jan 2024 Dolphin Progress Report is live! Feel free to discuss this month's update below.
So I didn't get any bites for new blog contributors (though I did get a few nibbles), so in this Report I followed a different creative strategy and writing style. Specifically, one I thought would give the best efficiency in writing with the least loss in quality, the most bang for the buck so to speak. I think it turned out pretty well. It does have a reduction in quality, but I only really cut out difficult to produce elements. The result is basically 90% of the report at 10% of the cost for me to make. Literally this Report took a tenth the time to make as the last one, not kidding. This is WAY more manageable!
02-10-2024, 03:12 PM
(02-10-2024, 02:57 PM)MayImilae Wrote: [ -> ]The result is basically 90% of the report at 10% of the cost for me to make. Literally this Report took a tenth the time to make as the last one, not kidding. This is WAY more manageable!
Not sure how you did this but thank you very much for another great report!!
02-10-2024, 10:28 PM
(02-10-2024, 03:12 PM)iwubcode Wrote: [ -> ]Not sure how you did this but thank you very much for another great report!!
I'll dive a bit into how the sausage is made.
Spoiler:
Well, it's less about me being amazingly smart or good with the new process, and more a sign of just how terrible the old process was.
So like, in the previous creative process, I would try to maximize everything, the best demonstrations, go over any history involved, tell the full story, etc etc. The complete and best attempt at every section. For Reports from years ago, that was important since much of the emulator hadn't been explained yet, and I was learning a ton. But now, I know SO MUCH and can do so much that the maximum version of the story was overwhelming. It had already ballooned significantly even when JMC was able to regularly contribute. I keep track of my time with an app, so with the previous creative process and JMC also pitching in, Progress Reports as of 2021 or so took me personally around 50 hours. Honestly that was already not what I'd consider -a lot-, but it was not terrible. Now that JMC is too busy and can't contribute much, that has basically doubled, 75-100 hours was pretty much the norm in 2023. That's the kind of time I'd want to put into high quality feature articles, that was not sustainable! But then we had the really rough previous Progress Report, where that maximize everything approach was met with a change where they had done very little if any testing. By that maximize philosophy, I had to get the details, so it was time for me to test their entire change for them, and I did. That Report totaled almost 200 hours of work just from me. It took over a month of me focusing on it exclusively. That was extremely unhealthy and wrecked me physically and mentally. It was definitely a wake up call that the entire creative process needed a redo.
So this new creative approach that I used in this Report is fundamentally different. For this Report, I wanted to get to the point and focus specifically on only what was directly related to the change. No long winded stories about the past here, just talk about the changes as they are and the things that are related to them. Then, I wanted to demonstrate those changes with as little effort as possible. For example, the maximized way to show the widescreen hack differences would have been two videos, synced to eachother of course, one with the widescreen hack and one with an action replay code, and of course looping perfectly and edited nicely and all at the same speed and that's like 6 hours of recording and editing by itself. This report? Two side-by-side images, bam, done in 5 minutes. It still does the job, and it's WAY easier and faster. For Luigi's Mansion, maximized would have been dissecting all of the EFB copies and showing them one by one, talking about all I learned from pokechu taking the game apart, then ending with a high quality screenshot of luigi's mansion without banding. Instead, I talked about the change and the change only, used the existing fifolog, and did a hold to compare. Does the job. For libaesnd, I could have gone on and on about those microcodes and why we supported them and the challenges of supporting a changing format, instead, I just introduced the microcode, how it was broken, and what the fix was - fast and to the point. So yea, it's just choices like these accumulating into making this Report WAY faster.
So in total, this report took 20 hours of my personal contribution to make, with a section written by Jos and a little help from JMC. About 4000 words from me specifically. It would have been 16 hours, but I had missed the EFB Copy change and once I saw luigi's mansion I was like, ok we got to cover this, and I gave it a single day (maximum 4 hours) to do a highly technical section. Fortunately pokechu bailed me out and dug into what the games were doing and explained it to me - I didn't have to probe into how or why it worked, I just learned from pokechu and wrote a section about the change. A big and highly technical section, but hey, 4 hours for that is not bad for that!
So I think this creative process change was a success. It's most of what the Report would have in the old process, but I can actually make this on my own and not kill myself doing it. And it's also just more too the point and less meander-y. We'll see what the reception of that is as the Report gets comments over the next day or two. I'll keep experimenting with it over time of course, and we'll see what happens. And maybe I'll get some help, who knows! But honestly, this is so much easier, I'll probably stick to this method even if we get help.
One thing I'd like to do is return to bi-monthly updates, so we can have shorter reports and faster betas. We'll see how that goes!
So like, in the previous creative process, I would try to maximize everything, the best demonstrations, go over any history involved, tell the full story, etc etc. The complete and best attempt at every section. For Reports from years ago, that was important since much of the emulator hadn't been explained yet, and I was learning a ton. But now, I know SO MUCH and can do so much that the maximum version of the story was overwhelming. It had already ballooned significantly even when JMC was able to regularly contribute. I keep track of my time with an app, so with the previous creative process and JMC also pitching in, Progress Reports as of 2021 or so took me personally around 50 hours. Honestly that was already not what I'd consider -a lot-, but it was not terrible. Now that JMC is too busy and can't contribute much, that has basically doubled, 75-100 hours was pretty much the norm in 2023. That's the kind of time I'd want to put into high quality feature articles, that was not sustainable! But then we had the really rough previous Progress Report, where that maximize everything approach was met with a change where they had done very little if any testing. By that maximize philosophy, I had to get the details, so it was time for me to test their entire change for them, and I did. That Report totaled almost 200 hours of work just from me. It took over a month of me focusing on it exclusively. That was extremely unhealthy and wrecked me physically and mentally. It was definitely a wake up call that the entire creative process needed a redo.
So this new creative approach that I used in this Report is fundamentally different. For this Report, I wanted to get to the point and focus specifically on only what was directly related to the change. No long winded stories about the past here, just talk about the changes as they are and the things that are related to them. Then, I wanted to demonstrate those changes with as little effort as possible. For example, the maximized way to show the widescreen hack differences would have been two videos, synced to eachother of course, one with the widescreen hack and one with an action replay code, and of course looping perfectly and edited nicely and all at the same speed and that's like 6 hours of recording and editing by itself. This report? Two side-by-side images, bam, done in 5 minutes. It still does the job, and it's WAY easier and faster. For Luigi's Mansion, maximized would have been dissecting all of the EFB copies and showing them one by one, talking about all I learned from pokechu taking the game apart, then ending with a high quality screenshot of luigi's mansion without banding. Instead, I talked about the change and the change only, used the existing fifolog, and did a hold to compare. Does the job. For libaesnd, I could have gone on and on about those microcodes and why we supported them and the challenges of supporting a changing format, instead, I just introduced the microcode, how it was broken, and what the fix was - fast and to the point. So yea, it's just choices like these accumulating into making this Report WAY faster.
So in total, this report took 20 hours of my personal contribution to make, with a section written by Jos and a little help from JMC. About 4000 words from me specifically. It would have been 16 hours, but I had missed the EFB Copy change and once I saw luigi's mansion I was like, ok we got to cover this, and I gave it a single day (maximum 4 hours) to do a highly technical section. Fortunately pokechu bailed me out and dug into what the games were doing and explained it to me - I didn't have to probe into how or why it worked, I just learned from pokechu and wrote a section about the change. A big and highly technical section, but hey, 4 hours for that is not bad for that!
So I think this creative process change was a success. It's most of what the Report would have in the old process, but I can actually make this on my own and not kill myself doing it. And it's also just more too the point and less meander-y. We'll see what the reception of that is as the Report gets comments over the next day or two. I'll keep experimenting with it over time of course, and we'll see what happens. And maybe I'll get some help, who knows! But honestly, this is so much easier, I'll probably stick to this method even if we get help.
One thing I'd like to do is return to bi-monthly updates, so we can have shorter reports and faster betas. We'll see how that goes!
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