Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi

(11-11-2014, 11:29 AM)BlizzardToaBreeze Wrote: [ -> ]When I started this thread, I asked for ideas of how money might be used with the aim of fixing zfreeze. The convo lead me to believe that this was a "time is money" issue for one particular person. This is familiar to me, for although I want to contribute my time directly to Dolphin, I can't make it a priority in my life. I pictured others feeling the same way as me, so I thought an online fundraiser would be a good second-best option.

Different people have worked on zfreeze (including myself), and "time is money" hasn't been an issue for any of them. More like "time is time", and really money doesn't change that unless you feel like paying someone enough for that person to be able to quit his other obligations temporarily.

(11-11-2014, 11:29 AM)BlizzardToaBreeze Wrote: [ -> ]I worded the campaign site so that anyone can claim the reward, and someone else could even use Galop1n's code as a starting point.

Why is it that Galop1n's code is glorified as the universal solution for all problems? As far as I am aware his zfreeze implementation is completely useless for a proper implementation. I've written the base code years ago and it was more accurate and compatible than what he came up with (which, for reference, is here). In general I don't think that galop1n is the best person to pay for finishing something in the sense that it'll end up in the master branch, because so far he showed little commitment to making things ready enough for that.

(11-11-2014, 11:29 AM)BlizzardToaBreeze Wrote: [ -> ]More generally.. to me, the most important thing isn't whether the Indie Gogo campaign meets its goal or not. It's that we are discussing different ways to solve a long-standing issue-- and I am so amped to play Rogue Leader, I couldn't sit around & do nothing. If 60 days go by and zfreeze is still an active issue, perhaps this will plant the seeds for another idea that does knock that bug off the list. But I think this is a worthy idea, and worth presenting directly to Galop1n in case he doesn't follow these forums anymore.

I don't think this is the right way and indeed I find it more than dubious for an external individual to collect money for a developer who hasn't even asked about it. I know you have good intents, but you should also consider that you could actually be making people angry. Also mind you that in general a fundraiser may have nontrivial tax-law implications on the affected people, even if they didn't opt-in to begin with.

Quote:The convo lead me to believe that this was a "time is money" issue for one particular person

Who?

Also, yeah, what neobrain said. Galop1n's zfreeze "implementation" is laughable. It's basically broken by design *and* in practice. He probably knows about this and didn't intend this as more than a hack.

I'm still convinced that zfreeze could be hacked together by using the sw renderer code (already used by the bbox implementation) to compute the Z plane value on the CPU side and patch it into the vertices uploaded when zfreeze is active. But since even the implementation of zfreeze we have in the swrenderer right now is not correct (it doesn't work well on RS2 for example), that should be fixed first.

Thanks to this thread, I have a better understanding of what's in the way of resolving zfreeze than I did a few days ago. What could convince developers within this community to make it a top priority, if not "time is money, here's some money for your time"? Alternatively, if the issue were to be presented to experts in other communities, what kind of skills would someone have who can solve it? What kind of communities might have such a person?

(11-13-2014, 03:43 AM)BlizzardToaBreeze Wrote: [ -> ]What could convince developers within this community to make it a top priority [...]?

Why should THIS issue be top priority? I'm sure there's a lot of people who would rather like to see other issues get resolved. Not the one who makes the most noise (this thread DID get the attention of the devs after all) or has money to give should decide what's most important for Dolphin.
In the end, the devs do whatever they themselves feel is important and their main expertise and looking especially at the last few months, shit is working so well (or at least that what it looks like for a humble user of many years), I wouldn't change a thing.

You may have inferred from my last post, a commanding or demanding tone that isn't there. I've never made demands of anyone's time -- not in this thread, not in the IRC, and not reaching out via PM.

To answer your question of "Why should zfreeze be a top priority" -- my personal answer is that the Rogue Squadron games are great. I'm trying to understand what's in the way of that issue, and my previous post is asking generally for ideas & discussion.

I think the most helpful thing would be an actual solid, fleshed-out idea for how to approach the problem -- right now it feels like it's languishing because nobody really knows quite how to do it. Even if it's just a write-up of how one might reliably and efficiently emulate zfreeze, a solid idea would probably do more to inspire people to try it than any amount of money.

Wasn't it that the absolute basics are missing and nobody knows what zfreeze does and what's supposed happen?

But for the star wars games with the skybox, i always wondered why there's no zfreeze hack that just draws all zfreeze elements as the bottom layer.

(11-13-2014, 04:23 AM)Fiora Wrote: [ -> ]I think the most helpful thing would be an actual solid, fleshed-out idea for how to approach the problem -- right now it feels like it's languishing because nobody really knows quite how to do it. Even if it's just a write-up of how one might reliably and efficiently emulate zfreeze, a solid idea would probably do more to inspire people to try it than any amount of money.

The most important issue is still that we don't know how it's supposed to work, and the people who did investigate into that issue have not put their results anywhere where people could look them up to actually think about how to address the problem properly.

The problems involved with zfreeze are not obvious at all and verifying how it works in detail requieres some sophisticated hardware testing. This has not been done to a complete extent so far. As a result of this, "newcomers" know very little about the problem at best and have no real chance of addressing it adequately.

@neobrain

Could the money be better spent on accessing the sophisticated hardware testing required?

Is there a way to implement the work around that you have already created in 3.5-1729 into the newer builds?

(11-13-2014, 06:46 AM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]The most important issue is still that we don't know how it's supposed to work, and the people who did investigate into that issue have not put their results anywhere where people could look them up to actually think about how to address the problem properly.

I'm curious, are the people who did this investigation still within the community? Sounds like these results would be the right starting point.