Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

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mast3r
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Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby mast3r » Tue Feb 23, 2016 10:51 am

I've been playing 3.121 for quite a while and have wondered if 4.0 has any advantages over 3.121. I've never actually dabbled with the new version, but performance issues with 3.121 has me asking, does 4.0 perform any better?

I'm playing on an Athlon 64 x2 at ~3GHz, 3GB DDR2, GeForce GTX 260, Win7
I'm using the KiD's Rock Band 2 theme. I get lots of jitters especially with double notes. Single note sections usually play smooth, such as songs on Easy. When Overdrive notes come on screen, or sections of double notes, it starts to get jittery.

I've made sure Psycho its turned off, and I've tried tweaking graphical settings, frame limiter, and even Process Priority. Often the menu music and sounds will get garbled and cut in and out as well. Usually I can fix that by setting the game to High priority and/or restarting the game.

Any suggestions?
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby bluzer » Tue Feb 23, 2016 12:12 pm

have you tried to disabled the shaders, and turned off anti-aliasing? The shaders used to be a problem for me back in the day.
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby mast3r » Tue Feb 23, 2016 12:34 pm

Does that make it look bad?
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby bluzer » Tue Feb 23, 2016 12:46 pm

I dont think it does, at least its not something i really liked even when it was a "new" feature.
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-=-=-=-=-=- Request Your RB Songs Here: Song Request Page! -=-=-=-=-=-


The Who - Behind Blue Eyes Hidden Rock Band Rip!(expert only, Puppetz Style Custom!)
Scrolling Lyrics Tutorial (Rockband Style) 4 MFH-Alarian Mod
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (links updated 10.12.09)
Guitar Hero: Metallica + DLC
Guitar Hero: Van Halen
Guitar Hero 5 DLC (incomplete)
Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock: (for FoF / FoFiX / Phase Shift)
ALL Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock DLC Downloadable
Rock Band 3: (for FoF / FoFiX / Phase Shift)
Available as RB3 DLC:
~~Bon Jovi: Greatest Hits (Rock Band Edition)
~~The Bee Gee's 01 Track Pack
~~John Lennon's "Imagine" Album
~~Queen Extravaganza Pack
~~Queen RB3 Enhanced Pack
~~Billy Joel: The Hits (Rock Band Edition)
~~Johnny Cash 01 Track Pack
~~Dragonforce RB3 DLC Songs
~~Linkin Park 6 Pack
~~Ozzy 8-Pack
~~The Doors: Greatest Hits
~~Lady GaGa 02
~~Bruno Mars TP
~~Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood
~~Megadeth - Rust In Peace
~~Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With the Chili Peppers
~~Foo Fighters Track Pack 02/03/04
~~Coldplay Collection 01
~~Nirvana 01/02 & Celebrating Nirvana TPs
~~Avenged Sevenfold 01 TPs +2
~~20 Single DLCs

All of the links under this button are dead, its here for an archived version of my old "sig"
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby mast3r » Tue Feb 23, 2016 2:36 pm

Oh ok, I'll give that a shot. Thanks!

Wow that really helped! Plays way smoother with the shaders off and I honestly can't visually see a difference! Thanks again :thumbup:
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby bluzer » Wed Feb 24, 2016 11:46 am

mast3r wrote:Oh ok, I'll give that a shot. Thanks!

Wow that really helped! Plays way smoother with the shaders off and I honestly can't visually see a difference! Thanks again :thumbup:



That is great to hear!

Yeah, the shaders gave me stutter problems back in the day too. Even today with my updated hardware(compared to back then) i would still turn them off.

:thumbup:
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-=-=-=-=-=- Request Your RB Songs Here: Song Request Page! -=-=-=-=-=-


The Who - Behind Blue Eyes Hidden Rock Band Rip!(expert only, Puppetz Style Custom!)
Scrolling Lyrics Tutorial (Rockband Style) 4 MFH-Alarian Mod
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (links updated 10.12.09)
Guitar Hero: Metallica + DLC
Guitar Hero: Van Halen
Guitar Hero 5 DLC (incomplete)
Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock: (for FoF / FoFiX / Phase Shift)
ALL Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock DLC Downloadable
Rock Band 3: (for FoF / FoFiX / Phase Shift)
Available as RB3 DLC:
~~Bon Jovi: Greatest Hits (Rock Band Edition)
~~The Bee Gee's 01 Track Pack
~~John Lennon's "Imagine" Album
~~Queen Extravaganza Pack
~~Queen RB3 Enhanced Pack
~~Billy Joel: The Hits (Rock Band Edition)
~~Johnny Cash 01 Track Pack
~~Dragonforce RB3 DLC Songs
~~Linkin Park 6 Pack
~~Ozzy 8-Pack
~~The Doors: Greatest Hits
~~Lady GaGa 02
~~Bruno Mars TP
~~Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood
~~Megadeth - Rust In Peace
~~Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With the Chili Peppers
~~Foo Fighters Track Pack 02/03/04
~~Coldplay Collection 01
~~Nirvana 01/02 & Celebrating Nirvana TPs
~~Avenged Sevenfold 01 TPs +2
~~20 Single DLCs

All of the links under this button are dead, its here for an archived version of my old "sig"
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby weirdpeople » Fri Feb 26, 2016 11:13 pm

So the shaders do basically nothing in fofix. A few onscreen effects were written with them like the pointless lightning thing, some 3D shaders which aren't used most of the time, and neck flashing. The game just isn't setup well currently to be able to properly use them imo.

Some other stuff you might try to increase performance more is disabling the lyrics from displaying at the top of the screen.

Shaders are still currently in the FoFiX git but i'm actually planning on removing them at some point... It has to many fingers poking around in like every part of the code...

And about the studdering issues that fofix has, i've been trying to improve that somewhat. Its mostly unrelated to the rendering code. I'm pretty sure there is just way to much crap logic code with weird code paths that take longer some frames than others... I've sorted out one studdering issue related to how it gets the song position and it not being accurate enough to render completely smooth gameplay at high framerates. But it doesn't help all that much because of the previous issue i mentioned, stripping the code down a ton does fix those issues though... video comparison
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby mast3r » Sat Feb 27, 2016 11:00 am

weirdpeople wrote:So the shaders do basically nothing in fofix. A few onscreen effects were written with them like the pointless lightning thing, some 3D shaders which aren't used most of the time, and neck flashing. The game just isn't setup well currently to be able to properly use them imo.

Some other stuff you might try to increase performance more is disabling the lyrics from displaying at the top of the screen.

Shaders are still currently in the FoFiX git but i'm actually planning on removing them at some point... It has to many fingers poking around in like every part of the code...

And about the studdering issues that fofix has, i've been trying to improve that somewhat. Its mostly unrelated to the rendering code. I'm pretty sure there is just way to much crap logic code with weird code paths that take longer some frames than others... I've sorted out one studdering issue related to how it gets the song position and it not being accurate enough to render completely smooth gameplay at high framerates. But it doesn't help all that much because of the previous issue i mentioned, stripping the code down a ton does fix those issues though... video comparison


So are you developing Fofix 4.0 currently? Like I said, I've never even tried 4.0, I'm afraid that it might take to much effort to get my setlist working in it or something like that. Is it worth trying, or should i just stick with 3.121
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby weirdpeople » Sat Feb 27, 2016 7:06 pm

Yes, but development happens in spurts. I have a couple of other python projects that i hop between and a full-time job. Since I'm basically the only one working on FoFiX you will see long periods with little to no development. I've not given up on the project, quite the opposite. I have a tons of ideas for where i want to take it, but first there is a ton of gritty grunt work to be done. It's just going to take time to plow through and fix all of the crap and there is only one of me...

Would be nice if some of the other developers would come back :P

Edit:
About the second part of your post:
Well your songs should work fine basically no changes have been made to the song code until very very recently.

Git master is very buggy is atm so i wouldn't use it, alpha 2 is 3 years old now i believe. The main problem from a users perspective with 4.0 is theme availability. It has dropped to basically zero in the past few years, and the stock themes are pretty meh. I had a couple 4.0 themes back in the day before i started learning python and moving into the development side of things, but I've basically abandoned them at this point. There were a couple of other 4.0 themes like Fuzion's 4x and the GH3/GH5 themes but again those have all been abandoned as well. Part of that is that theming for FoFiX 4.0 is way more complicated than 3.x was, and since 4.0 was a moving target things broke it was just a pain.

Personally at this point I would say stick with 3.121 for most players.

So this wasn't completely scientific but certainly interesting.
I was watching the framerate at the same spots while playing the same song on each:
4.0 git:
Max: 260 fps
min: 55 fps

4.0 stripped out cleaning branch that was in the video:
max: 610 fps
min: 190 fps

4.0 alpha 2:
Max: 260 fps
min: 70 fps

3.121 (py2.6 ogl3):
max: 160 fps
min: 60 fps

shaders are disabled on all.

The most interesting thing about this to me, this shows that the efficiency of the graphics rendering on 4.0 has gone way up(the cleaning code didnt touch much graphics code). This was because we always thought that the graphics was the slow part in fofix, but my cleaning branch certainly shows that it is in-fact the opposite. The game is just slow because there is just to much going on in the badly written gameplay logic. Which I've been working on this but so far my efforts have made the game slower. I'll get there eventually though since i know what general path to follow in order to get the result i want.
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby mast3r » Mon Feb 29, 2016 11:50 am

It's nice to hear that someone still works on it. I used to play Guitar Zero way back in the day before i found Fofix. I'm actually a moderator on the GZ forums and i must admit how sad it is to see absolutely no activity there anymore. After the C&D we received, the project changed developers so many times that nothing was getting accomplished anymore. The last Beta that was released of GZ2 BETA 3, Update 6 I believe, had increased difficultly in terms of the note window. It was shortly after that when I discovered Fofix. I never really went back, however I do miss the community itself which we had.
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby weirdpeople » Tue Mar 01, 2016 10:00 pm

i wasn't really around that much then and I only saw Guitar Zero and its C&D afterwards, but i'm guessing that let to FoFiX being separated from its mod past. Even the activity on this forum has slowed down quite a bit. Although at least It hasn't died yet :P
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby Co2Noss » Wed Mar 09, 2016 7:10 pm

I'm still around so it's not TOTALLY dead yet :)
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby djsolidsnake86 » Sun Mar 13, 2016 3:58 pm

so it's better to use 4.0?
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby weirdpeople » Sun Mar 13, 2016 4:27 pm

Thats not what i said. For the average user its not because of bugs and lack of themes. Performance might be better in some cases, but its not that much better.
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Re: Fofix 3.121 or 4.0?

Postby KobaltKreations » Tue Mar 15, 2016 6:26 pm

Such a shame to only know that there's one developer. I still use 3.121 and I'm quite content with it. But if 4.0 ever gets finished I would like to check that out as well.

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