XBox One Backwards Compatibility and Xbox One X Enhancements for X360 and OG (XO XOX BC)

[Riddlewire]

The gradual slowdown that he refers to in the video was a well known problem with the Xbox version. Fortunately, the solution was common knowledge, too (15 years ago).
It has something to do with the game being required to keep track of world items and the bloat this causes to the game's cached state and save file. Kill a rat in Seyda Neen without disposing of the corpse, the game has to keep a record that it's still there. After 60+ hours of gaming, this type of behavior builds up to a lot of world clutter. Any time the save file on an original Xbox surpassed ~240 blocks (remember those?), you would begin to experience frequent "Dirty Disc Errors" and the game would need to be restarted. It also required much longer load times. Eventually, the game could become unplayable.

The solution was pretty simple. The first step being to always dispose of corpses. However, I think if you hit the "dispose of corpse" button on Xbox, it transfers all of that enemy's items to your inventory. That's fine if it's just scrib jerky. You can consume that right away and make it disappear. But if it's a lot of stuff you don't want, you'll become overencumbered with this process pretty quickly. If you leave items on a corpse in the world, it WILL eventually disappear. However, it takes a very long time. And you'll be accumulating other cached clutter in the meantime. So, what most of us did on Xbox was to periodically sleep somewhere for a very long time. Not leaving, just sleeping over and over again until months (years?) had passed. It doesn't harm the game world. You can test that it works by checking leftover corpses in the game world. You can also see the block count of your save game go down.

I have no idea if the Xbox One BC version would be affected by this particular bug. I can't imagine it would. The entire game can fit into ram several times over. But it's still a good practice to manage your save file starting early in the game. Just try to keep it below 250 and there will be no problems.

 

[AlNom]

So it's a feature because it's just simulating decay of corpses & garbage.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The gradual slowdown that he refers to in the video was a well known problem with the Xbox version. Fortunately, the solution was common knowledge, too (15 years ago).
It has something to do with the game being required to keep track of world items and the bloat this causes to the game's cached state and save file.

Yup, Bethesda's engine is overly ambitious, particularly on systems with little RAM where the list of world state changes becomes huge. This was also on issue with Skyrim on consoles, particularly PS3 because of it's split 256/256mb RAM pools. It's a mechanic that I like because it makes the world, and the player's impact in it, more immersive.

But it would be nice that, for example, if I'm in a shop in Skyrim and knock some stuff over accidentally, the shop keeper puts those items back where they should be. Or if guards removed bodies from populated areas. Sometimes it makes no sense for things to be left out of place and this also reduces the technical issue of keeping track of all these changes.

 

[steveOrino]

The gradual slowdown that he refers to in the video was a well known problem with the Xbox version. Fortunately, the solution was common knowledge, too (15 years ago).

It was a well known problem with the PC version as well, only it was worse when you factored in user generated mods and counting on the modder to clean the .esp plugins of identical to master records before distribution (wasn't easy since TESCK was pretty poor at letting you know). Every item you loot/drop/leave, every container, npc, quest completed, and even in game scripts (script bloating being the worst offender in mods and even poorly written stock scripts) got written to the save file and it was common to get 100+ meg saves on the PC depending on what you did. But it was never as bad as Xbox since with the PC you can just throw memory at the problem.. but it could still lead to long load times and crashes.

So yes a common practice to clean your save file was to do a cell reset (go to some isolated area in the world and force rest), especially if you were going to remove a mod plugin. The game had a hardcoded cell reset timer of 72 hours or 3 days where by if the player character had not traveled to a "cell" in that time period it would reset to its default state (including containers without the player owned flag and npcs (not killed)). It won't prevent the game from bloating up since its still keeping all records of the player but it can help quite a bit.

 

[Riddlewire]

I didn't know that.
I never played the PC version, other than just to tinker around a bit. You actually have to do a lot of exploring and questing to get your save file over 250 blocks on the Xbox. And, as mentioned above, even though the game was never patched, I seriously doubt the Xbox One will have any problems with it.

On topic:
I finished Breakdown on Xbox One last night. I suppose there's no way to check to see who completed the task first. I'm just going on record for 3 days to complete this notoriously difficult game. The Xbox One controller isn't well suited to the fighting engine of this game. The game is quite a bit easier to play on the old Duke controller.

 

[Cyan]

I didn't know that.
I never played the PC version, other than just to tinker around a bit. You actually have to do a lot of exploring and questing to get your save file over 250 blocks on the Xbox. And, as mentioned above, even though the game was never patched, I seriously doubt the Xbox One will have any problems with it.

On topic:
I finished Breakdown on Xbox One last night. I suppose there's no way to check to see who completed the task first. I'm just going on record for 3 days to complete this notoriously difficult game. The Xbox One controller isn't well suited to the fighting engine of this game. The game is quite a bit easier to play on the old Duke controller.

are you talking from memory or do you have the modern version of duke?

 

[Riddlewire]

are you talking from memory or do you have the modern version of duke?

No need to rely on memory. My original Duke still works. I have the Breakdown disc and my saved games on my launch Xbox. I can test the game on both platforms.
I would like to try out that new Duke, though. Too expensive.

 

[OCASM]

Conker looking good. The Xbox version still holds up very nicely (dat lighting and postfx):

The only problem is that they didn't update the DOF effect for higher resolutions so it looks weird.

 

[Cyan]

Conker looking good. The Xbox version still holds up very nicely (dat lighting and postfx):

The only problem is that they didn't update the DOF effect for higher resolutions so it looks weird.

had that game at launch date, pretty expensive at the time, but it was worth it. Having a Xbox and the fur shading effect...it gave you a status.

Not a new video, but sometimes this goes unnoticed...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Conker looking good. The Xbox version still holds up very nicely (dat lighting and postfx):

The only problem is that they didn't update the DOF effect for higher resolutions so it looks weird.

The higher resolution and AA go a LONG way to making the game look a whole lot better even with that omission on DOF.

Regards,
SB

 

[Cyan]

BC doing its maginc once again. I had Jedi Academy on the OG Xbox. Constant 60 fps on Xbox One X and 4K, almost 60 fps con Xbox One at 1080p and very variable framerate on the OG Xbox ranging from the low 10s to 60 fps, but less than 30 fps most of the time.

 

[Riddlewire]

I wonder why particular titles end up on the BC list and others don't.
I know it's a rights issue in most cases, but with the Star Wars games it should have all been one bundle. Jedi Outcast (which I prefer greatly to Academy) did not make the BC list. But both games were made by Raven, both games were published by Activision, both properties are owned by Disney. There can be no problem with rights for the game. And if Disney is allowing the Star Wars games, Obi-Wan should have made the list, too. It was developed and published totally in-house by Lucasarts. It's not like it requires any additional work on the part of Disney. Microsoft is doing all the work and Disney collects their share of the money on new digital sales. Obi-Wan is a perfect choice for the BC program because it's totally exclusive to the original Xbox. It wasn't available on any other platform, it was never on PC, and it isn't compatible on the 360. You can't play it at all unless you have an original Xbox. I suppose Microsoft didn't want any "stinkers" to tarnish the BC program, and Obi-Wan didn't get good reviews, although I quite liked the game.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I wonder why particular titles end up on the BC list and others don't.
I know it's a rights issue in most cases, but with the Star Wars games it should have all been one bundle. Jedi Outcast (which I prefer greatly to Academy) did not make the BC list. But both games were made by Raven, both games were published by Activision, both properties are owned by Disney. There can be no problem with rights for the game. And if Disney is allowing the Star Wars games, Obi-Wan should have made the list, too. It was developed and published totally in-house by Lucasarts. It's not like it requires any additional work on the part of Disney. Microsoft is doing all the work and Disney collects their share of the money on new digital sales. Obi-Wan is a perfect choice for the BC program because it's totally exclusive to the original Xbox. It wasn't available on any other platform, it was never on PC, and it isn't compatible on the 360. You can't play it at all unless you have an original Xbox. I suppose Microsoft didn't want any "stinkers" to tarnish the BC program, and Obi-Wan didn't get good reviews, although I quite liked the game.

There's a possibility there could be right's issue with music if the music is different. Older games can get into a rights quagmire when it come to licensing the music used in the games. Even if original music was commissioned by the developers at the time, the music creators sometimes still retain rights to the music.

Regards,
SB

 

[Riddlewire]

I suppose that must be it.
The Xbox version of both games (Outcast and Academy) were developed by Vicarious Visions.
The credits for Jedi Academy include this note:

Original Star Wars music composed by John Williams. (P) & (C) Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights reserved. Used under authorization. Published by Bantha Music (BMI). Administered by and/or co-published with Warner-Tamerlane Music Publishing Corp., John T. Williams

I'm guessing Williams and those two companies didn't relinquish control over his original music when Lucasfilm was purchased by Disney. If that situation still holds, then MS would need to obtain permission (or cut a new deal) from John Williams to release Jedi Academy in digital form.
The only thing I can find different in the Jedi Outcast credits is an audio credit to Ben Burtt, listed thusly:

Sound engineer, responsible for many iconic sounds in the Star Wars franchise (including the lightsaber hum, the blaster-rifle sound, R2-D2's beeps and Vader's heavy-breathing voice).

I wonder if that means the sounds in Academy were cheap imitations.

 

[Riddlewire]

Saints Row 2
Presented without commentary.

 

[BRiT]

The emulation is too good, remaining faithful to the original experience, even down to the horrible sections.

 

[Cyan]

Xbox One backwards compatibility logs over 1 billion hours of playtime.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/10...ompatibility-crosses-1-billion-hour-milestone

 

[Allandor]

Xbox One backwards compatibility logs over 1 billion hours of playtime.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/10...ompatibility-crosses-1-billion-hour-milestone

So every xbox one owner (assuming at least 35m sold) had played 28.5h so at least one xb/xb360 game.
Well this is not bad for those old games.
But well, I play way more than 100h BC games … statistics ^^

 

[HMBR]

KOTOR 2
while the first game was uncapped (well up to 60) this one is at 30FPS max and there are some drops to around 20FPS, with the X is leading by the advantage you would expect from the CPU clock difference, and the original hardware can drop to single digit FPS

 

[Allandor]

KOTOR 2
while the first game was uncapped (well up to 60) this one is at 30FPS max and there are some drops to around 20FPS, with the X is leading by the advantage you would expect from the CPU clock difference, and the original hardware can drop to single digit FPS

Well even the best hardware (well jaguar-cores aren't the best but much much better than the original xbox cpu-core ) can't get around engine-bugs.
But really a shame that this game is always locked at 30fps.