Mar 1, 2023

Our Version of Kuro no Kiseki does Not, in Fact, Have a Memory Leak

The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak - NISA Nathaniel

Hi everyone,

Today is the release of the Japanese version of Kuro no Kiseki, and it is the first port to use a lot of new infrastructure we at PH3 built up over the past year or so. That infrastructure includes things like asset compression and platform handling, mundane features like logging and crash reporting, and dealing with game settings. But what does any of that have to do with the strange title of this article, and why should you care?

Well, if you are not one to worry about technical details, then you probably won’t notice anything, and can get to playing right away. However, if you are inclined to observe what games are doing a bit more closely, then – depending on your PC hardware and software setup – you might very well get the idea that our version of Kuro has a severe memory leak issue. And that’s primarily what I want to clear up with this post on how we purposefully use all that memory.

The p3a Archive Format

In Kuro, we are using our p3a archive format, which contains compressed assets. If you want to read a more general deep-dive into game asset compression, storage and loading then we have a more technical post up on our company blog here. I’ll quickly summarize the main ways in which this affects Kuro:

We are able to ship the entire game while requiring only ~9 GB of disk storage space – perfect e.g. for owners of one of the more affordable Steam Deck versions.
Modders need not worry: you can still access individual files easily. We purposefully included “p3atool” with the game, which is our internal tool for building these archives (and can of course also unpack them).
By using ZStandard with dictionary compression, and optimizing loading in general, we can achieve this file size reduction without a heavy impact on loading times.
Specifically, after playing for a while and getting the caches warmed up, you might see map loading times of roughly 500ms, or half a second.

That final point is what the title is about: caching.

Using all that Memory

Quite a few years back, I noticed that the amount of memory available in a decent fraction of PCs was quickly outstripping what the vast majority of games are actually using. While most games have some sort of internal caching, they generally do not seem to scale that with the amount of memory available.
As you might have guessed by now, the default setting in Kuro does exactly that: it uses up to 80% of the available memory to cache loaded and decompressed assets. And this does mean that when you play for a very long time, and have a lot of main memory, you might actually see the game process using 20 GB or even more of it – and hence the title of this post.

This memory is not wasted or leaked – it is kept on standby to make the loading times even shorter, especially when revisiting maps. However, if for any reason you dislike this automatic behavior, you can also set a fixed cache size limit or turn off caching entirely in the game’s general settings menu.

A Very Brief Feature Tour

Talking about the settings menu, there’s quite a lot in there. We hope to provide a more in-depth overview by the time the English release of the game is ready, but for now, here is a short list of features of the port that are either sufficiently important to include here, or just personal favorites:

Arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio support. That means that 21:9 ultrawide is supported just as well as the Steam Deck’s 16:10 aspect ratio. Of course, as always, some specific UI screens will have black bars.
High frame rate support. We officially support up to 360 FPS, which is particularly valuable given the somewhat more dynamic combat system in Kuro compared to previous games in the franchise.
A field of view setting – in addition to the field of view scaling automatically with the aspect ratio.
A broad range of graphics options, including:
- Shadow resolution, filtering and local shadowing quality
- Sub- and supersampling of the game’s main rendering, without affecting UI
- Draw distance adjustment for NPCs, enemies, map level-of-detail, and dynamic lights
- Quality settings for screen-space reflections and volumetric lighting
- Minimap multisampling (this is one of those personal favourites)
An immediate in-game graphics option preview. This lets you see the impact of option changes live while you make them.
Full mouse / keyboard support, which means that:
- Menus can be navigated entirely with the mouse
- We offer multiple different gameplay options for combat controls, including target lock on or free camera, the option to automatically select targets based on camera look direction, or alternatively based on mouse flicks.
- Everything is fully rebindable, with additional action bindings available for hotkeys beyond what can fit on a controller.
- And of course, all prompts are dynamic and respect your rebinding as well as your physical keyboard layout.

I’m sure I forgot quite a few more minor features there, but that should be the most important ones.

Before leaving you to enjoy the game, I’d like to note that we also specifically worked on Steam Deck optimization, to eliminate a particular issue that reduced performance significantly in some areas while running via DXVK.

All that said, I’m very happy with how this port turned out, and as always want to thank our team at PH3, the fine folks at NISA, and of course the beta testers for their outstanding work.

Peter “Durante” Thoman, CTO, PH3

Mar 1, 2023

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - Exclusive Hands-On Preview | IGN First

STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor™ - Electronic Arts

Full Article Here: https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-jedi-survivor-exclusive-hands-on-preview-ign-first

By Mitchell Saltzman

As a fan of Star Wars, Soulslikes, and big-budget single-player action games, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a game that spoke to me on multiple levels. It successfully merged the risk/reward elements of From Software’s Souls series with the power fantasy that inherently comes with being a Jedi. That said, it wasn’t a perfect combination. Backtracking without any means of fast travel was annoying, exploration was rewarded primarily with underwhelming cosmetics, and I couldn’t help but wish I could do more with my powers than just push, pull, and slow.

I say all of this because my main takeaway from roughly five hours with the upcoming sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, is that it felt like I was systematically crossing off the issues I had with Fallen Order. Survivor feels grander without ever letting the burgeoning scope compromise the exploration and sense of discovery that serves as its heart.

My preview time was broken up with me spending about four hours on the planet Koboh, a gigantic and wide open planet that largely serves as Cal’s home away from home throughout the course of Jedi Survivor’s story, and then about an hour on a moon planet to showcase some more traditional combat and platforming encounters that fans have come to expect. Let’s start off with Koboh, because it represents the biggest change in Jedi Survivor versus Fallen Order: A vast open world that sprawls out in every direction, with interesting encounters and rewards everywhere you turn.

Koboh Let’s Go

We’ve already shown you 9 minutes of Koboh gameplay as part of our IGN First coverage, but what we haven’t really gotten to point out is the fact that most of that footage covers only the introduction to the planet, which is a fairly traditional linear portion that guides you through caves, valleys, and mountain trails, but then opens wide up once you get to the Southern Reach – in a moment that brought to my mind the very first time you step out onto the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild.

My main goal throughout this entire section was to reach the Cantina to find someone to repair my crashed Mantis ship, and I could’ve just booked it over there to get on with the story, but if I did I would’ve missed out on so much meaningful exploration. Off in one direction there was a hidden cave that housed an incredibly tough (and incredibly cool) boss battle that I’d be remiss to spoil for you here, off in another direction there was a Bedlam Raider camp with Stormtrooper armor on spikes and a nasty surprise waiting for me in a trap door that led underground, and if I took another path I’d eventually find a Jedi Chamber that housed a gigantic puzzle room. Other paths still were closed off to me until I found a particular upgrade.

Even better, all of these excursions felt appropriately rewarding. Most offered me skill points for my trouble – which are much more valuable in Survivor due to the fact that there are now individual skill trees for each lightsaber stance, your force powers, and for flat health and force upgrades – and even the treasure chests that offer cosmetic items have vastly improved rewards due to the fact that you can find entirely different outfits for Cal to wear (as opposed to just different designs of ponchos). In addition to that, you can even find new hairstyles to equip Cal with. My personal favorite so far was a bandana that made him look a little bit like Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid.

Koboh is massive, but thankfully, I never felt lost thanks to some truly excellent map features, like automatic markers that highlight passageways that lead to unexplored areas, symbols that let you know what areas you can’t access yet with your current abilities, a trail that marks the way you just came, and of course, fast travel. Thank Yoda for fast travel. Even better, Cal eventually also gains the ability to tame beasts so he can use them as mounts or as ways to traverse large gaps. All of these additions, on top of just stellar art design, all add up to make the act of exploring Koboh a joy.

Another thing that struck me as I was playing through was how good both the level and enemy design was at setting up opportunities for you to use your force powers in fun ways. Miniboss arenas are full of objects that could be force pulled and thrown to deal big damage, rolling mines are both a constant threat and a constant blessing when you can send them back at pursuing foes, and there were plenty of opportunities to end a battle before it even began by force pushing foes off a ledge. My favorite interaction is when I tried to force pull a staff wielding enemy towards me. He would try to plant his staff into the ground to stop himself, and when that failed, he’d let himself go and attempt to slash while he was pulled towards me. The first time I tried this, he got me, but then I found out that I could parry his desperation attack, which allowed me to still turn the tide in my favor.

Koboh is also not a one-stop shop. It’s a planet that you’re meant to return to many times over the course of Cal’s adventure. Aside from the aforementioned locked passageways that Cal won’t be able to progress through until he gets a specific upgrade, the Cantina and the town it resides in, Rambler’s Reach, doubles as a sort of home base for Cal. There are vendors to purchase new customization options, colorful NPCs to talk to, and everytime you come back, you can be certain there will be something new to check out.

Fly Me to the Moon (Planet)

The second area I got to play was on an unnamed moon planet that Cal and his companion Bode visit sometime later in the game. In comparison to Koboh, this felt like a much more traditional style of level that would’ve been right at home in Jedi: Fallen Order. That isn’t to take anything away from it though, because it was a ton of fun – with a healthy balance of both death defying platforming challenges and challenging combat encounters.

The thing that most stood out about this level was there was almost a horror theme to it. Turns out that the enemies were expecting Cal, and thus most of them were lying in ambush. The beginning was very tense as it seemed like enemies were hiding around every corner waiting to get the jump on me. Respawn even played to this expectation a few times and would have a harmless droid suddenly come out through the fog, which I totally bit on and sliced the poor innocent bot in half.

Even in a level that was much more linear, there still were plenty of goodies hidden off the beaten path, including Jedi: Survivor’s take on a DMC-like challenge room. In it, I had to face off against wave after wave of what seemed like hundreds upon hundreds of B1 droids that would all go down in one or two hits, but could very easily swarm and overwhelm me. It was an absolute blast – and surprisingly tough as well – once they started mixing in some droids that would self-destruct if I didn’t force push them or otherwise get the heck out of the way in time.

I loved this encounter because it’s something that wouldn’t have made sense within the context of the actual level, but in a sealed-off space where anything goes, it was the perfect kind of combat test. I hope there are a ton more of these and I’d happily search every nook and cranny to find them.

I could go on talking about the Jedi Chamber puzzle rooms, the fun new force powers, the exciting story beats that took place after I stepped foot into the Cantina, or some of the awesome boss battles that I had to overcome, but it’s all stuff that’s probably better experienced for yourself once the game comes out on April 28.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1774580/STAR_WARS_Jedi_Survivor/