Ontario, CanadaI've been having issues finding a single source for all the glitches discovered in this game, so I figured I'd set this area up and just dump my findings.
Going Out Of Bounds interests me in most games, and this one was no exception. After looking around YouTube, I was motivated from Abyssoft's video to see what can be Sequence Broken, if anything.
On this most current patch (as of Dec 29), it is still possible to get outside the Tutorial path before you even pick your first Pokemon. I don't know how to record gameplay off my Switch Lite, so all I have for evidence of this is a grainy phone photo (https://imgur.com/a/lE1uZNB).
To describe it plainly, save at an area where there is a rocky overhang above you. In my location, it's where there is a sharp pointy cliff. Once you reload, there is a chance the game will place your character model on the cliffside, or on top of it. Sometimes you will just slide down and be forced to reload the save to try again, but other times, you will be boosted high enough to be put on steady terrain, and can walk/run/slide forward to the new ground.
Tread wearily here, if you venture too far right to your original path, the game will trigger a text box, and result in you being force walked back to the path. Avoid wild pokemon, as attempting to encounter them without a poke in your party will cause the software to close. At this new area, you can visit Los Platos.
Items can be picked up no problem. The PokeMart works fine, with buying and selling. I'm not sure of the TM Machine maker, as it requires a lot of objects to exchange for a Move, that I did not pick up in my limited roaming space. You can speak to NPCs as well for standard dialogue.
Warning, do not heal your Pokemon with the Nurse. While the animation plays to "heal your party", no Pokeballs appear in her machine, and the game also crashes when trying to "hand back your Pokemon". You can ask for Tips, and she recommends you go to school.
Much like Wild Pokemon, Trainers should not be interacted with either. Though the dialogue and battle them starts, the game quickly crashes. For some reason, you can buy food at one of the stands, and the animation plays with Koraidon/Miraidon in the background, even though you haven't interacted with them yet.
Heading to the Main Gate outside the school, it will give you a text saying you can some back this way later, so there's no progress to be made. The Menu options are limited as well, and we cannot access the Online services for any Mystery Gifts, and while the button seems to trigger when interacted with at the side of the PokeStop, no menu appears.
So now we have to trick the game again. There was a cliffside that can be carefully slid up, letting you get from South Area One to South Area Five. This was incredibly challenging (found by DanSalvato), but I did manage it as well, breaking free. I recommend saving partway up the cliff so you don't have to get back to your progressive position too often.
If you manage to get up, you've got the vast Eastern side to walk around. The 3 starters will continue to follow you around, though seem to be have some glitchy teleports. No Legendary for movement sadly. Oddly, if you make the long way around and head to the Eastern entrance to Mega, it lets you in. Speaking to the picnic guy gets you free food items, and for some reason, healing at the Picnic Table doesn't crash the game.
Warning, if you go inside Mega, it will let you out, but only by the Southern Entrance back to our limit exploration area outside Los Platos, s you'd have to re-do the Cliff Climb to get out. I just saved before my first entrance into Mega to avoid this hassle. The Eastern/Western/EliteFour entrance stop you with a text box, saying Nemona is waiting for you, but trying to take the North entrance into the school, once again says you can visit there later. I know of no way to clip into the buildings.
Exploring the wild Eastern area, I did not see any Titan pokes. The Bases are similarly functioning as the Online area beside the PokeStop, where you can press the button outside, but nothing happens. And with the Gyms, while the counter attendant will greet you, nothing gets triggered to progress.
Oddly, inside Mega, there is an NPC that says she can measure the size of your Pokemon, and interacting with her will open up your Box Menu with 8 boxes, though with zero Pokemon. Closing this out, your game crashes.
Oddly again, if you speak to an NPC that offers a trade, and you try to accept, they will reject you, citing you need two Pokes in your party, but you have only 1. Doesn't make sense, as anytime you try to give an Item to hold, the game says you have No Pokemon. Though attempting to teach a TM does change the cursor to the left side of the screen where the typical pokemon party list resides.
Oddly for the final time, there is a Weird Egg. If you try to use an Rare/EXP Candy, it will also mention you have no Pokemon, but then an Egg labelled 007 begins leveling up, and then it's name proceeds to become the level it grew to after the candy was consumed (ex. 007 fed a Rare Candy, "2 grew to level 2!". Sadly, I've been walking around a very long time, and nothing has hatched, nor does the egg appear in the party.
That's all I could find. Hoping to hear more amusing stories and discoveries from others.
Made this vid as a reference to myself and others who are interested in performing this trick for their speedrun.
Is there a public area or Google Doc used to determine which seeds yielded what results?
It's possible I don't understand this, but if there's an optimal starting point when it comes to FFXHD-PC (CSR%) by basing it on the starting seed, I'd like to see a log of advantages and disadvantages.
As of now, there's no known way to trigger Confront Ardyn for the final battle.
Don't know much about this game, but as I know it there are difficulty options to choose from.
Would changing the difficulty dramatically alter the run?
Just a meme, or do you think having a 30 minute category for this game could bring in some players?
Updated Jan 2020:
https://imgur.com/a/dyFQqFW https://imgur.com/a/DK9YpsE https://imgur.com/a/Msz2UVP https://imgur.com/a/V6Orkfb
Since I've upgraded my setup over the course of the year, I thought I'd add a few updates to this topic.
Styling a 1070ti for my GPU and an AMD 3800X for my CPU, no overclocking involved. OBStudio usage when streaming only (no local recording) has about ~1% CPU usage. Game doesn't get detected on NVIDIA GeForce.
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Here is a memory dump of the journey I've taken in optimizing Lightning Returns. There will be little structure, useless information, and many obvious musings. I just want to get it out before I forget anymore.
Geez, how do I begin...
Okay, so Lightning Returns FFXIII was built for the PS3. I primarily played the PC port that came out maybe 2 years later. And like many ports from Square Enix before it, this one was...imperfect. See, the game still THINKS it's on a PS3, which fundamentally limits some of its capacity. You can even notice on the first saving/loading screen tutorial when you begin a New Game, where it warns you about how to handle your "PlayStation 3", even though you are on Steam. Moving forward, this relates to how this game, even while on your PC, will use only 1 core. Other cores can't be activated to help boost this game's performance.
60 FPS was not a native selection on the original, and the selection here via Steam (a.k.a. Dynamic Frame Rate) is the alternative. With the PS3 limitation, a normal playthrough will find slowdowns and locations where the environmental polygons are many. Yusnaan (at night) is the primary example, where constant confetti raining down chugs the FPS to 40fps at times. Luxerion would also suffer occasionally with its detailed buildings and frequent NPCs. Battles tended to stay consistently at 60 as you were teleported to a separate battle arena, where the game didn't have to render as much.
Sure, a better PC may help with some of these issues, but I'm here to talk about why the game is a problem, not the limitations of each individual's rig. For reference, here's various settings of mine:
http://imgur.com/wwcjsHz http://imgur.com/a/ybX0I http://imgur.com/a/mi4hb https://imgur.com/a/FAhqP https://imgur.com/a/GgX6A - 144Hz https://pcpartpicker.com/user/D_Winds/saved/#view=hVZZLk
So, my Steam directory is located on my SSD, the fastest area to load Steam and the LRFF13.exe from. Sure, you could move the .exe file somewhere else, but it won't change your loadtimes. To put it in simplest terms, you want to the game to be running with minimal background interference, which adds on to the CPU usage. Having a recording program, like Fraps, would chug the loadtimes. I am using OBS Studio (NOT OBS) for this reason, where your CPU usage remains low (mine hovers at ~10%) and you can record while streaming. If you stream alone and don't local record, then of course you'll lower the CPU usage even more and get subtle timesaves, but for my purposes the difference was negligible.
Changing the game graphics and settings usually lead to negligible differences as well whenever I tried testing loadtimes. You can do so in the Steam Window (where I have everything to Standard, not Advanced), 1280x720 (my lowest resolution), and Windowed Mode. Rumor has it that Fullscreen mode is faster, but I haven't seen proof of that myself. You can change stuff on your Graphics Adapter too (mine is AMD Radeon Settings, accessible from the desktop), but still this didn't help me much, even going so far as to making the game look blurry. Switching to a previous version, in my case the Radeon Crimsom Edition, didn't help my cause, despite the additional settings options that may have improved my framerates, You'll find when you look online more people go with NVIDIA, so there may be some optimization with that brand, but that's beyond me.
For other general settings:
- Windows 10 Game Mode is on
- Performance Options -> Visual Effects -> Optimize for best performance
- Power Options -> High Performance
- System Explorer: LRFF13: Priority -> High/Realtime also Steam -> High/Realtime
Now I get to the questionably legal portion of my runs, and could invalidate everything I've done:
Now I say having programs in the background is a bad idea, but I will point out this one that quite possibly made all this possible:
https://sfx.thelazy.net/games/game/1187/
Here is a website that provides texture mods. All of them serve to make the game look better (4K, better lightning, etc.). But that's not what you want for a speedrun. What you want is to make everything minimal. Here is what my directory looks like:
https://imgur.com/a/K8sZf http://imgur.com/l5aL73f
Now there are tutorials out there for how to get this setup. It's not complicated, so I won't outline it here. However, I'll explain a bit as to what I have listed:
Notice how they all read 0. When you first download it some of them are defaulted to 1. So manually change those and resave the file.
shader.fx is what injects the changes into the game. d3d9 and/or dxgi work with your graphics card. CommonRedist and weiss_data come normally in the Steam folder. As a a side note, while these files have a good chunk of data in them, deleting portions won't improve the game's framerate, and often cease function altogether.
GeDoSaTo was an alternative texture modifier. Any change in that always increased loadtimes, so I never used it. Never got around to deleting it.
For the final major change, which is the only I can recall that helped me out:
There are a couple files in the download named: d3d9.dll
Only one of them is the one that gets the best loadtimes. Cannot run the game without this type of files alongside the LRFF13.exe.
I found the good one in the Shaders folder of Sweet FX, helped found with SweetFxAutoConfigurator. Replaced this "good" one with the "default" one given with LR, and that did the trick. I'll reiterate that I won't be able to grant more details, since I've long forgotten the stress I've endured in getting this setup optimally. For all I know this doesn't even help me, as I've had successful setups in the past without this complicated madness. I'd say test this out on your own time, you may find something that I didn't catch. Another program that may have helped was Razer Cortex or Game Booster, which eliminates some of the background memory usage. AMD may have some new program released that makes gaming better, I have no idea, it's been awhile since I've checked.
Now for the forbidden info:
What about hacking? I plead the fifth. Just Google "Lightning Returns FFXIII hack" and you'll find a few things. I could never figure it out myself, so I left it alone. Few random links I found:
This final link I have not explored much myself, but it may be the key to further improving loadtimes. Simply put, it involves making custom d3d9.dll files.
There's some program called Cheat Engine that you may be able to do something with too. Too complicated for myself, so I can't recommend it per se. You'll have to browse forums and YouTube vids to get any necessary info.
And for the last suspicious method:
Find the LRFF13.exe. Right click. Properties. Compatibility. Run this program i Compatibility Mode: Windows XP. Apply. OK. Start the game.
Congratulation. You now have loadtimes that are 3 times faster.
As I understand it, the game is trying to run at 120fps in this compatibility mode. Aside from fantastic loadtimes, you get some odd artifacts in game, like occasional screen flashing and almost infinite running ATB. I didn't pursue this because it makes interacting with most objects too difficult (where the "Talk" prompt flashes repetitively, and hitting X won't trigger an interaction). Switching to 30fps from Dynamic Frame Rate fixes it sure, but there go your loadtimes. Just a fun discovery I thought I'd share.
Some addendum. I'm using a PS4 controller, through a program names DS4Windows. An XBOX controller should work even better. Map to whatever you like (I have Start and Select to L3 and R3 for faster cutscene skipping). In-game, turning off the minimap saves frames. You're also better off timing your cutscene skips and interactions instead of mashing buttons, as there is an inherent delay in the former. But that's just me being frame-picky.
That's all I know. Feel free to message if something doesn't make sense.
I'm used to seeing that they are for other games, and I don't know how serious Hard Mode can be taken as it involves so much carried over from a previous room.
But Easy lets you have a fresh start, while having mildy different mechanics than Normal Mode. I only see one list on the board here, but should there be two?
I'm not strictly speaking against the idea, but I'd like to know the rationale for disallowing times to be submitted through emulator means?
