Slippery controls?

[Terry]

I really wish this was a problem I could fix.

I have no idea if this will work, but flash seems sensitive to background processes slowing it down - are you running anything in the background that might be causing this on your system? A virus scanner? Printer Drivers? I'm grasping at straws at this point, admittedly...

[Yelnats]

I did a few tests for input lag.

I used my digital camera to record a 30 FPS video of the game and the input device

New super mario bros DS:  1 frame of lag  (mario starts jumping the next frame after the button is pressed)

Cave Story fullscreen: usually 1 frame of lag time, 2 in a single test

VVVVVV fullscreen:  usually 5 frames of lag, 4 in one test

VVVVVV windowed: 3 or 2 frames of lag

My monitor is among the best of LCDs when it comes to lag.  Some monitors can add an additional 1-2 frames of lag (3-4 at 60hz)

I'll have to see if I can get a hold of a camera that takes video in 60 FPS.

[Rox]

Super necropost bump!  Not that these forums are very active in the first place... And this is cute, the forum's warning me about how old this thread is and recommends that I probably should start a new thread. Anyway...


Hey guys! Bringing this thread back up because this is still an issue. I want to type a long story about affection and longing for this game, but I won't. Let's just put it this way; I got to play this game a long time ago now, beat it in one sitting and thought it was amazing. Much time passed and now I really want to play it again. Despite it going against my extremely rigid principles as a very low-budget gamer, I've been strongly considering buying VVVVVV at its current price for the past few days. Until something reminded me of this bug. I tried the demo again, and sure enough, it's slippery to the point where I don't think I'd want to play it again. It was like that the first time I played it, too, but I somehow faught through it.


Anyway, my computer's pretty decent, there's no question about that, just like some others in this thread. I understand that it seems to be an issue regarding Flash in general and that Mr. Cavanagh is powerless to it, but I really feel the need to check up on things one last time, before I either buy the game, or lay all thoughts about this game to rest.


If it helps at all and if Terry even checks these forums anymore, I did find one pattern when messing about. Someone else mentioned something similar, but not quite the same. My issue seems to be that the character slips quite considerably when letting go of the movement key after he's already reached maximum speed. The distance little Viridian will slide after letting go is much greater than the distance required to accelerate up to that speed in the first place. However, if letting go of the movement key before reaching top speed, he stops on a dime. Or a pixel, as may be the case.

I remember when I played the game the first time... Sliding around after long jumps never bothered me. Even if it's unintentional, that feels kinda natural. What got to me was when I had to make tiny adjustments, and holding the arrow key for a hundredth of a second meant the difference between stopping in one pixel, and stopping in 10-20 pixels.

That's rather disturbing. Let's say I'm on the edge of a tricky jump, or I need to avoid a particular spike or something. I need to move ~7 pixels sideways. If I hold the arrow key for as long as I feel I should, I'll start decelerating exactly where I need to stop - but keep going another ten pixels and fall off the edge/crash into another spike. If I let go JUST before that instant, I stop several pixels short, so I quickly have to tap again, and tap again, and if I tap a little bit too slow, once again, I go crashing into the opposite wall.


The thing that gives me hope that this could be fixed somehow, if Terry wants to keep supporting this game, is that there's no problem with sliding at any point before the character reaches max speed. Even if the problem in itself can't be solved, I'm sure there's something in the code, somewhere, that could be used to work around this. Does the instant stopping work when accelerating because of the acceleration itself? Then there might be some ugly way to cheat the game into thinking the character's still accelerating even though he's not and maybe then the sliding will stop? I don't know, I'm not a programmer and I have even less of an idea how Flash works, nevermind this specific game... But the fact that the sliding seems circumstantial in-game gives me hope. I really do want to buy this game now. I'll support Terry if Terry manages to support the game a little bit longer. I'll volunteer to test out these crazy ideas on my machine if push comes to shove, too. I just hate to see such an awesome game fall short because of something so seemingly tiny!



Heh. Looking at more videos of the game and trying to see how quickly Viridian stops in place, I realized something else... With the decreased friction that I seem to get, he moves very similarly to how the other characters move when they follow you around in the polar dimension. They take much longer to stop than Viridian does in these videos, but to me, they seem about the same. Anyhow, hope I didn't type all this for nothing! 

[Terry]

Well, basically: There is a small amount of horizontal inertia in the game, but it's very much intentional and I promise you'll get used to it and eventually like it.

However, in your case...

holding the arrow key for a hundredth of a second meant the difference between stopping in one pixel, and stopping in 10-20 pixels.

That does seem excessive. It is possible that you're experiencing a technical issue that unfortunately some machines have with keyboard input on flash games, and sadly there isn't a lot I can do about that It's possible, if you've been playing the online demo, that the game will run better offline. If that's the case, I'd recommend checking out the offline demo, just to be sure.

[Rox]

Yeah, I've already tried that. I've tried everything previously mentioned in this thread, which is why I chose to bump it instead of make a new one. Offline and online version behave the same, turning off every other program running makes no difference, nor does disabling one of my cores. I'm almost half convinced that's just how the game is, in which case I'd blame you for bad game design! But something as simple as looking at videos on Youtube confirms that, for some people, the game is more slippery than for others, and I just happen to be one of those people.

I figured some of the inertia was intentional, it just struck me as really odd that deceleration is near-instant before reaching top speed, but takes that long while he's going at maximum. It seems like a binary thing. I was hoping there might be some ugly way to fix it based on that (like removing the inertia completely which seems to me like it would fix the issue), but I can understand if you wouldn't want to dig that deep for what appears to be a problem plaguing a minority of people, and this is all just me speculating out of my ass pretty much.

Thanks for taking the time to read my enormous post in any case. Since V is now on Steam, I know I'll end up buying it either way. I think I promised I would do so on Twitter... This glitch will make some of the challenges much more frustrating than they're supposed to be, but I'll get by. It's still a great game, after all!

[arbo]

Terry. PLEASE. PRETTY PLEASE.

Give us a new Accessibility Game Option: "Disable inertia".

If we can turn inertia off, we'll finally find out how much of it is due to Flash or hardware versus intended gameplay.

This issue made me discover I'm the precision platformer gamer type, I guess... All this slipping around feels absolutely frustrating, it really ruins the game for me completely, I can't help it. I get as little far as Trench Warfare and I want to turn it off. Please throw me a bone, Terry!   

Got VVVVVV from Steam last week. Hoping for an update...

[Terry]

I'm sorry, but there's no way I could update the game just for something as small as that at this point. Updating a game on steam is kind of a big deal, unfortunately.

More than that, while I understand that some people really don't like the horizontal inertia, I don't want to encourage people to turn it off because I feel very strongly that it's important to the feel of the game and that it's worth getting used to.

(On the other hand, if you're having input lag problems, try playing the game in a window - that seems to fix it for a lot of people.)