Sik wrote:No, the real issue is that the game is behaving like it's running off a hard disk. Optical drives are much slower than hard disks: if you want to read anything you may need to wait a lot of time (even seconds) before the drive is done seeking and can even start reading. The game doesn't take this into account, which results in blatant loading times.
The worst offender of this is rendering the dungeons. The game only loads the meshes the first time they have to be shown. The end result is that when a mesh isn't loaded first it's completely gone, then suddenly it pops up out of nowhere (and this isn't distance related, there's one dungeon where the missing mesh can end up loading when it's nearer to the camera than the player!).
This also happens when switching characters in a dungeon. When you switch to a different character, it will disappear for a moment - that's the time between unloading the current mesh and waiting for the new one to be done loading.
And no, I didn't hack the game at all. I've noticed all this just by observing how the game behaves. I've programmed long enough to figure out this kind of behaviors =P
The dungeons made me lag when they loaded before I got too close. This is why in Neptunia MK2, dungeons are in sections instead of being in one place. There are times in MK2 where the game may transition from hybrid animations to 3D models if your copy is too early in versions. My copy has the option to switch from 3D to the animations anyway. I have a friend who doesn't have the option. You can also tell in the model that it's been smoothed dramatically. The pauses between changing characters didn't startle me because the models had tons of smoothing on them. Basically the models were made to look polygonal, and someone who is really good at smoothing meshes came along and smoothed the meshes to make them look more professional, and then applied the textures to the models. I was satisfied with the game, and at least it wasn't as terribly optimized as Love Death 555. If anything HDN and MK2 were optimized better than most games are. The only thing I'm not satisfied with is the fact that the models themselves do not have eyes. The eyes are just textures like they were in Ar tonelico Qoga. Every blink looks like it was done by the 3D model, but it was actually just a texture animation that was done frame-by-frame, perfectly. The mouths are the same way as well.