Image source: 9to5google.com
Log entries
- This is a 2D platformer with Pang-style mechanics of shooting directly up at enemies that divide into two when hit. It seems all right, but didn't capture my interest immediately.
- This was the first time I noticed an interesting issue with Stadia. The music of this game was a bit rhythmically inaccurate, which is pretty rare in a modern game. My mind first went to the idea of this game playing its music using a sequencer which was imprecise, but I quickly realized a much simpler cause, which was supported by the problem showing up in other Stadia games: On the client-side, Stadia is streaming and playing a video with corresponding audio. The video and audio must necessarily be playing with a very small buffer to achieve the impressively low latency that this platform has. If a video frame arrives too late, it will result in stuttering, but if an audio buffer arrives too late for when it's supposed to play, the local playback software needs to handle this somehow. A few simple approaches could be: 1) playing nothing until it arrives (which results in an audible pop), 2) reducing the playback frequency of the currently playing audio to slow it down (resulting in unstable pitch), 3) playing back the audio as overlapping windowed frames which allows windows to be repeated (resulting in rhythmic inaccuracy but no other noticeable side effects). I would assume that something like the windowed frame approach is what is causing the imprecisions.
2020-04-20
SW Quest, Serious Sam, Spitlings, Stacks