There's nothing stopping you from setting the in-game time to be off real time by like 6 hours or whatever so when you're awake it's the afternoon in-game.
yeah, my entire AC experience has been "how far off regular clock time do i need to be for this to analogous?"
like the majority of my play time is between 11pm and 3am so... i've never had my device set to the "correct" time while playing AC.
I thought time traveling wasn't possible in this AC game. Maybe I'm mis-remembering hearing something about it. Hard to believe really, since we've heard so little about this game. Come on Nintendo, let us know about the game already.
That's what this news is about, though, the fact that they are going to have a backup solution in place at some point, it just doesn't currently work over the standard cloud backup application.
Not sure whether this is directly related to that:
If previous Atlus games (games which can be played on other hardware, without adding additional elements) were ported to the Nintendo Switch, would you want to play then? Select all of the titles below that you would like to play on the Nintendo Switch.
Port of “Revelations: Persona”
Port of “Persona 2: Innocent Sin / Eternal Punishment”
Port of “Persona 3,” “Persona 3 FES,” and “Persona 3 Portable”
Port of “Persona 4” and “Persona 4 Golden”
Port of “Persona 5” and “Persona 5 Royal”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei IV”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse”
Port of “Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner” series
Port of “Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers”
Port of “Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha” series
Port of “Etrian Odyssey” series
Port of “13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim”
Port of “Persona Q”
Port of “Catherine: Full Body”
Port of “Odin Sphere Leifthrasir”
Port of “Dragon’s Crown Pro”
I do not want to play any on the Nintendo Switch
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2020
Unless you have 2 people in your household with 2 Switches then you don't have to worry about cloudsaves or lack of cloudsaves.
People act like you can't just hold the systems close together for 5 seconds and transfer the save over.
Kinda baffled Atlus didn't think "huh, the Nintendo Switch is selling really well and Nintendo went out of their way to put Joker in Smash Bros., maybe porting Persona 5 is worth the effort?" But that company's weird. Persona 4 Golden never did escape the PSP.
The lack of cloud/transfer support has next to zero to do with cheating, its because of the one island per console thing. The existing save system cannot handle that feature because saves are unique per user, and the island is not, its dropped in an "extra data" section that most games don't use for save data. That is why they need their own bespoke in-game system to handle any of this.
In other words they are *really* committed to one island per console, and are making everything super inconvenient due to that. Although maybe they are doing one island in part to avoid the 4 GB save files you could get with Minecraft, NBA2k and the like.
I don't know how NBA2k gets up to multi-gigabyte sized save files, but minecraft does it by saving vast quantities of voxel chunks from the endlessly expandable map. Animal Crossing saves only need a very small, fixed set of data relative to that. I would be amazed if they managed to use more than a few tens of megabytes.
I like doing this kind of napkin math.
You could store an Animal Crossing object with two bytes pretty easily, but probably need a third byte for additional properties.
00000000 0000000000000000
The red part is enough bits for 16,383 objects, which should be more than enough for everything in Animal Crossing. Object 63 is a red shirt, object 259 is a metal desk, object 6,755 is a stegosaurus tail bone, etc.
The blue part is to store the object's rotation. Two bits are all you need. 00 = north, 01 = east, 10 = south, 11 = west.
The green part is to store any other data about the object. If it's a radio or TV, is it turned on? If it's a table, has it been customized by Cyrus to be blue? If it's a pile of turnips, how many are in that pile? The interpretation of this data changes based on what the object is, so 45 attached to a pile of turnips might mean something different than 45 attached to a couch, the code knows how to deal with it.
So if an object is 3 bytes, how many spaces are there in the game to hold those objects? Well...that gets technical.
New Leaf outdoors had what were considered 16x16 "acres," and was 5 acres across by 4 acres tall. New Horizons is marginally bigger but we'll just use New Leaf's size. 16x5x16x4 = 5120 tiles. Not all of these are accessible/usable, like river tiles, but sometimes it's good to treat all tiles as valid for simplicity's sake.
But it's not just 5120 tiles x 3 bytes, because in Animal Crossing, some objects can sit on top of each other, like a table with a teapot and a photograph on it. In New Horizons if you can completely fill your outdoors with tables piled with books and knicknacks, you essentially have to double the number of objects that can be stored outside. 5120 tiles x 3 bytes x 2 objects = 30,720 bytes outdoors.
New Leaf could have 10 villagers at once, and villager homes are 6x6, so 36 tiles. However, you can also hang items on the wall, which adds 24 more potential objects (ignoring the door), and as above you can stack some items on top of others, so that's 36 x 2 + 24 = 96 spaces, x 3 bytes x 10 homes = 2880 bytes for villager homes.
On a wiki I found that the player's total home floor space can end up at 320 tiles, with 142 tiles of wall space. 320 x 2 + 142 = 782 spaces, x 3 bytes = 2346 bytes for one player home, but 8 can live together in New Horizons, so that's 18,768 bytes.
New Leaf had a model home showcase area with space for 48 homes to tour. I don't know if the game saved all of these completely, or always used the internet to go grab them. If they were actually saved locally, that's 112,608 bytes. Not sure if New Horizons will have this feature but we'll add it anyway.
Then you have all of the stores and museum and such, which even if they aren't player-interactive do need to have some info stored, like what's being sold in the shop or what museum pieces you've found. Heck, the museum had four 8x8 "exhibition" rooms you could fully customize like your own house. Without going to to the trouble of figuring out the precise amount of what's saved there, we could easily add ~12 8x8 rooms worth of stuff, which is 5,760 more bytes.
TL;DR adding up all the space and multiplying it by 3 bytes comes to about 170,736 bytes.
But this is an absolute worst case scenario, and uncompressed too.
Each player has about 560 item slots (20 in pockets in New Horizons, 180 in regular closet space, and a New Leaf patch added a "secret storeroom" with 360 more slots). If every item in those slots takes up 3 bytes and there are 8 players, that's 13,440 more bytes.
Most of the rest of the data that would need to be stored is probably negligible by comparison. To some extent, every one of the 300+ animals has a memory, whether they've lived in your town or not, probably some tracking to make sure they don't repeat themselves to you too often, remembering things you've told them or a past quest they gave you etc. Every animal wears certain clothes which can change. Every room in the game has a wallpaper and carpet. Your catalog could be a simple true/false bitfield of whether you've seen each item in the game or not. Every space on the ground tracks how much grass or dirt is there. But all of these should be a matter of bytes, not megabytes.
All of this is to say...
We could add a whole bunch to what was already calculated and round up and say it's 500,000 bytes. Which is 500 kilobytes, which is only half a megabyte.
Poking around the internet I see what purport to be New Leaf save files at 84 kB (empty town with fully upgraded shops) and 511 kB (somebody's random town they were sharing) so I think the numbers work out. Original Cube Animal Crossing took up a whole Memory Card 59 which is 512 kB.
Earlier I had estimated tens of megabytes but it really should be super tiny.
You might be missing color (skimmed the post too quickly) and any other data they're saving for the object, which could bloat object information size as well. I'd guess the overhead for object type is greater than 16,383 too.
P4G wishes it was on the PSP, its stuck on Vita. And Sony made explicit that "Persona exclusivity was important to them" so I dunno what game Atlas is playing here talking about Nintendo ports.
I'd half expect them to ruin Etrian Oddessy by forcing you to draw maps with the controller. A good automap sacrifices some fun of the series but its not worth the hassle without a stylus. Although still being able to drop custom notes is good.
Unless you have 2 people in your household with 2 Switches then you don't have to worry about cloudsaves or lack of cloudsaves.
People act like you can't just hold the systems close together for 5 seconds and transfer the save over.
You *can't* do this with Animal Crossing because its not a traditional save, as it doesn't stick the data within profiles. Until they come up with whatever solution the island is locked to the console, they had to put warnings on the game box to that effect in some regions.
You might be missing color (skimmed the post too quickly) and any other data they're saving for the object, which could bloat object information size as well. I'd guess the overhead for object type is greater than 16,383 too.
Yeah, even if I was way off and it's 6 bytes per item, that would only get you to a 1 megabyte save, worst case and uncompressed.
I did forget about the custom patterns which are little player-made bitmaps. 32x32, x 8 per player, x 8 players is only 64 kB more.
Isn't this the first AC that lets you build a town from the ground up? Just dump buildings anywhere, drain resources, terraform the place? Not saying its on Minecraft level but it should be more involved than past games.
Isn't this the first AC that lets you build a town from the ground up? Just dump buildings anywhere, drain resources, terraform the place? Not saying its on Minecraft level but it should be more involved than past games.
To my knowledge we don't know anything yet about building houses. We don't even know how shops will work, if you take a boat to the mainland or what (seems likely). All we know is you can place objects anywhere, like sofas or TVs etc. Not necessarily houses.
You might be missing color (skimmed the post too quickly) and any other data they're saving for the object, which could bloat object information size as well. I'd guess the overhead for object type is greater than 16,383 too.
Yeah, even if I was way off and it's 6 bytes per item, that would only get you to a 1 megabyte save, worst case and uncompressed.
I did forget about the custom patterns which are little player-made bitmaps. 32x32, x 8 per player, x 8 players is only 64 kB more.
The most dangerous assumption you're making is they're storing all the information in a rational format :snap:
Took over an hour to get through that survey, but a lot of it was how much do you know about their games and backlog and a few modern games they might be interested in; what platforms would you be interested in playing remakes and ports of their library; your game system time spending habits and entertainment budget; how much interest is there in seeing their library on Mobile (Apple, Android), Switch, Stadia, and Steam. At the very least I made it known that I want more Switch and Steam games from them, specifically give me Persona 5 on Switch already.
You might be missing color (skimmed the post too quickly) and any other data they're saving for the object, which could bloat object information size as well. I'd guess the overhead for object type is greater than 16,383 too.
Yeah, even if I was way off and it's 6 bytes per item, that would only get you to a 1 megabyte save, worst case and uncompressed.
I did forget about the custom patterns which are little player-made bitmaps. 32x32, x 8 per player, x 8 players is only 64 kB more.
The most dangerous assumption you're making is they're storing all the information in a rational format :snap:
Fun story. I've worked on a few official localizations in my day. Most visual novels have a "skip read text" function. Most index the lines/scenes in some way and just mark them in the master save file. I opened up the master save since it seemed weirdly big and found a complete copy of the entire script. It was recording every single line of the game in the save file, and when you loaded the game, it created a hash value for every line, and checked that hash for whether or not it should be skipped. The hashes weren't even fucking unique.
Programmers are the stupidest.
+7
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
The "if it's stupid but it works it isn't stupid" school of programming.
It technically didn't work though! Tons of lines were improperly being marked as previously read, and the simplest unit test would have shown that. But nobody noticed because you'd have to turn on Skip Text at a random point, and the worst failure would be skipping a line or two.
So more like "if it's stupid, and nobody notices that it doesn't work..."
Damn it why does Spyro go on sale after I blew through my birthday funds? I'd like to say I'm strong and resist temptation but the reality is my backlog now has a purple dragon in it.
If previous Atlus games (games which can be played on other hardware, without adding additional elements) were ported to the Nintendo Switch, would you want to play then? Select all of the titles below that you would like to play on the Nintendo Switch.
Port of “Revelations: Persona”
Port of “Persona 2: Innocent Sin / Eternal Punishment”
Port of “Persona 3,” “Persona 3 FES,” and “Persona 3 Portable”
Port of “Persona 4” and “Persona 4 Golden”
Port of “Persona 5” and “Persona 5 Royal”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei IV”
Port of “Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse”
Port of “Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner” series
Port of “Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers”
Port of “Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha” series
Port of “Etrian Odyssey” series
Port of “13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim”
Port of “Persona Q”
Port of “Catherine: Full Body”
Port of “Odin Sphere Leifthrasir”
Port of “Dragon’s Crown Pro”
I do not want to play any on the Nintendo Switch
[pedant]Uhhh.
I don't want to play Persona 3 AND Persona 3 FES AND Persona 3 Portable.
Nor do I want to play Persona 4 AND Persona 4 Golden.
Nor do I want to play Persona 5 AND Persona 5 Royal.
I only want to play the BEST version of each.
(Actually Persona 3 is a legit choice since each version has tradeoffs.)
Edit: Also I'm assuming Persona Q2 being left out was unintentional.
I played through and 100%ed Timespinner over the past week, and that’s a damn good little game. Significantly draws from SotN for its structure and gameplay, but tightens things up mechanically and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. Getting all the built in achievements took me about 13 hours, including an incredibly rapid New Game+ run on Hard for some final bits (first playthrough was roughly 11 hours, so).
Highly recommend if you’re looking for a good Metroidvania. It’s like this game looked at Symphony of the Night and said, “What if we stripped it down some?” while Bloodstained went for, “What if we added a billion new systems and items?”
I echo the sentiment that I'd pretty much buy that entire lineup for Switch and spend glorious hours playing them all again.
Heck, the Switch, for me, is becoming as much a retro gaming machine as it is a current one. My last installed games were the NES Collection, SNES Collection, Genesis Collection, FF7, FF8, and Romancing Saga 3, and I've felt that everyone one of those was 100% worth the reinvestment.
Not sure how you'd port Etrian to the Switch but I'd sure as heck buy them again.
With the 3DS done I hope they find a way forward for that series. Keep it going...it's some good stuff, I love the class mechanics and the design on abilities and turn order and crazy combos.
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yeah, my entire AC experience has been "how far off regular clock time do i need to be for this to analogous?"
like the majority of my play time is between 11pm and 3am so... i've never had my device set to the "correct" time while playing AC.
Even if you can't time travel I'd think they'd at least let you set an initial offset like that.
Not sure whether this is directly related to that:
I mean, the only reason I'd want a backup, personally speaking, is in case something happens to my data. Sounds like this may do the trick.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
They released their Japanese online consumer survey for 2020
and finally at question 47 you get:
People act like you can't just hold the systems close together for 5 seconds and transfer the save over.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
Inject them right into my bones.
I like doing this kind of napkin math.
You could store an Animal Crossing object with two bytes pretty easily, but probably need a third byte for additional properties.
00000000 00000000 00000000
The red part is enough bits for 16,383 objects, which should be more than enough for everything in Animal Crossing. Object 63 is a red shirt, object 259 is a metal desk, object 6,755 is a stegosaurus tail bone, etc.
The blue part is to store the object's rotation. Two bits are all you need. 00 = north, 01 = east, 10 = south, 11 = west.
The green part is to store any other data about the object. If it's a radio or TV, is it turned on? If it's a table, has it been customized by Cyrus to be blue? If it's a pile of turnips, how many are in that pile? The interpretation of this data changes based on what the object is, so 45 attached to a pile of turnips might mean something different than 45 attached to a couch, the code knows how to deal with it.
So if an object is 3 bytes, how many spaces are there in the game to hold those objects? Well...that gets technical.
But it's not just 5120 tiles x 3 bytes, because in Animal Crossing, some objects can sit on top of each other, like a table with a teapot and a photograph on it. In New Horizons if you can completely fill your outdoors with tables piled with books and knicknacks, you essentially have to double the number of objects that can be stored outside. 5120 tiles x 3 bytes x 2 objects = 30,720 bytes outdoors.
New Leaf could have 10 villagers at once, and villager homes are 6x6, so 36 tiles. However, you can also hang items on the wall, which adds 24 more potential objects (ignoring the door), and as above you can stack some items on top of others, so that's 36 x 2 + 24 = 96 spaces, x 3 bytes x 10 homes = 2880 bytes for villager homes.
On a wiki I found that the player's total home floor space can end up at 320 tiles, with 142 tiles of wall space. 320 x 2 + 142 = 782 spaces, x 3 bytes = 2346 bytes for one player home, but 8 can live together in New Horizons, so that's 18,768 bytes.
New Leaf had a model home showcase area with space for 48 homes to tour. I don't know if the game saved all of these completely, or always used the internet to go grab them. If they were actually saved locally, that's 112,608 bytes. Not sure if New Horizons will have this feature but we'll add it anyway.
Then you have all of the stores and museum and such, which even if they aren't player-interactive do need to have some info stored, like what's being sold in the shop or what museum pieces you've found. Heck, the museum had four 8x8 "exhibition" rooms you could fully customize like your own house. Without going to to the trouble of figuring out the precise amount of what's saved there, we could easily add ~12 8x8 rooms worth of stuff, which is 5,760 more bytes.
TL;DR adding up all the space and multiplying it by 3 bytes comes to about 170,736 bytes.
But this is an absolute worst case scenario, and uncompressed too.
Each player has about 560 item slots (20 in pockets in New Horizons, 180 in regular closet space, and a New Leaf patch added a "secret storeroom" with 360 more slots). If every item in those slots takes up 3 bytes and there are 8 players, that's 13,440 more bytes.
Most of the rest of the data that would need to be stored is probably negligible by comparison. To some extent, every one of the 300+ animals has a memory, whether they've lived in your town or not, probably some tracking to make sure they don't repeat themselves to you too often, remembering things you've told them or a past quest they gave you etc. Every animal wears certain clothes which can change. Every room in the game has a wallpaper and carpet. Your catalog could be a simple true/false bitfield of whether you've seen each item in the game or not. Every space on the ground tracks how much grass or dirt is there. But all of these should be a matter of bytes, not megabytes.
All of this is to say...
We could add a whole bunch to what was already calculated and round up and say it's 500,000 bytes. Which is 500 kilobytes, which is only half a megabyte.
Poking around the internet I see what purport to be New Leaf save files at 84 kB (empty town with fully upgraded shops) and 511 kB (somebody's random town they were sharing) so I think the numbers work out. Original Cube Animal Crossing took up a whole Memory Card 59 which is 512 kB.
Earlier I had estimated tens of megabytes but it really should be super tiny.
I'd half expect them to ruin Etrian Oddessy by forcing you to draw maps with the controller. A good automap sacrifices some fun of the series but its not worth the hassle without a stylus. Although still being able to drop custom notes is good.
You *can't* do this with Animal Crossing because its not a traditional save, as it doesn't stick the data within profiles. Until they come up with whatever solution the island is locked to the console, they had to put warnings on the game box to that effect in some regions.
Yeah, even if I was way off and it's 6 bytes per item, that would only get you to a 1 megabyte save, worst case and uncompressed.
I did forget about the custom patterns which are little player-made bitmaps. 32x32, x 8 per player, x 8 players is only 64 kB more.
Oh right, I got it mixed up.
Which is even MORE baffling, since Vita was a disappointment even in Japan, and it was relatively easy to port stuff from there to the PS4.
To my knowledge we don't know anything yet about building houses. We don't even know how shops will work, if you take a boat to the mainland or what (seems likely). All we know is you can place objects anywhere, like sofas or TVs etc. Not necessarily houses.
Port of “Dragon’s Crown Pro”
Uh yes please. Throw a new Grim Grimoire in there too kthxbye
I love both of those games so much.
The most dangerous assumption you're making is they're storing all the information in a rational format :snap:
Fun story. I've worked on a few official localizations in my day. Most visual novels have a "skip read text" function. Most index the lines/scenes in some way and just mark them in the master save file. I opened up the master save since it seemed weirdly big and found a complete copy of the entire script. It was recording every single line of the game in the save file, and when you loaded the game, it created a hash value for every line, and checked that hash for whether or not it should be skipped. The hashes weren't even fucking unique.
Programmers are the stupidest.
I've bought Odin Sphere three times and would probably buy it again on switch.
I think it would be my 4th as well!
GIVE ME A SEQUEL!
If it's stupid and it works it's still stupid and you're lucky.
Can't remember the number on that maxim offhand
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
It technically didn't work though! Tons of lines were improperly being marked as previously read, and the simplest unit test would have shown that. But nobody noticed because you'd have to turn on Skip Text at a random point, and the worst failure would be skipping a line or two.
So more like "if it's stupid, and nobody notices that it doesn't work..."
I really enjoyed its moody, post-apocalyptic, Hindu-inspired atmosphere.
I'm not as big a fan of the sequel, but I did really enjoy the final dungeon.
I feel like NBA2k's Switch save takes up 5 GB due to a whole lot of "if it's stupid but works" just-go-with-it programmer logic.
[pedant]Uhhh.
I don't want to play Persona 3 AND Persona 3 FES AND Persona 3 Portable.
Nor do I want to play Persona 4 AND Persona 4 Golden.
Nor do I want to play Persona 5 AND Persona 5 Royal.
I only want to play the BEST version of each.
(Actually Persona 3 is a legit choice since each version has tradeoffs.)
Edit: Also I'm assuming Persona Q2 being left out was unintentional.
That said, this is heartening!
Highly recommend if you’re looking for a good Metroidvania. It’s like this game looked at Symphony of the Night and said, “What if we stripped it down some?” while Bloodstained went for, “What if we added a billion new systems and items?”
Heck, the Switch, for me, is becoming as much a retro gaming machine as it is a current one. My last installed games were the NES Collection, SNES Collection, Genesis Collection, FF7, FF8, and Romancing Saga 3, and I've felt that everyone one of those was 100% worth the reinvestment.
Dancing all night? Persona 4 Arena?
Right in my bones.
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With the 3DS done I hope they find a way forward for that series. Keep it going...it's some good stuff, I love the class mechanics and the design on abilities and turn order and crazy combos.