Klonoa 2 frame pacing issues?

[mettlegear]

I get a pretty solid 144fps in both games, but there is a choppy judder to Klonoa 2 that isn't in Klonoa 1. I wonder if it is a frame pacing issue that the developers can look into? Also, I really wish we could get an option to choose the original cel shaded graphics in K2...the game looks rather flat without them.

[Talon]

Might be due to DOF, first time running it was fine but 2nd time it what shuddering the frames quite often till I turned it down by 1

[Atom]

Yes and it bloody sucks. Sharing my findings from another thread:

Tl;dr: Klonoa 2 has framepacing issues at a fundamental level. Pixel filter or reshade + motion blur + cap to 60/120 hz makes it less noticeable but its there. People generally are not sensitive to these kinds of issues so they get brushed aside, which is a shame.

More detail:

The game's camera motion that tracks the player motion seems to update at a different refresh rate to many of the other animations, including some camera animations (e.g. pans, cutscenes, UI, backgrounds) which can run at arbitary framerates. To make the inherent player-tracking camera jitter less noticeable, you'll to have your refresh rate at a multiple of 30 (or maybe 60 fps) -- I have found good success with 120 fps. Anything else will introduce persistent periodic noticeable stutter. Jitter exists in all versions of the game, even with the PS2 version -- if you look at upscaled footage you'll see the same sort of image instability when Klonoa moves, to the point where I wonder if the game is just the old PS2 version using Unity as a front end. Use the pixel filter, or Reshade with some motion blur to make it less noticeable.

Gsync etc. will not work with K2 because of this -- the game will output frames at the highest refresh rate possible, but it's doing some weird compositing of various other refreshes underneath and the result will look bad. Catherine Classic and Alliance Alive have similar issues. But 60Hz isn't even smooth, as you can see even on other platforms (compare 8:23 and ~31:13 in the below video on a 60Hz display -- K2 has a sort of weird jittery camera movement, even if other animations seem fine).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwzhB9sS9Fk

For the PS2 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN5M6bRhizE

Compare the fluid cutscene camera pan and scrolling clouds here at ~5:00 to the actual gameplay/movement shortly after that, and you'll see it looks more similar to probably what you're seeing on PC in terms of judder. Maybe an old CRT masks the issue and so maybe it wasn't as noticeable on actual PS2 hardware, reshade crt shaders can make it a little less noticeable too.

[loop zoop]

The camera updates its position 60 times per second, which the framers of the ps2 version. It might be a quirk of the ps2 architecture programming they couldn't get around

[mettlegear]

Thanks so much for the info Atom, that's very helpful. Hopefully they can come up with a patch to at least improve it. Still, even with this issue, I am beyond happy to have this remaster.

[Mairo the bear]

I'm extremely surprised this hasn't been brought up more often because this is extremely distracting, especially coming from first game that didn't seem to have any trouble at all.

I can confirm with 120 FPS recording that character movement and camera are both updating around 60 FPS but really often with really bad frame pacing, so even capping at 60 doesn't get rid of the issue, capping at 120 FPS is closest tradeoff between constant stutter and at least trying to be smooth.