Frame drops and horrible gameplay lag compromise

[TheDryIce]

I've been playing metal slug 3 a lot since it's release, and I've come to notice how the game just stutters and it makes it damn near impossible to play. Many people have posted with the same issues and I have found a potential compromise to actually play the game with no frame drops. I'm also not talking about the actual game slowdown that was present in the arcade version and various ports since then. I know this is a part of the game but the fact that my game lag horrifically and is easily noticed because it slows down the game sound as well.

I'm not very experienced in editing game files but I figured there had to be a reason for this problem because some people are also stating that they do not have any frame drop/sound lag issues. During the first week of release I read a fix to the instantaneous launch crash that was caused by changing the game resolution. The fix I read was to change your UserDefault.xml file back to the default resolution (I think something like 640x480) and then change the file properties to "read-only". This small edit caused my game to run perfectly, and I still cannot understand why. I have since discovered that the difference between running the game with the frame drops and sound lag and it running perfectly, is changing the UserDefault.xml between read only and non read only.

This leads me to believe that there is some form of write issue with the data in that file, and allowing the game to change it whenever it wants causes extreme lag. I have little understanding of coding in any form so I can't tell why it is that this would happen, but I know for sure that if I want to play the game with no lag, I change the file to read-only, and I am unable to submit any high score to the leaderboards (makes perfect sense though) leaving me to ask myself, do I want to play the game for personal enjoyment or do I want to play competitively? And depending on what I answer, I am forced to deal with lag in order to submit a high score, though if you read my other post, I do know how to submit any score I wish, I just feel like inputting whatever score I actually achieved in a smooth game is somewhat worthless because the very method I use is what the cheaters at the top of the leaderboards are using themselves.

I hope I can get the attention of DotEmu because there really needs to be someway to stop the game from lagging like all hell just because it has to change some values in an xml document. If anyone knows a way to maybe make my file write faster or without destroying my FPS I'm open to your methods.

[pablofsi]

Nice supposed find, can anyone confirm so DotEmu can fix this?

[Marcus]

That somewhat makes sense on why I was having almost no stutters, as I have the system, including %appdata% and Steam, installed on SSD (in fact, my HDD died weeks ago but that's different story).

Maybe I will test later with my external HDD, maybe.

[Swagnemite779]

tbh as long as i still earn achievements idc

I really hope this gets patched soon though, it's sad to see that my computer can play a fairly high end game like Lords of Shadows 2 yet it can't play something as old and basic as metal slug XD

[Swagnemite779]

where is this UserDefault.xml file located btw? is it in the steamapps folder anywhere?

I've tried performing searches and i can't find anything, I even did it in the regular Steam folder...

[Evilnapkin]

Originally posted by marko:

You think single player is bad, try co-op, lol. It's miserable lag, slowdown, stuttering in almost every match I played online. They advertise the multiplayer aspect, but you can tell barely any effort went into it. They don't even have a way to find public games besides this shoddy thread that is stickied.

Online play for games like this are always crappy. I don't even know why it was included. You can't put games that require twitch reflexes into an online setting where latency is an issue and expect there to be no problems. It's why "Street Fighter IV", while being enjoyable enough online, cannot be truly competitive in that environment. You do an input, it has to bounce it off the other play first and match game states when you made that input, and both of you were looking at something different when it happened so it always feels wrong to someone.

It's the same thing with Metal Slug, except it tries to slow down/stutter to reduce the difference between what both players are looking at, and the lag is just because you're playing over a connection that's online, instead of LAN or two guys hooked up to one console in front of the same TV.

[**Neorz Tormeno ♿︎☢]

where is UserDefault.xml located?, after years, the game still has frame drops at least in the version of Amazon games installed on an HDD, what a crap...