Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana Receives Big Performance Update, Local Co-op on PC

NIS America announced recently that The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3 would be coming to PC. Though it ran well on PS4, there were still concerns as to how the PC port could fare, especially given how poorly optimized Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana was at launch. Thankfully, the publisher announced that PH3 Games, whose co-founder Durante created the renowned DSfix for Dark Souls on PC, would be collaborating on the port.

Not only that but PH3 Games has also worked on a major new PC update for Ys 8 that’s available now. The update improves the PC version’s performance and addresses several bugs. It also adds a new local co-op mode, which is currently in the experimental phase. Among the many improvements include better frame-pacing and animation sync accuracy across all frame rates.

Monitors with high-refresh rates are also supported and the previous anti-aliasing solution has been replaced with a high-quality screenspace anti-aliasing. Video memory leaks, crashes, etc. have also been fixed. Check out some of the patch notes below. Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana is currently 50 percent off on Steam so if you’ve been putting off playing it, now is finally the time.

Graphics and Performance

• Arbitrary main rendering resolution enabled.
• Improved frame-pacing and animation sync accuracy at all frame rates.
• Improved menu opening / closing behavior.
• Character and enemy animations now correctly timed at 100-plus frames per second.
• Support for high-refresh monitors and over 60 Hz V-sync
• Replaced ineffective anti-aliasing blur filter with high-quality screenspace anti-aliasing.
• Bloom, refraction, and glare post-processing effects now scale with resolution.
• Minimap rendering resolution now adapts to rendering resolution, preventing pixelated map at high resolution.
• Greatly improved quality of menu backgrounds (replacing low-res screen capture).
• Improved standard shadow filtering without performance loss, plus two new, higher quality filter options.
• Added option for rendering additional environment shadows.
• Added supersampling / subsampling option (which also affects secondary 3D rendering).
• Improved shadow rendering performance by preventing unnecessary memory traffic.
• Fixed animation speed of HUD elements at over 30 frames per second (e.g. full health bar).
• Improved the quality of volumetric lighting.
• Implemented HBAO+ ambient occlusion as alternative higher-quality SSAO option.
• Added a draw distance setting which applies to grass / clutter, monsters and NPCs.
• Implemented anisotropic filtering setting.
• Added high-quality texture pack (generated from original sources, partially with AI upsampling, and full mipmaps).
• Character poses in the equip menu now update at over 30 FPS.

Input and User Interface

• Improved camera mouse controls, replacing joystick emulation with direct 1:1 control.
• Movement keys are now individually bindable.
• Added keybinding for walking (slow movement) with keyboard / mouse controls.
• Changed default bindings to fit common usage by PC gamers.

Stability

• Fixed multiple video memory leaks.
• Fixed potential crash when switching between languages.
• Switched to 64-bit build to prevent address space fragmentation issues in long sessions.
• Improved render thread synchronization to prevent specific types of race condition crashes.
• Removed superfluous asset encryption.