Emulation: A look at Yuzu’s October 2020 Progress Report – Controller Profiles, better Rumble, Pokemon Time Fixes & rendering/NVDEC improvements among others! taikhogame.com

admin

Despite the odd case of Yuzu’s Nintendo Switch Online implementation that got axed a few hours after it was announced, October has been a pretty fruitful month for the emulator. In this article, we’re going to look at Yuzu’s October 2020 progress report together with the games that have seen tangible improvement!

A look at the most important stuff in Yuzu’s latest progress report

Perhaps the best way to describe Yuzu’s latest progress report is by using the phrase jam-packed. This is because it contains details about improvements in a wide array of areas including HID (controller) functionality, fixes to Pokemon Sword & Shield, the obligatory rendering & NVDEC improvements together with miscellaneous bug fixes to make everything work a bit better!

Despite cut-scenes being around for decades, they’re still used in some titles and now, they’re working in Ni No Kuni and other titles!

Obviously, touching on so many areas rendered the progress report pretty lengthy so for those who would rather have a summary, we’ve got you covered as this list covers the primary points of what the Yuzu team was up to recently:

  • Controller Profiles have been properly implemented
    • Now, you can easily swap between different controller schemes through a drop-down menu similar to emulators such as Dolphin
  • Modifier Buttons are now working properly – this allows one to set the maximum ‘pressing’ value of digital buttons to less than 100% allowing for easy walking/sneaking in some titles
  • The Rumble feature has been greatly improved as it’s more more accurate and works for all players not only the first one
  • As many Pokémon games, including Pokémon Sword & Shield, keep track of real time to determine the weather, berry spawning and whatnot, Yuzu has implemented a temporary solution that allows you to set the time within the emulator

    FE3H fans rejoice as the game’s now working better in Yuzu!

    • While this is not a permanent solution, it’s a step up from loading a new save in Pokémon Sword & Shield only to find that nothing changed!
  • The Vulkan renderer has received some regression fixes benefiting both Nvidia & AMD users with the GLASM (assembly shaders) code gaining robust buffer operation support in the way it’s done in GLSL which helps Nvidia GPU users quite a bit
  • NVDEC, which is Nvidia’s video decoding functionality found within the Switch’s Tegra X1 SoC, is now working better with titles like Ni no Kuni displaying their cut-scenes properly
  • Reconnecting controllers now works properly, multi-core functionality is now enabled by default, asychronous shaders now determines the amount of threads to use differently and various other minor improvements & bug fixes

Games which have seen improvement recently

Fancy playing some Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity on your PC? If so, Yuzu’s got you covered as the demo’s working despite the full game not being out yet!

Over-the-board improvements usually bring improvements to a whole slew of titles and this time, it’s no exception with the following games seeing some form of improvement:

  • Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 & Hollow Knight – Rumble is now working
  • Pokémon Sword & Shield with the aforementioned time-setting feature
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses – improved stability
  • Super Mario 3D All-Stars – the game is still not rendering but it’s pretty close although work on the texture cache still needs to be done
  • Luigi’s Mansion 3 – stability has been improved
  • Ni No Kuni & Onimusha: Warlords – cutscenes are now displaying properly
  • Pikmin 3: Deluxe Demo is now playable
  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Demo is playable

Conclusion

You may read Yuzu’s full progress report in all its glory by following the link below. Yuzu’s development may also be supported financially on Patreon which allows one to use Early Access builds with features not present in public builds if one donates $5 or more.

Yuzu’s October 2020 Progress Report: https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-progress-report-oct-2020/

Yuzu’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam

Note: All images in this article are from the progress report linked.