We all know MGS3 and MGO were full of bugs but I think this explains why...

-excerpt from pcsx2.net's news section-

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Refraction, what have you done? You've changed history. You've created a Time Paradox!

Real Time Clock (RTC) has been recently implemented by Refraction. PCSX2 now takes the current system time from your OS and inserts the value into PCSX2 upon launch, from that point onwards the emulated RTC counts independently from the OS.

So? you wonder, well apart from the BIOS now displaying the correct time and date - you would think this is a minor addition to PCSX2, nothing more than an addition to authenticity? Well you're in for a suprise!

It struck me when talking to Refraction over a cup of coffee, Metal Gear Solid 3 uses system time for various fun aspects of the game - Such as being able to kill The End from old age if you set the RTC 1 year ahead after saving during the battle.

Metal Gear Solid 3 had never done anything under PCSX2, so with the RTC addition to PCSX2 in mind, I popped the disc into my drive, and eureka it booted!! This however was only the beginning of an epic saga between Zerofrog and the Konami programmers!

Zerofrog has spent days wrestling with Konami's ability to push the PS2 hardware to its limits by making zeroGS KOSMOS push the limits of GPU's, Metal Gear Solid 3 certainly loves its post processing! Not only has he managed to get the game looking ..well from absolute garbage to gorgeous, he's also managed to stop Snake from slipping through holes in the universe instantly.

The game still has issues, Snake still manages to find holes in the universe (falls through geometry), and he still likes to get stuck inside trees, rocks or just teleport off the edge of the world (the video demonstrates the latter beautifully!). The game also still suffers from visual issues, such as missing textures and the specular lighting overlay being drawn wrong, hopefully by the time the next incarnation of PCSX2 comes out, these issues will be mostly resolved.

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While remaining it was posted about emulation this explains the glitch problem that has plagued MGS3 and MGO down to the wire. It would seem the post processing done by the PS2 EE just wasn't enough to fill in the holes of the "universe" that people would fall through at random or holes people searched out and found and we as players termed up "glitches".

So basically in a nutshell MGS3 taxed the PS2 so much that basically the Emotion Engine just wasn't powerful enough to finish all the post processing needed by the Real Time Clock matrix along with the texture generator, pixel processor, shader units, etc. to be fully effective.

If anything this means that the PS2 was just barely scraping the minimum system requirements to support the PS2 at all. Possibly the reason we saw slow downs and overdraws. Even a port to the XBox 360 by a differential ratio assessment of the PS2 abilities vs the XBox 360 abilities would literally be this... both systems would not be powerful enough to push the real time clock, post processing, and other graphical components. If anything on a scale the PS3 would be the only system near capable enough to process the real time clock and post processing efficiently enough to prevent "holes" from even happening on a technological standpoint and evaluation.

In analysis this means only one thing by conclusive evidence considered by various players across MGO... MGS3/MGO was a BETA concept engine of what MGS4 would be utilizing in terms of environmental effects, real time clocking of events, and player/cpu interaction on a A.I. level.

While MGS2 used a similar engine to that of MGS3, MGS3's engine did far more than what MGS2's engine was even capable of.

I didnt notice that many bugs in mgs3. The only one i noticed was when your in that warehouse place and you press triangle to jump over the rail, snake actually teleports to the upper level.

That's a perfect example of a "hole". Another is on the Dolinovodno Bridge. If you use the suicide pill at a certain point on the edge of the cliff on the south end right at the cliff at a particular angle, you can fall through the map and run along the river bed. More common and unnoticed is the box in the wall trick.

Clowns are taking over America!!! That statement makes as much sense as the shit I just read. Of course there will be problems when using an emulator, jesus. And Im sure most people will agree, I NEVER had any problems with MGS3 on my PS2. And the claims that the PS2 barely had enough capabilty for most games is retarded. Also, who fucking cares! MGO is gone and has been for some time. thanks for useless, inaccurate information!

Also, WHY in the hell is it that FF12 ran just fine, if MGS3 was a strain for the PS2? FF12 is a MUCH more graphicly advanced, hardware demanding game. Kojima and Square Enix made the best looking games for the PS2, so maybe the rest just didnt try.

It's a whole different engine Zy. Seriously you're comparing and apple to an orange, but your statement holds plenty of water but I'll explain why it's still apples and oranges.

Final Fantasy 12 may have better graphics than MGS3 did but you're forgetting the vastness of the environments used for MGS3. Every "room" in MGS3 was huge. It has an expansive space and depth of field to give a realistic simulated environment. The sky and clouds were simulated in a depth of the field far beyond the map itself. Most games call this the "Gray Void" that lies beyond maps and areas. Final Fantasy 12's "rooms" were small by comparison against those used in MGS3. Where that room's "wall" was where the edge of the field was that you saw. The same is not the case in MGS3. In mGS3 the wall is pretty much far far beyond the map past the cloud textures deep in void area.

You ever noticed many of the "Z" glitches that were posted on YouTube where people were launched many many feet in the air? If that were to happen in a FF12 environment then the person would have only been thrown as high as tallest building's environment and not a thousand feet up like they were in MGS3.

MGS3's engine basically created a realistic environment in a realtime simulation with realistic depth of field and mapping techniques.

Yes emulation is far from perfect but even with the most advanced Athlon 64 CPU and GeForce 8800 series GPU with which they can reproduce the 128bit MIPS Emotion Engine CPU used in the PS2 and the Graphics Synthesizer using a processing code translation method called dynamic recompiling, they can reproduce the exact processing speeds used with a 99% comparability rate meaning they can reproduce a PS2 in emulation by about 99% speed wise with the correct hardware.

That is where people using debugging tools will finally see where the PS2 was lacking at times and it has shown. With those tools they basically can see where a CPU post processing buffer was either doing it's job or was overloaded past it's limiter.

So yes, FF12 does have better graphics but it's the realistic simulated environment of MGS3 that was the real issue. There was just simply too much environment to be crammed into the PS2's post processing buffer and that's why there were "holes". The PS2's post processing buffer was overloaded with so much data at times you might even have seen holes at times like missing textures or missing pieces of the environment. I noticed this plenty of times in various areas. Missing parts of walls, rocks, trees, etc. In general, stuff that should have been there was not there for a few seconds until the buffer could be cleared. Flashing textures or textures that were out of focus where the post process was incomplete and the texture was forced out of process.