Peter “Durante” Thoman, a man who’s known for helping fix games like Dark Souls, Stranger of Sword City, and Tales of Symphonia, has helped Xseed fix the PC version of Little King’s Story. In 2016, the company hired Durante to assist in repairing various issues and, as a result, Little King’s Story is now repaired and experiencing a relaunch.
Durante appeared on the Xseed Tumblr to go over all of the things he did for the PC version of Little King’s Story. He noted that it was built on a custom engine and decided its overall performance, intermittent stuttering, and 60fps mode issues needed repairs. For overall performance, he used caches to prevent state changes unless absolutely necessary, improving overall performance by over 50%. Stuttering issue candidates where found with Nvidia NSight and addressed. Because of how the central NPC simulation code works, arbitrary framerate support was impossible, so instead Durante worked on locked 60fps. He worked at framerate-dependent speed mismatches to fix NPC and animal movement, hardcoded object, and simulation speeds. In addition, he applied MSAA anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, transparency supersampling, shadow caster options, Xinput controller analog directional control support, and other adjustments, as well as a new launcher to support these new options.
Little King’s Story is available for the Wii, PlayStation Vita, and PC. In honor of the relaunch, the PC version is 40% off on Steam and The Humble Store until February 9, 2017.
