Platformer Madness – Alice Returns – in 3D with PhysX

Tweaking the Game

Removing the framerate cap

The frames are capped at 30 … here is a workaround.

• Go to Documents/My Games/Alice Madness Returns/Config
• Open aliceEngine.ini with Notepad (about 1/3 of the way down the list)
• Find MaxSmoothedFramerate and change it to 61 (or 999 to effectively remove it)
• UseVsync should be changed from True to False if you wish to completely disable it for benching.
• Save and exit

Tweaking the gravity and adjusting the combat multipliers

In the AliceGame

• (1) tweak the gravity (default GravityZ is 750). Try playing with lower values for easier jumping; be aware that you cannot just “float” through the game and must actually make some jumps at regular gravity to progress.
• (2) you can adjust the multipliers for damage done by enemies (DamageMultiplierArray[#]) and damage done by Alice (AliceWeaponDamageMultiplier[#)) with # being the difficulty/skill level.

For example, if you set the enemy multipliers at 0 and Alice multipliers at 10-15, Alice takes no damage from enemy NPCs and she does much more damage per hit with her own weapons.

So in a way, you can get Alice to be as powerful as you want by tweaking the files in this game.  Of course, missing a jump or getting hit by some one-hit kill objects will still send you back to the checkpoint for a retry.

Weapons upgrades

In the AliceGame.ini you can also give yourself more “teeth” to upgrade your weapons very early on by making them “cost” less, although it is unnecessary as there are plenty of teeth to find in exploration to upgrade all of Alice’s weapons before the game ends.

The ability to tweak the Alice game to your liking and difficulty level – a choice – give the player a chance to compensate for the jumping and his fighting abilities and it is completely unique to the PC as a platform choice.  Of course, these are “cheats” and would not be used by players wishing to play as the game developers intended..

PhysX

There are three different levels of PhysX available in Alice: Madness Returns – Low, Medium, and High. These settings can only be adjusted by selecting the Options button, then clicking Video from the main menu, not in-game. Each setting results in an increasing level of in-game effects and higher hardware requirements.

PhysX “Low”

On low, all in game GPU-accelerated PhysX effects are disabled.  You have the same lack-of-effects as on the XBox 360 and on the PS 3.

PhysX “Medium”

Medium PhysX enables GPU-accelerated PhysX elements including Dynamic Cloth, Debris Particles, Volumetric Smoke, and Destruction particles.  There is no SPH fluid simulation and this setting is well-suited for medium PCs.

PhysX “High”

High enables all GPU-accelerated PhysX elements enabled within the “Medium” setting as well as the Doom enemy volumetric oil simulation.  The physical simulation of the oily creatures that are spawned when black “Ruin” NPCs are damaged or killed is particularly demanding on PC hardware. Up to 10 000 SPH fluid particles are colliding with level geometry and reacting to Alice’s movement are being processed simultaneously by the GPU.

Specific Effects requiring PhysX:

Alice Effects

•  Feather effects when Alice double-jumps
•  Feather effects when Alice glides after a double-jump
•  Rock mesh particles when Giant Alice stomps (Chapter 4)

Alice Weapon Effects

•  Rock mesh destruction particles when the Hobby Horse hits the ground the first time
•  Volumetric Smoke sprite particles and floating ember particles when the Pepper Grinder gun is used
•  Glowing peppercorn mesh particles from Pepper Grinder Gun projectile impacts
•  Tea volumetric steam sprite particles when the Teapot Cannon projectile impacts

And the list goes on and on and on.  PhysX is particularly implemented well in this game which in turn can slow down even the fastest PCs when fighting gets intense – especially fighting ruins with the Pepper Grinder.  The volumetric smoke also demands a lot of a PC’s resources as the entire screen will sometimes fill with smoke – and this can sometimes be a bad thing as it is hard for the player to see.

Since Nvidia tested Alice and PhysX on High with a GTX 560 and found it ran about 3-4x faster than on the CPU, we also ran our own tests.

Shifting high PhysX to the even a fast overclocked quad-core i7-920 CPU simply killed our framerates; from locked at sixty FPS to an average of eight which caused this editor to lose an important boss battle and to replay the last section of chapter 1 because of it.  Unfortunately, one can’t fight with framerates tanking and you must exit the game to change PhysX settings for the game.

We generally found that “medium” effects on the CPU were playable except for using the Pepper Grinder in the most intense fights.  If you have to disable PhysX entirely, you might as well play it on a console.  Physics adds quite a bit to the immersion of this game and is probably the richest game in simulated particle effects of all games with hardware PhysX support so far.  This includes the universal debris, bits and chunks of enemies and broken containers, smoke and dust, as well as environmental particles and effects including dynamic bubbles and falling leaves.

Also, APEX Destruction and APEX Clothing modules are utilized to smash objects and to also give realism to hair, clothing and papers.  Destruction is particularly effective in the Giant Alice episode.  However, Alice’s simulated hair and clothing are not even using PhysX.

Conclusion:

The PhysX effects are outstanding and they support the game and the player’s immersion.  We would recommend playing this game at least on medium PhysX settings.  And you may be able to experiment a bit with the AliceGame configuration (.ini) files to try different combinations of PhysX related parameters.  Unfortunately, these effects cannot be disabled individually as in Mafia 2, for example.

A single GTX 560 Ti is generally sufficient to play Alice: Madness Returns on high settings with medium PhysX enabled although you will get slowdowns into the twenties when volumetric smoke covers the entire screen, for example.  In this case, you might consider a dedicated Nvidia GPU just for PhysX and you would then likely be able to play on high.  A single GTX 580 has no such issues with PhysX on high and maxed out settings and there are almost no slowdowns even in the most intense of fire-fights with smoke and oil.

Here are the settings we used (of course we had 3D Vision on when we played in S3D; but that is even more of a resource hog):

We are going to give you our further impressions of Alice: Madness Returns as well as give you a performance evaluation featuring 3D Vision/Surround (1920-5760 x 1080 resolution) featuring the GTX 580 and the 560 TI as well as GTX 560 Ti SLI to run 3D Vision Surround.

This review is only going to focus on the single player content and especially on playing with Nvidia’s 3D Vision (1920×1080). Playing a game in Stereo 3D (S3D) will definitely increase immersion of a good game but nothing can save a real pig of a game if it is a disaster in 2D. Before we look at the merits and flaws of Alice: Madness Returns, we need to look at Nvidia’s 3D Vision and the hardware we used to play it on.