Mods Improve FPS, Controls for Nights into Dreams on PC

A modder has hacked the PC version of Nights into Dreams to increase its framerate and improve its controls — just in time for the 27th anniversary of the original Saturn game’s launch in Japan, which is today.

The modder, Colon D, uploaded two submissions to game modification repository Game Banana last week: one that increases Nights’ framerate from 30 frames per second to 60, and one that removes deadzones from the analog input.

The framerate mod can be downloaded here while the input mod can be downloaded here.

The pages describe that users must first install a mod loader called Reloaded II to use them.

Colon D uploaded a video to YouTube showing off the improvements:

In the comments of that video, the modder gave some background into how and why she developed the improvements.

“Normally a 60 FPS mod would take a lot of effort, this one did not,” Colon D said. “It was made on accident whilst I was making the Input mod.”

She went on to describe the strange way he found the game checking for inputs:

“Whilst I was making the Input mod, I looked at things input was used for, I noticed one of the things being the Replay data. I found it strange that it was updating every frame with two sets of input. Continuing onwards, I noticed that the amount of times input was being checked was always a multiple of 2, which is also strange, but I moved on. When I got onto trying to replicate the Visitor’s animation slowing down when moving slower, I needed a timer, and I found some, but they all were only ever even numbers. I decided to look into why, and found that the game’s main loop updates everything twice.

“So I changed it to only update everything once, and told the window to wait for less time in between frames, and was extremely surprised to see that the game just works at 60 FPS.”

— Colon D

The PC version of Nights, released in 2012, was based on an enhanced port made for the PS2 in 2008 that featured sharper graphics, widescreen support and some content from the Saturn demo disc Christmas Nights. But it supposedly is locked to 30 frames per second.

“It really seems to me that they programmed the game for 60 FPS, and maybe the PS2 couldn’t render that fast so instead they decided to limit the framerate to 30 and just call the update function twice,” Colon D said.

The framerate mod was “only one day’s worth of effort,” according to her, but the input mod took several days’ worth:

“For the Input mod I needed to find three deadzones, disable them, find the Visitor’s speed and angle, change the speed function so that it is limited by how far the stick is pushed, find out how animation is updated, implement a custom way to slow down animations, and find the animations that are related to the player’s movement. Not easy, but I am happy with the result, and I’m happy that the 60 FPS mod just so happened to accidently occur. I certainly had no plans on doing a 60 FPS mod if it weren’t that easy.”

— Colon D

Colon D said she intended make the PC version feel more like the original Saturn game, even though she’d only learned about Nights into Dreams a few months ago, putting perhaps a dozen hours into playing the Saturn and PC versions.

“From my limited experience, I think the Input mod does a pretty good job of emulating how the Saturn version felt,” Colon D said. “There are some areas I dislike, I think moving the Visitors downhill on PC feels jittery, I don’t know how to solve that. But for flying Nights, removing the deadzones seems to make a big difference to me.”

Colon D uploaded several other smaller mods for Nights into Dreams last week, including a fix for Jackle’s Cape to not use the prototype model, a skip for the game’s introductory cutscene, the ability to customize the date and time in the game, and a fix that turns the letters B and E on the level rating indicator from upside-down to right-side up.