Pause Cutscene Trigger

Pause cutscene trigger, or pause triggering, is a bug that allows Jak to initiate the audio of a cutscene without entering the cutscene itself.

The trick was patched in the OpenGOAL PC port of the game by Dass because it would cause occasional crashes. "The console version does not crash because the PS2 IOP can handle null derefs."

Technical

I don't think anybody knows the exact reason for that trick, but it's very likely related to a bug in how the main CPU and the "overlord" driver running on the I/O processor are synchronized. In OpenGOAL, the timing of all this stuff is a lot different, since modern PCs are a lot faster. Maybe you have to pause while a certain thing is loading, and on console, that might be a window of multiple frames. But on PC, the loading is so fast that there's no window.

Some the windows aren't tied to the PC speed - like the fire canyon one, since the game is checking the position once per frame. But stuff related to loading/sound is basically running independently and could be quite a bit different between opengoal/console. Which is kind of a nightmare for us, since on PC, it may run way faster, triggering bugs that were in the original game but could never happen on original hardware.

- Water111