I've been moaning about the way Konami programm PES for years and it seems they've come to the point of failure.
They've been using the same programming methods since the days of ISS on the playstation back in 1998.
Every game has an internal clock it runs on. On older consoles which would run only on TV sets the programmers would use the v-sync timer for the game's clock (this is an event that fires up every time the monitor is ready to start drawing a new frame). TV sets have a fixed refresh rate (60 for pal and 50 for ntsc) , so this method worked and became a standard practice for console programming. That's also why NTSC versions of ISS would run faster on modded PAL consoles (for those who remember).
The way this method works is the game does all calculations about where the ball would go, the AI, receives player commands etc etc on every v-sync event (60 times a second for PAL). If the next v-sync event comes before the previous is finished the frame is skipped (frame-skipping, momentary pause effect, wrongly described as lag by some people). So the game is optimised to run on 60 "caclulations" per second (or 50 for ntsc). For example the AI calculates the gks every 1/60 seconds.
Enter PCs. Different specs and possibly different refresh rates on monitors. So opitmisation and v-synced clock go out the window. So what do we do. We set a clock on v-sync of 60Hz and enable frame-skipping (that was the case from PES3-PES6). For those that played on CRT monitors with v-sync and a refresh rate of higher than 60Hz it had a LOT of frame-skipping. The game only played smoothly on 60Hz.
All was so and so until "next-gen" PES2008 came, all unoptimised and cumbersome. Konami knew older PCs wouldn't handle is so in a desperate attempt to lower the minimum specs they introduce the "low" 30 fps mode.
Major catastrophy. First off on multiplayer two potential players (one on high and one on low) would run on a differently clocked engine, so when the 30 fps player was hosting the other player would go double speed and vice versa ("fixed" later by a rediculous patch that would lock both on 30 fps).
The second problem is what you describe on this thread. Like I said the GK AI is optimised for 60fps. When the engine goes to 30 fps the next frame may take the ball twice as far as on the 60fps, giving the AI no time to react proeperly. This is also apparent on players losing control of the ball.
Modern games seperate game engine and graphics engine. The game engine (physics, AI, player input etc) use a real-time clock to fix the game's speed. The graphics engine instructs the graphics processor to create a frame as fast as possible as well and the frame is displayed as soon as it's ready. So in essence the game's "world" runs independently of the graphics displayed on screen. So the physics could run on 500 ticks per second and the game at how many fps the gfx card can produce.
After this years feck-up I assume Konami would pull their heads out their arses and modernise their programming methods. This also applies to their data handling and the need to abandon fixed slots and go for a proper dynamic database so that the community can expand the game instead of replacing fixed content. However I find it more possible for them to abandon the PC platform than going through the trouble of reinvening the wheel.
