Demon's Souls Glitches

[IbanPetrov]

<Bubble in world3-2 (second tower before boss)
RPCS3.log.gz

PS3
RPCS3

boss cap/hood or what is
PS3

RPCS3

layer ground in world 4-2(begin)

Round shield

Weird effect(rare)
RPCS3.log.gz

[isshininu]

Yes,
Also mentioned here:
#3088 (comment)

[kd-11]

These look like some kind of memory corruption or something. I certainly have never encountered any of them, with the exception of the first one which I could have missed. It is known that sometimes the game is not sending geometry for drawing (like the invisible soldier shield) but the cause is still unclear. The last picture is definately memory corruption (there are no easy ways around the root cause, it is triggered by warping using archstones and the proper fix is currently very slow). Are any of these persistent across restarts of the emulator? i.e save and quit, shut down rpcs3, restart and load back the save

[isshininu]

For example, invisible bubble in world 3-2 (first screenshot) persistent between all versions of emulator.

[kd-11]

First screenshot looks like the game didn't even draw it at all. This may be a bug in cell where the game thinks the bubble isn't there, or generates the draw geometry outside the viewable area, or a vertex bug in rsx which is less likely since one shield is also affected, but all other shields render correctly. The corruption after warping isn't going away any time soon unfortunately. Requires some rewrites in the emulator's memory manager with features that are usually not exposed by the operating system.

[Parthorisian]

For this game[blus30443] this kind of distortion(i got sometimes something like that or this, like last 8th screenshot) isnt persistent
kd-11 wrote

save and quit, shut down rpcs3, restart and load back the save

then image turns back to normal
ground layer still missing for 3rd floor of world 4-2 cave

[YaPeL]

I'm closing #3088 in favour of this more broad issue

[kd-11]

Retest and update for all reported issues here.

[YaPeL]

Soldier shield still missing, tested on opengl, default config except for "Write Color Buffers."

[isshininu]

I'm afraid "bubble" issue is not fixed.
Tested on RPCS3 v0.0.5-7177-9e380a4a4

[dukenukemx]

I'm having the same issue.

[dunestorm333]

Any ETA's for a fix?

[Parthorisian]

Two years passed and still no fix for this bug(

[Asinin3]

If you want to see visual issues looked at then you should be providing Renderdoc captures and RRC captures (to take a RRC, just open RPCS3's debugger and click RSX capture when you see the issue ingame) make sure you compress the captures though e.g with 7zip LZMA2 Ultra, it makes the files much smaller. Are we even sure that all the issues are still there?

[dunestorm333]

Here is my RRC

[RevenantX]

If you want to see visual issues looked at then you should be providing Renderdoc captures and RRC captures (to take a RRC, just open RPCS3's debugger and click RSX capture when you see the issue ingame) make sure you compress the captures though e.g with 7zip LZMA2 Ultra, it makes the files much smaller. Are we even sure that all the issues are still there?

Yes. Tested on v0.0.6-8368 Alpha [2019-07-13] . Issue still here

[RevenantX]

my RRC.
BLES00932_20190714181301_capture.zip

[arkbg1]

@Parthorisian is this common for RCPS or indicative of a dead project? My gf and I just started DeS after I guided her through DaS, is there anything we could do to get RCPS3/DeS help?

[mavethee]

@arkbg1 RPCS3 is not dead :v Just head to RPCS3's discord, but if your problem will be solved depends on that if it's fixable ;)

[kd-11]

This bug happens very rarely and is not simple to fix. It is therefore not very high priority since most players will never even notice the missing blob in that one area. Compared to the other hundreds of bugs, instability and missing features, this is a relatively minor problem. Will it get fixed? Sure, but not before we have other more serious problems squared out.

[RevenantX]

@kd-11 well invisible soldier shield - is always invisible. 100% reproduce...

[kd-11]

Yea, its the only shield affected though. The problem is that it seems to not actually have been sent to the graphics card at all, the game considers the shield to be invisible but present. This means debugging as a visual bug hit a dead end early on in this game's emulation and disassembling the eboot to find the conditions that trigger this is not easy.

[YaPeL]

@kd-11 so the shield issue its unreated to this one?? I'm gonna re open the other ticket then.

[kd-11]

I think its related though. I think in all of these some check is happening and the game thinks the geometry is not there. Or there is some kind of glitch that happens to just work on retail PS3, the firmware for retail can vary quite a bit and some releases have per-game hacks in the sprx files. I'll self-assign this one and review in the next fortnight, the emulator has changed a lot since this game was worked on two years ago.

[Parthorisian]

kd-11 wrote

happens very rarely
Yea, its the only shield affected though

WtF? I can clearly see all these 3 missing textures(bubble, cave floor and boss hat) excluding round shield though, between all versions of "official" master builds, since december 2017! Why just not consider to mark reason of this bug as unfixable for now?

[jokoputera]

is it solved with the latest release ?

[javsp]

is it solved with the latest release ?

No.

[SlippyGuy]

The projectiles that Storm King fires are also invisible, making the fight more frustrating.

You can see it in this video here at 3:20: https://youtu.be/2KBnPuncULY?t=200

Although it is old, the issue still persists in the current build like these other missing graphics and probably happens due to the same problems as the others. I'm surprised I've seen no one mention it before.

[kd-11]

I played through this game recently and the purple projectiles were visible if that is what you're talking about.

[SlippyGuy]

There should be large arrow-like projectiles that create the purple effects, like in this video of the original: https://youtu.be/tENmFe09bOE?t=252

In the first video I posted showing the error you can actually see the air-trails which would accompany the projectiles flying through the sky, just not the projectiles themselves.

[kd-11]

Ok, I see it now, although I never noticed they were missing, I always hide in the broken room and snipe from there.

[SlippyGuy]

Haha fair enough.

Are there any plans to fix these graphical issues currently? They are the last few things that are keeping this title from being basically perfectly emulated as far as playability goes, although I understand that they are low priority and time may be best spent elsewhere.

[kd-11]

Yea, the problem is that if it takes more than 3 days to figure out what's going on, I have to move on to something else. The main blocker for me last time was that the mod tools for DS1 could not properly open the DeS models, which I need to do to figure out why the soldier shield is different from the other shields. This would have given me a starting point, but all of them refused to render the 3D model or show me the model's attributes without crashing. I could get some basic info out of them but not much else which made it a dead end. From the emulator point of view the game is "intentionally" passing in values that indicate to scale the object to 0 which is obviously not right. Maybe the DeS modding has come along enough that I could in theory try again and maybe get different results, but I'm not very hopeful for improvements on that front.

[SlippyGuy]

Ah, shame it's such a tricky bug.

Yeah, modding tools at the moment seem to be a very limited debug menu patch. Although if texture mods are available then it might be possible to make a hacky fix for this until the issue is properly solved on the emulator side, or would simple texture mods not fix the issue? The collision boxes are at least all there and work properly.

[theoldsport]

@kd-11 there have been model/animation swap mods for DeS, drop by the souls modding discord if you find the time!- https://discord.com/invite/mT2JJjx
Or check out this writeup- https://www.nexusmods.com/demonssouls/mods/21

Perhaps Dropoff#1639 can help you (he managed to port DeS models to the DaS engine)

[csando]

I will send money to the person who solves this.

No way I am paying for a PS5 just for this game

Edit: Should note I own it on PS3 already, just want to play it at that sweet 4k/60fps. Sony has nothing that interests me on PS5 aside from this title (plus it's just so ugly), so it would be a huge waste of money. I'd rather support the guy who does some magic to make the RPCS3 version 100%.

[griever-gf]

Invisible shield bug is still presents in November, 2020.

[SJalltheway5]

I was able to track down the particular models that are failing to render and edit the problematic weight values of most of them. The edited models seem to render perfectly in RPCS3. I've released what I have so far as a mod for the game. Feel free to check it out:
https://github.com/SJalltheway5/DeS_MissingGeometryFix
https://www.nexusmods.com/demonssouls/mods/39

EDIT: I found the last few meshes that needed fixing. All the missing geometry I'm currently aware of should now be restored via the mod, which I've updated to version 1.00.

[csando]

Wow nice work. Is there a way this could be integrated without needing a mod?
Well done well done

[jokoputera]

Maybe an automatic patch for this particular problem up until developer figure it out?

[csando]

@SJalltheway5 when you complete this work, I will be putting my money where my mouth is, re: my earlier post saying I'll send money to who solves it. I'm no baller but I can afford to send you some hard earned beer money

[Zerowalker]

@SJalltheway5
Yeah same as @csando , even though i already ran the game, i really wanted this fixed, better late than never!
It's very much appreciated, and i am quite interested in how you do it, finding the models and patching them so if you are willing to educate a bit on this it would be awesome;P

[Canzah]

According to @SJalltheway5 on his Nexus page, it seems he fixed all remaining issues.

[csando]

Wow they did. too. @SJalltheway5 is there a way to make this a patch in RPCS3? And are you prepared to take my money? lol

[AniLeo]

Just a heads up, the correct fix for this one is to fix the rendering code directly, not through game specific patch
Maybe @kd-11 knows what's wrong now that there's a mod that fixes it on the game side - even if it's a bug that works by chance on the original hardware, RPCS3 needs to replicate such a thing in order for these to render

[kd-11]

I had it narrowed down to one of the vertex attributes streaming in. Disabling it from streaming (as though the attribute were disabled by the game) completely fixed the issue, but this was obviously incorrect as other games don't expect this, and real PS3 disagrees with the workaround. I'll revisit this later when I have some time, but there are a few "Epic"-level bugs I need to close first.

[csando]

Just a heads up, the correct fix for this one is to fix the rendering code directly, not through game specific patch
Maybe @kd-11 knows what's wrong now that there's a mod that fixes it on the game side - even if it's a bug that works by chance on the original hardware, RPCS3 needs to replicate such a thing in order for these to render

Thank you. My knowledge of this stuff is somewhere between "none" and "almost none". All I know is I am very grateful to all you working on this.

[kd-11]

Looking at the mod information, it seems to replicate the findings I had about bad weights, and adds dummy value for the weights instead of having 0s which causes geometry to collapse like a black hole to an infinitesimal point. I get the feeling the game somehow identifies that the model is missing weights and disables the attribute for real PS3, but I have yet to identify how exactly it does this.

[Zerowalker]

Oh, well it seems like we might be closer to a real solution than we were before, very impressive and many thanks!

But so if i get it right, the models got some data which basically will make it invisible cause the size is just as close to none as possible.
But even though they have that the ps3 still doesn't act upon it, which it should, so something happens with that data before it's actually passed to the ps3 for rendering?
Did i get that somewhat correctly xd?

[SJalltheway5]

Thanks to everyone showing their appreciation, though I absolutely agree with @AniLeo that a mod is not an appropriate long term solution. It was merely intended as a stopgap for players. If it potentially helps in some tiny way to make RPCS3 more accurate, I'm all the happier.

@csando I really appreciate the offer, but I couldn't take any money. I made the mod purely out of love for the game and for the emulator enabling me to play it, and I felt like not sharing would make me a bad person. If anyone has money they feel truly compelled to give away, I would rather see it go to the devs.

As far as creating an RPCS3 patch, I'm sure it's possible to visually yield a similar result by patching the game's executable rather than patching specific game assets, but it's probably not something I'm going to be looking into. I do acknowledge a patch would be more convenient than a mod, but it's currently a bit beyond my capabilities.

[Puxirepublic]

I got the fullscreen artifact dots, it's super rare, when switching the scene and the loading screen ends, it suddenly appeared, only got 2 times by far (played 20+ hours). Thought you might be interested.

Also the log,
RPCS3.log.gz

[Puxirepublic]

Finally beat the game today, and got one last a little surprised for the one last glitch here in the rolling credits screen, it's only showing the fully white screen in the whole time.

log:
RPCS3.log.gz

It's the first game that I have finished in RPCS3, just want to say thanks to all RPCS3's devs work.

[Darkhost1999]

Finally beat the game today

Do you Happen to have save files for this issue. Seeing as you gotta beat the game to get that far having save files can save a ton of time testing.