3rd Birthday ghosting

[Edvarcht]

Game or games this happens in

ULES-01513 - The 3rd birthay

What area of the game

All the game is affected.

What happens

The character and environment shows like a ghost shadow (as you can see on screenshot 1). This can be fixed by turning on the checkbox "Disable slower effects (speedup)" on the version 1.13.2 (as you can see on the screenshot 3), however on the newest version the only option is "Skip buffer effects" and it creates shadow artifacts (as you can see on screenshot 2). This artifacts also happen on the 1.13.2 version, but on this version they can be fixed by changing the resolution. The bad thing is that the version 1.13.2 does not have RetroAchivements, so I have to choose between playing with good graphics and no RetroAchivements (v1.13.2) or with the ghosting issue and with RetroAchivements (v.1.17.1)

What should happen

Character and environment should not show that ghosting or halo around them.

GE frame capture

No response

Platform

Windows

Mobile device model or graphics card (GPU)

NVIDIA GTX 1600 super

PPSSPP version affected

1.17.1

Last working version

1.13.2

Graphics backend (3D API)

Vulkan

Checklist

• [X] Test in the latest git build in case it's already fixed.
• [X] Search for other reports of the same issue.
• [X] Try resetting settings or older versions and include if the issue is related.
• [X] Try changing graphics settings to determine if one causes the glitch (especially speed hacks or enhancements/replacements.)
• [X] Include logs or screenshots of issue.

[hrydgard]

It's a difficult one. The ghosting is intended and part of the game, so it's hard to get rid of it when emulating things accurately. It's just that it doesn't look very good when rendering at higher resolutions than the game expects - at 1x it's more of a glow than a ghost and looks ok. I don't want to try to reintroduce old bugs to get rid of it.

The option "Lower resolution for effects" might make it look a bit different but probably not great.

One possible solution some kind of game patch that disables the effect but that could have adverse effects in different scenes in the game, hard to predict.

[LunaMoo]

AFAIR "Lower resolution for effects" could easily remove effects it detects by just setting a detected framebuffer size to 0.

Back when I initially played around with it I recall that worked well, but ofc, there's a thing about users activating random settings without understanding what they do which is very common especially among mobile users and while it's acceptable to render at original res without intention, it maybe not so to not render those things at all.

[Edvarcht]

It's a difficult one. The ghosting is intended and part of the game, so it's hard to get rid of it when emulating things accurately. It's just that it doesn't look very good when rendering at higher resolutions than the game expects - at 1x it's more of a glow than a ghost and looks ok. I don't want to try to reintroduce old bugs to get rid of it.

The option "Lower resolution for effects" might make it look a bit different but probably not great.

One possible solution some kind of game patch that disables the effect but that could have adverse effects in different scenes in the game, hard to predict.

Hey, thanks a lot for the prompt response. What I found is that the combo "Mode: Buffered Rendering" and "Disable Slower Effects (Speed Up)" options delete this glow without affecting or breaking the the game. The problem is that the last known version that had this options was the version 1.13.2, the later versions don´t have this options anymore. The option "Lower resolution for effects" seems to not have any result at all.

If some options like those were removed, I understand that you have your reasons to do it, as you mentioned maybe it provoke old bugs or affects more than help. If the options can be reintroduced or a workaround it would be great, otherwise no problem, I appreciate the great work that you and your team have done, it's definitely a remarkable emulator.

I wish I could contribute, however I don't know how to program, I barely knew HTML, so I don't know where to start (any advice is appreciated), but maybe in the future I will be the one to create the patch you mentioned... who knows... Greetings!

[Edvarcht]

AFAIR "Lower resolution for effects" could easily remove effects it detects by just setting a detected framebuffer size to 0.

Back when I initially played around with it I recall that worked well, but ofc, there's a thing about users activating random settings without understanding what they do which is very common especially among mobile users and while it's acceptable to render at original res without intention, it maybe not so to not render those things at all.

Do you mean that the option "Lower resolution for effects" sets the framebuffer size to 0, or that I can set the framebuffer size to 0 on my own? Because when I activate that option, it does not have any effect (Even in "Aggressive").