FF4 - Complete Collection graphics issues that prevent game from being playable

[pal1000]

1.Battle menu options are mot visible.

2. Characters dialogues cannot be seen.
3. On screen text during cut-scenes is sometimes partially invisible (acceptable bug).
4. Blue garbage with lagging effect is shown on screen when Blue Fangs are used; I saw it at the begging of the game; similar effects might happen when magic is used, especially lightning based, JPCSP has laggings with that as well. I didn't test the game long enough to see for certain. Not a serious bug. What I like about PPSSPP over any other PSP emulators are these:
   • Is light in terms of both RAM and CPU;
   • The save state feature is working properly.
     If at least the first 2 of above issues are fixed, I may consider switching from JPCSP to PPSSPP when I begin FF4 - Interlude.

[daniel229]

1,2,3 can be fixed with buffered rendering off,if you have nvidia graphics card.

[Cepheidsong]

I'm not sure the exact issue (and I do not have Nvidia so Buffered Rendering off does not fix it for me), but it seems like something is on top of the text/menu screens. Like the background overlaps on top of them. Thus blocking the text.

But if Buffered Rendering affects it, pertaining to Nvidia (maybe their OpenGL?) is it just that maybe the section of text/menu is just not loading into memory/ram properly?

I am still new at learning but trying to help debug, so I am just thinking of what might cause it.

[unknownbrackets]

It could also be affected by settings like texture scaling and SSAA, etc. Possibly mipmapping could affect it.

I'm using a GeForce 9800 GT, and buffered rendering off makes it visible. There's weird flickering though. Using an older driver still from October 2012.

It is very possible that it's just doing some render/copies that aren't yet supported from VRAM.

-[Unknown]

[Nezarn]

At last boss even the battle background is broken (its animated, btw i have a geforce gts 450 and im using an old driver too 296.10 i think (3xx.x drivers suck, i get a lot of dx11 crashes with games) comparison: ppsspp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dYdUYDuW6c psp(its not my video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83vCkplpsMw

[unknownbrackets]

Some of these problems are most likely bezier/splines, which this game definitely uses: http://report.ppsspp.org/temp/recent/game/NPJH50414_1.01

-[Unknown]

[hrydgard]

Yup that's beziers/splines alright. Need to figure those out one of these days...

[unknownbrackets]

So, this is crashing for me in the bezier code.

What happens is, it's got 8x8 patch divisions, and 13x13 num patches. Each quad requires 4 * (4 * 2 + 1 * 4 + 3 * 3 + 3* 4) bytes of space if I've got it right.

That's ~1.5 MB of vertexes, which is sometimes more than there's space for (maybe some of the values above are higher somtimes even...)

-[Unknown]

[solarmystic]

@unknownbrackets

Reported here by @thedax and myself, multiple times, sometime ago, which @hrydgard took note:-

https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/issues/660#issuecomment-25018116 https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/issues/660#issuecomment-25026415

Enabling LQ beziers/splines is the way to go for now.

[hrydgard]

Hm, ok. I think we calculate the subdivision amount wrong for larger-than-4x4 bezier patches. In fact the whole bezier code should probably be reworked so we don't subdivide each 4x4 on its own, but work "globally" across the patch instead, like spline patches.

[solarmystic]

I think this issue report can be closed now, most of the issues detailed in the report have been dealt with, except perhaps for the visual imperfections visible when certain spells are cast, e.g. Firaga.

The text issue has been completely fixed in recent builds, the hack isn't even required anymore for this game.