[Tracking Issue] Ratchet & Clank Series

[segevfiner]

Open

• Ratchet And Clank Future: A Crack in Time Freezes Randomly #8653, Random freezes happening on Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction #13888 - Happens in all games AFAIK, has canary patches in the wiki, check each game's page. (See https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=Help:Game_Patches for instructions)
• Flamethrower heavily drops FPS in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction #12058
• Flame breaks upscaling in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time and in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time #12375
• Water glitch in Ratchet & Clank games #12439
• Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty - No audio in the final cutscene  #12830
• Flickering textures in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction #13907
• Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One Graphical Issues #14053
• Cubemaps in later Ratchet games are broken #15427
• Ratchet QForce/FFA can only render one HUD meter at a time #15440

Fixed

• Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction/Resistance: Fall of Man instanced mesh system broken #10754
  • rsx: Implement xform-constant-based instancing #15483
  • If the performance of this on NVIDIA GPUs is bad for you, please open an issue.
• [Regression] Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time [NPUA80966] - Visual Bug #15566
• Ratchet & Clank Crack in time visual issues #15472

Opened this since I really want to play those games in pristine condition, and I'm already monitoring the issues for progress, since others might find this list helpful. If you rather this be placed somewhere else or not at all, let me know.

[Hamtaro30214]

1. Bugged swingshot on infinite fps

When frametime is set to infinite (higher than PS3 Native) Ratchet's ability to swing is circumscribed. The momentum speed is too slow to reach platform in Vorselon's Warship.

FPS_.117.33._.Vulkan._.0.0.32-16430._.Ratchet.Clank_.A.Crack.in.Time.BCES00511.2024-05-08.18-01-15.online-video-cutter.com.1.mp4

Situation gets fixed after limiting fps for example to 60.

FPS_.60.02._.Vulkan._.0.0.32-16430._.Ratchet.Clank_.A.Crack.in.Time.BCES00511.2024-05-08.18-54-47.online-video-cutter.com.1.mp4

2. Falling underground after using deploying weapons

Equipping Tesla Spikes and firing it cause Ratchet to fall under the floor. The player can't move or change the weapon and is forced to load a save. This can also happen while using CryoMine Glove, Groovitron and it happend to me once after summoning Mr. Zurkon.

SPU Decoder set to Interpreter (static) seems to be free from this occurrence

FPS_.1001.33._.Vulkan._.0.0.32-16430._.Ratchet.Clank_.A.Crack.in.Time.BCES00511.2024-05-08.18-35-33.online-video-cutter.com.3.mp4

Other issues:

• Saves are often corrupting after alt + f4, happend to me 7 times in 16h of gameplay.
• Textures of weapons/projectiles are flashing (regresion), but do not cause fps drop.
• Not moving or having active menu still cause freezes.
• The game still crashes frequently on the first planet (Quantos) when the player is trying to save the Fongoid children, where obstacles move over time.

Fixes from the last two years::

• Game no longer freezes in canyon (planet Quantos).
  It was a nighmare to kills five riders and two hydra tank after multiple crashes happening back then.
• Hover boots no longer slow down on jump pads.
• Grinding on rails no longer cause Ratchet to fall.
  In older versions of the emulator setting SPU Decoder to slower one was also fixing the intangible rails.
• Read Color Buffers in Advanced tab fixes black squares over fire to display correctly.

Settings
OS: Windows 11
CPU: i5-12400F
GPU: RTX 4070
RPCS3: 0.0.32-16430-04d6ff27 Alpha | master
Game version: BCES00511 v.01.20

[segevfiner]

I think it might be best to submit those as new issues, this is a tracking issue just for keeping track of the others. So there is a better chance of the maintainers seeing them. Though a maintainer might say otherwise.

I think unlocked FPS bugs are known though and it is simply the game that doesn't support that, and I'm not sure RPCS3 has GameDB still feature to automatically set such settings required for each game and they are documented in the wiki for now

[JimScript]

I'm really hoping that the water glitch gets fixed, as it's really obvious and probably the most widespread graphical issue for the Insomniac engine, as in it's in all the Ratchet & Clank games and most of the Resistance games. Although knowing how much the engine changed over the years, I have to wonder if it's secretly multiple underlying issues across these games. Maybe, maybe not, it seems like it could be how the emulator loads in the procedural textures for the shader, at least that what I got from reading an article saying how Insomniac did some funky things to get their noise textures in.

[kd-11]

The water rendering changed after implementing signed normalization for INT8 textures correctly, but it still looks odd. The problem is the complexity of the shaders in question especially after full decompilation. It's also harder to follow logic due to instruction shuffling. I was however able to identify what the water shader was doing at a high level and found the texture bug that way.
If possible, it would be highly beneficial to identify a game that has broken refraction on rpcs3 but also has a PC port.

[HeartPerfusion]

I just wanted to comment and say thank you so much for finally looking at this. Ive been waiting to be able to replay my old R&C games after losing my PS3 years ago. cant wait till this is complete! Thanks again

[kd-11]

Btw, I need a ToD save for the flamethrower performance investigation. There is a chance it's not fixable but we can at least look into it and figure out why it drops performance so hard.

[Valtekken]

Btw, I need a ToD save for the flamethrower performance investigation. There is a chance it's not fixable but we can at least look into it and figure out why it drops performance so hard.

Will any complete save do? Mine has maxed out weapons and everything else

[JimScript]

Here's a 100% save(minus buying the last armor) on planet Mukow:
BCUS98127_SAVE_9.zip

[JimScript]

The water rendering changed after implementing signed normalization for INT8 textures correctly, but it still looks odd.

It only seemed to change the water in ACIT and beyond, ToD and QFB still looked the same after the update. Could it be that it is a different shader or that it just had different source textures? It does line up with the Forward/Deferred rendering split this series had.

[JimScript]

About #13907, the ToD flickering texture issue, I think it is might actually just be a lack of polygon z-depth accuracy for the whole series. I noticed it in Into the Nexus as well, and when I clipped into a mesh that did it(a jetpack fuel station) I noticed that there were in fact 2 faces very close to each other.
The Jetpack fuel station:

Clipping into the fuel station's panel:

[RibShark]

The canary patches no longer seem to fix the freezing issues; this has been noted on the wiki but there's no indication as to when these stopped working. Does anyone have any idea what build broke them?

[RibShark]

Ended up reverting to before #15483 was merged due to heavy performance issues related to that PR; would probably recommend most NVIDIA users to use build 0.0.32-16436 for now.

[kd-11]

More of a note-to-self:
I have an idea on how to boost NV performance. Needs a new shader cache iteration and custom emitted shader taking into account instanced attributes for streaming. Single draw call emit + CPU buffered data + single flush post-emit. That should at least double throughput if done correctly. That's a big job though, I'll need time.