Splinter Cell

[AlpyneDreams]

See also: #65

• Works pretty well! Se below for comparison with WineD3D.
• Shadows (Add support for NVIDIA Shadow Buffers #65) are a concern.
• Currently crashes when alt-tabbing because GetClientRect is returning 160x24 for some reason so it just infinitely tries to recreate the swapchain. Maybe the game is making the window this stupid size? I don't know.
• "Shiny textures"

[AlpyneDreams]

• "Shiny textures" may apparently be an issue that exists on d3d9 hardware and is reproduced by d9vk. Will have to look into why that's happening. I think they're in the CIA levels.

[AlpyneDreams]

• I can reproduce the issue in the CIA level
• But not the issue in the Defense Ministry level. That one works fine.
• dgVoodoo has the same issue so it may just be the game is just genuinely broken
  • Probably no point in testing WineD3D, lol

[AlpyneDreams]

• The shiny textures issue is present on GeForce FX+ but not GeForce 4 according to this tech review.
  • There must be either some incorrect behavior or a vendor hack on GF4 that's missing here...
  • It seems like the glitch might still appear for a split second on GF4. Apparently according to Vogons the game chooses render path (multi-pass vs one shader) based on a visibility check in shadow buffers.
  • Currently even for dgVoodoo 2 the only fix is to use a texture mod (in the thread). I think I will have to leave this one unsolved for a while.

[AlpyneDreams]

Note about this game is that neither D3D8 apitrace nor renderdoc+d8vk seem to work. Best I've gotten is D3D9 apitraces of d3d8to9.

[tobiasjakobi]

I've tried the game with the 1.0 release of d8vk, but I can't get shadow buffer mode to work.

I make sure that the game picks up the correct d3d8.dll (by enabling the full HUD and checking the output). So SC is definitely using d8vk and d8vk is using the correct config. The config has d3d8.useShadowBuffers set to True.

Forcing projector mode in the game's INI renders appropriate shadows (light cones are a bit blocky though), in particular the main character is casting a shadow. Switching to shadow buffer mode no shadows are rendered anymore. I'm currently testing the tutorial level, which has a corridor with a big fan, which also acts as light source. In project mode the fan casts a shadow onto the nearby wall, in buffer mode no shadow can be seen.

Going through the commit log the 1.0 release should have support for shadow buffers. So either I'm doing something completly wrong here, or the support got broken at some point.

[WinterSnowfall]

@tobiasjakobi I'm not sure I understand what the problem is. I haven't messed with game settings (it's all on high and max) and am seeing shadows (I'm assuming you were referring to the fan below):

Have you tried running the game with -shadowmode=buffer?

Since this is an UE game, it could also be something that got fixed by #163 which was merged after the 1.0 release. Long story short, we were not exposing D3DPRASTERCAPS_ZBIAS, and apparently most UE games rely on it to enable character (and potentially other types of) shadows.

[mirh]

It has been like almost a decade since I first came to know about the problem, and people banging their head against it.. but could it be that the game has a vendor-specific whitelist? Unsure if I actually had read this once, or just dreamt it.

Maybe tobias isn't using an nvidia. In which case, assuming it also works with d3d8, you could try customDeviceId=0250 and customVendorId=10DE (i.e. a GeForce4 Ti 4600).

[WinterSnowfall]

-shadowmode=buffer will force it on regardless of what card you have and is the same as force-enabling in the game's INI file. Just had a look at it, and it seems like I had done that ages ago, which is probably why I'm seeing the right behavior. IIRC the game won't auto-enable shadow buffers if left to its own devices.

[mirh]

I'm very confident that the game wasn't broken on day one, so it must definitively have some way to decide what to pick up.
And UE2 doesn't have AppCompat buckets like later versions, but it's literally written in the ini that unspecified==auto-detect.
Alas my disassembly skills suck too much to make a sense of what happens inside of UD3DRenderDevice::DetermineShadowMode.