Rpcs3: Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut | Flickering Shadows

[FrancisZachMorgan]

As the title implies there's flickering shadows in "Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut" when you move the camera. You can encounter them from the first playable section onward. Just skip all the cutscenes and start a new game. Once camera movement stops, it takes a brief moment and the shadows will stabilize. This does not occur in an older build of RPCS3 (v0.0.10-10343 #8171) [download here] that I've tried.

Unfortunately I don't know which update introduced this error as I'm new to using RPCS3. I tried the aforementioned build as it seemed to be the one these guys used (according to the date) when posting that "Deadly Premonition" was working fine with RPCS3.

As for the current build I tried lots of different settings combinations, using the recommended settings for this game from RPCS3 wiki, a clean re-install, updating my graphics driver and more. Nothing could get the shadows to appear as they should. With the older build mentioned above, it worked right away with default settings, as well as when using Vulkan and increased render resolution (1.5x/1080p).

I have attached both log files. You can download video footage of both builds running the same scene here (link expires after 30 days): https://easyupload.io/s5peav

My system specs are as follows:

• intel i7 8700K @ 3,70GHz (stock clocks)
• GeForce GTX 1080 (stock clocks)
• 16 GB DDR4 RAM @ 3000 MHz
• Windows 10 Pro v. 10.0.19041

I hope this is helpful! Thank you for your time and effort!

[AniLeo]

Need log files from a clean game copy, removed the existing ones since they show a pirated copy of the game

Since it's a regression report, knowing which Pull Request broke it exactly is also required, in order to ask the developer that made the breaking change to investigate

[FrancisZachMorgan]

I hope someone else can provide these. While I do own the game I neither want to install custom firmware on my PS3 nor dig through month's worth of RCPS3 builds to find the one causing the issue. :( Thanks for your reply though!

[lextra2]

The game is available on GOG & Steam. Not sure why you'd pirate the PS3 version over the PC version...

[FrancisZachMorgan]

I bought the game both on XBOX 360 and PS3. Unfortunately the 360 version is sub-720p and the PS3 version suffers from horrible framerate on original hardware. With RPCS3 it runs at superb 60 fps even at 4K – unfortunately it also crashes randomly in addition to the shadow flickering. The PC version is a catastrophic port that is extremely unstable and full of bugs.

I bought this game twice. I just didn't want to go through the trouble of installing custom firmware on my 11 year old fat PS3 to dump a game which, as it turns out, doesn't even run flawlessy and/or stable on RPCS3. I already wasted hours of trying different settings combinations and different builds of RPCS3 to get it to work the way it should. So please forgive me for wanting to save time and effort for downloading an iso of a game I already bought twice. As in my book it's not really piracy if you download a game you already bought legitimately.

[lextra2]

The PC version is a catastrophic port that is extremely unstable and full of bugs.

Some of that can be mitigated. Check out https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Deadly_Premonition:_The_Director%27s_Cut for DPfix

[FrancisZachMorgan]

I knew of that potential fix but I must admit that I haven't tried the PC version myself yet. Nevertheless: Thank you very much for trying to help and pointing at DPfix! Seeing how much better the game feels and plays at high resolutions and framerates (with RPCS3) I think I'll give the PC port a chance.

[Silanda]

I seem to be seeing this too. When I get the chance to look in more detail I'll try to find when the regression occurred.

As for the PC version: it's a piece of crap. It's unstable, has sound issues, and runs at 35fps on my system for reasons I have yet to determine and have been unable to mitigate.

[FrancisZachMorgan]

@Silanda: If I'm not mistaken, I also tried the last build released in September, which dispayed the shadows correctly. Thus the regression should have occurred in a build that's less than 1.5 months old. Maybe you can use that as a starting point.

Also: Does the emulation also crash/freeze on your system? Depending on which settings I use (or maybe it's just random?) the emulation freezes after 10 to 100 minutes. I let the emulation run (tryinh different settings) while I was doing something else in hopes of determining the cause/setting for the freezes – to no avail unfortunately. It seems to freeze faster the higher resolution and framerate are set. Without resolution scaling and a 30 fps cap it would sometimes run stable for more than an hour. Most of the time the game would freeze within 30 minutes though. I considered using the most accurate interpreter's of RPCS3 to see if that would help but didn't really test that for very long as it resulted in very low framerates.

[ribolovac510]

The regression got introduced with #8741 so the last build without the z-fighting issues on shadows is 0.0.12-10844. For anyone wanting to try out the game, currently it works best on that build, at least in my case.

0.0.12-10844 log:
RPCS3.log.gz
0.0.12-10846 log:
RPCS3.log.gz