Star Ocean: First Departure

[[Unknown]]

A bug was fixed in the GLES backend that caused characters to not be visible or only be partially visible - it would've looked a lot like the game locking up. The latest git build has a fix.

Since I'm here - an unrelated driver bug affecting the Vulkan backend on many popular mobile devices has also been worked around. This bug caused characters to show on top of all objects (rather than properly underneath certain things.)

The boxes are caused by bugs in the game which weren't visible at the PSP's render resolution (as described in the post I linked to.) It will probably happen on all backends. Sometimes using texture upscaling will dodge these issues.

As far as stencil tricks - what I mean is that the game uses graphical rendering techniques that are uncommon, and that modern games don't really ever use. This is the what we worked around the Vulkan driver bug to fix. There's no setting: PPSSPP automatically detects when the game uses this rendering technique and simulates it with a technique supported on modern GPUs.

It's just that simulating this is still something modern game developers rarely do, so modern GPU drivers (and by "modern" I mean released in the last 10 years, but possibly without latest driver updates) often have bugs with it.

-[Unknown]