Sukura wars 1&2 (Sakura Taisen 1 and 2)

[fukuoka000]

Compatibility : Ingame
Notes : picture wrong

[valefor]

This is playable now, only hang when executing a particular special attack in battle.

Title: Sakura Taisen 1 & 2
Game ID: ULJM-05109
Genre: Strategy RPG / Dating Sim
Region: JP
Format: ISO

PPSSPP ver: v0.9.8-1450, v0.9.8-1636
OS: Windows XP 32-bit
Compatibility: Playable (tested Sakura Taisen 2 so far)

Notes:
On battle, hang when executing special attack from Sakura or Ogami. Orihime special attack seems work fine albeit with slowdown. I haven't tested with other characters.

[[Unknown]]

Does it log anything interesting when executing that special attack?

-[Unknown]

[valefor]

(07-20-2014 06:03 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Does it log anything interesting when executing that special attack?

-[Unknown]

Hmm last time I didn't see any error on Log window when it happens. I'll try with verbose logfile next time.

EDIT:
I've just attached normal logfile (info). I believe the hang happens after line:

Code:

18:28:828 CRI ADX File I[IO]: HLE\sceIo.cpp:845 stdout: PSPCI: File cache was not hit. "disc0:/PSP_GAME/USRDIR/SAKURA2/SAKURA2/HISSATU1.AFS"

At that moment I execute Ogami special attack.
Default setting. Disable JIT, fast memory, and i/o on thread.

[LunaMoo]

Tested this for a while and I would say it can be moved to playable, special attacks aren't really crashing, however I can understand the reason of potential crash for people with older/weaker hardware... by running out of memory:].

Unfortunately this game uses tiled textures(it's a port of an old game), and for one effect it does something very weird that our texture cache doesn't and likely can't handle well.
Basically it uses 512x512 textures to do some colorful lights and instead of advancing prim, it advances texture address to match following tile as can be seen:
       
~not hard to guess this translates to a lot of 512x512 textures being cached per frame and that's a serious performance problem especially when those textures change every frame and game runs it at 40fps.

In the end it's not exactly game breaking issue, even less thanks to a feature of the game itself which allows to instantly skip those animations at any moment by just pressing "start". Auto frameskip also helps since every frame skipped = lots of textures less to cache.

[[Unknown]]

Ah, so this is another game where trying to slice textures smaller might help performance, like Final Fantasy 2. I wonder, Vulkan may be a good chunk faster for this game (comparing apples to apples, non-buffered.)

-[Unknown]

[LunaMoo]

Can't really test this against Vulkan yet, game requires buffered rendering to draw those effects as well as most other graphics.

Some stats from my system using OGL during the slowdown which pretty much happens in animation that can be seen from around 0:06 to 0:11 in this video. ~ it starts by filling 2gb of vram pretty much instantly, then continues to fill system ram which is the reason of a slowdown finishing with around 4.4gb extra(I belive that's from my gpu dynamic memory feature not really ppsspp doing).
So yeah over 6gb of free vram required just to watch few seconds of pretty ugly animation ~ that's where the hang would likely happen for people on 32 bit OS's.

Shouldn't texture cache have a low memory mode, or was it only for texture scaling?

[[Unknown]]

It does have a low memory mode, but it just makes it eject textures more frequently and tone down scaling. It also only activates if you run out of VRAM, and might still crash. Uploading 6GB of data in 5 seconds is still guaranteed to be slow.... hmph.

We could probably detect that it's using offsets into an existing (and unchanged) texture too, maybe.

-[Unknown]

[LunaMoo]

Heh I just tested something ~ I mentioned earlier my gpu feature which does use system ram when something fills up vram, well fact is PPSSPP will never be able to switch to low mem mode exactly for that reason. One good side of it ~ it will never crash from that.

But yeah 6gb vram is overkill, no doubt about that. :X Will check again when it becomes playable in Vulkan. This issue while scary, isn't troublesome for people just wanting to play since those animations are repetitive, ugly and fortunately can be skipped before those cancer textures starts breeding lol.