Progress Report : April 2017

This month we have been hard at work trying to find the source of the vertex bug that is currently plaguing the Dashboard, the GamePad XDK sample and many other titles. Sadly, we have made little progress on this front, but did identify a few small issues that were contributing factors.

PatrickvL determined that there must be a bug in vertex conversion so he started work porting the known-to-be-working vertex conversion code from Dxbx, sadly this did not fix the vertex issue completely, but it did drastically improve the character models in JSRF for some users, myself included, so there's that at least.

The dashboard has a few rendering issues, ranging from text corruption to Window rendering issues. The text corruption also seems to be solved by porting the Dxbx vertex code, however, the other rendering corruption still persists. My testing determined that when updating the code to disable the Vertex Buffer Caching, the Dashboard renders much more accurately. This proved to have a too great performance impact for some users, so this needs further investigation.

The big new thing that happened this month (and what I was working on) was the introduction of HLE Caching. This means that a title only has to be scanned for symbols on the first execution, and subsequent executions of a certain title will have a much faster start-up time. This greatly aids debugging as when booting Cxbx-Reloaded in debug mode, the pattern matching took over two minutes. With HLE caching, this has been reduced to mere seconds.

That's about it for what happened specifically within this month, stay tuned as in the coming days I'll be writing a progress report detailing what exactly changed from previous Cxbx versions, and just how Cxbx-Reloaded is different.