goldeneye-pc-port/docs/TEXTURE-GLITCH-ANALYSIS.md

Texture Glitch Analysis — PC Port (read-only investigation)

Date: 2026-08-29 · Status: diagnosis complete, fixes pending (session was read-only) Supersedes nothing — feeds the Dxx entries proposed in §7. Companion artifacts: CAPTURES_DIR (outside repo).

---

1. Reported symptoms

1. In general: textures repeat oddly with weird artifacting.
2. Depot (-level_30): loads "completely wrong" textures — the ground is drawn a glitched blue that is not right (visible in attract mode).
3. Character models: obvious texture artifacts during the credits roll.

2. Root causes (confirmed by code + ROM evidence)

#	Cause	Location	Explains	Fix class
RC1	G_SETTEX (0xc0) is a no-op in fast3d	port/fast3d/gfx_pc.cpp:2443 (case G_NOOP)	#3 character/model artifacts	implement the command
RC2	Mip-chain contamination: base + all LODs uploaded as one GL image	src/game/tex.c:330 (texGetDepthAndSize sums all LODs) → gfx_dp_load_block/import_texture_*	#1, #2 noise bands, wrong scale, minification garbage	upload base level only; disable GL mips
RC3	Wrong wrap period: N64 wraps at 2^ceil(log2(dim)), GL wraps at uploaded image size; D74 pre-wrap block is dead (G_TX_WRAP == 0, include/PR/gbi.h:391)	port/fast3d/gfx_pc.cpp UV math in gfx_sp_tri1 + D74 guard	#1 "repeats oddly", squash/stretch on non-PoT dims	mask-based wrap period (fix D74 guard, extend to T axis)
RC4	Palette off-by-one in palette_to_rgba32	port/fast3d/gfx_pc.cpp:835	subtle hue shift on all CI textures (grays survive; red→orange-ish, blue→cyan-ish)	1-line-class fix per channel

RC1 — G_SETTEX no-op (character artifacts)

• GE's gbi_extension.h defines opcode 0xc0 as G_SETTEX (gsSPUseTexture): w0[3:0]=type, [9:6]=shiftt, [13:10]=shifts, [17:16]=tile, [19:18]=cmt, [21:20]=cms; w1 = minlevel<<24 | detail_id<<12 | texture_id.
• Full ROM scan: 508 of 512 model files contain G_SETTEX — 43,314 commands total (top emitters: PwalletbondZ 2830, CbaronsamediZ 976, GautoshotZ 975).
• Worked example CheadbrosnanZ: 47 G_SETTEX commands; texture_ids (1624–1626 = 32×64, 1607 = 64×32, 1608 = 1×1 null) exactly match the model's Textures[] table; the GDL interleaves them per mesh part. All use tile=2 (G_TX_RENDERTILE).
• On N64, gmain.s dispatches 0xc0 via the jump table at offset 0xbc (top-2-bits bucket 3); it rebinds the render tile to the texture identified by texture_id.
• Our fast3d hits case G_NOOP: break; — every mesh part renders with stale tile state → wrong/shifted textures on characters. This is why the credits roll (many models, many texture switches) shows obvious artifacts.
• The in-code comment at gfx_pc.cpp:2443 ("the game never emits it") is wrong for GE — presumably inherited from PD assumptions. The PD port also no-ops 0xc0, so there is no reference implementation to copy; implement from gmain.s + gbi_extension.h.

RC2 — Mip-chain contamination (floor/room noise)

• texGetDepthAndSize() (src/game/tex.c:330) sums all LOD levels, so one gDPLoadBlock carries base + full mip chain. fast3d uploads that as a single GL image: a 65×65 floor texture becomes ~65×134, rows below the base being raw mip bytes.
• GL then wraps at the uploaded size and glGenerateMipmap + the never-disabled GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR min-filter (gfx_opengl.cpp:59) sample mips of a garbage-stacked image. Distant surfaces (attract-mode camera!) minify into noise.
• ~75% of Depot's textures carry full mip chains (lod 6–7), so this is maximal there.
• N64 per-LOD tile selection is already emulated by the D107 rule (always base tile, offset 0) — GL mips are pure poison in this port; disable them.

RC3 — Wrap period mismatch ("repeats oddly")

• N64 wraps at the tile mask period 2^ceil(log2(dim)) (texDimensionToMask, src/game/tex.c:361). GL GL_REPEAT wraps at actual image size.
• Depot's large room surfaces are non-power-of-two: 65×65, 56×56, 96×48, 128×32 (I4/IA4, non-zlib). E.g. 65 wide: N64 period 128 vs GL period 65 → pattern squashed 2× horizontally; with RC2 the vertical period is ~2× too long and half of it is noise.
• The D74 pre-wrap UV block never runs: guard tests cms & G_TX_WRAP but G_TX_WRAP == 0 (include/PR/gbi.h:391) — dead code (already parked in docs/GRAPHICS-BACKLOG.md).

RC4 — Palette off-by-one (subtle global hue shift)

port/fast3d/gfx_pc.cpp:835:

// fast3d (current):   r = v>>11;        g = (v>>6)&0x1f;  b = (v>>1)&0x1f;  a = v&1
// N64 RGBA16 spec:    r = (v>>10)&0x1f; g = (v>>5)&0x1f;  b = v&0x1f;       a = v>>15

Channels are read one bit off (alpha treated as LSB). Grays (r≈g≈b) survive nearly intact — which is why BUNKER1 looks "mostly right" (it's gray/brown) — but saturated hues shift. Format mapping itself was verified correct: TEXFORMAT_RGBA16_CI8/CI4 → G_TT_RGBA16, IA16_CI8/CI4 → G_TT_IA16 (src/game/image.c:71–104).

3. Depot-specific analysis ("why blue ground, only there?")

Depot is not special — it is the worst case of RC2+RC3+RC4.

• Ruled out with data:
  • Texpool exhaustion / D85 placeholder path: a real Depot load (env-gated log) shows 342 unique texture loads, ~326 KB compressed into the 450 KB stage pool, zero D85TEX pool-full events. The floor is not sampling a garbage pointer.
  • Broken decompression: texInflateZlib/texInflateNonZlib are faithful decompilations; the format was independently re-derived offline (§4) and decodes byte-exact.
• What Depot's floor actually is (decoded from ROM): non-zlib I4/IA4 grayscale with full 7-level mip chains and non-PoT dimensions (texnums incl. 85/86, 508, 618, 631, 779–782, 836, 909–911, 989–996). Exactly the class RC2+RC3 mangle hardest.
• The blue: nothing in Depot's texture set is actually blue (decoded color stats are all industrial grays/browns, e.g. avg rgb 107/107/108, 147/117/112). The perceived blue = garbage I4 values sampled under minification (attract camera is far → mip-filtered noise)
  • Depot's fog table (src/game/bgfog.c, LEVELID_DEPOT entry) tinting distant surfaces cold. RC4 then shifts whatever hue survives.
• BUNKER1 "renders recognisably" because its surfaces hit the same bugs less severely (PoT dims / fewer visible garbage rows at typical camera distances).

4. Texture pipeline reference (learned during this investigation)

Useful ground truth for whoever implements the fixes:

• ROM layout: g_Textures[N] = segment offset; texture N occupies [g_Textures[N], g_Textures[N+1]) in the images segment (_imagesSegmentRomStart, ROM file offset 0x8F7DF0 in the NTSC dump). assets/images.def cumulative sizes match the logged runtime offsets exactly (0/342 mismatch) — verified against the D66 log.
• texLoad (src/game/image.c:~2450) copies from (thisoffset & ~15) and re-points compptr += (thisoffset & 7); empirically every blob decodes at the listed offset (+0).
• Blob header byte: u(1) z(1) lod(6). z=1 → zlib path, else per-image format(4)/w(8)/h(8)/comp(4) + Huffman/RLE/lookup payloads.
• Zlib path (texInflateZlib, image.c:169): MSB-first bitstream — format(8), numcolours(8)+1, palette nc×16; per image: width(8), height(8), then a rarezip stream = 2-byte header 0x11 0x72 + raw deflate (GE's src/game/zlib.c is stock gzip-1.2.4 inflate). Output rows are stored tight; texAlignIndices (image.c:340) repacks to 8-byte-aligned rows (CI8: 1 B/px; CI4: 1 B/2 px, high nibble first).
• texSwapAltRowBytes (image.c:2191) is applied to every level of every texture on every code path (calls at 260, 300, 312, 316): odd rows get adjacent u32 groups pairwise swapped. The post-swap RAM buffer is what gets uploaded — any offline tool or dump must account for this.
• Palette is appended to the buffer big-endian after all images; G_LOADTLUT uploads it.
• u=0 + lod≥2: mips are generated at load by texShrinkPaletted (2×2 palette average).

5. Open questions / hypotheses

• H-A (high confidence): Depot blue ground = RC2+RC3+RC4+fog, per §3. Confirm in-game after fixes; the before/after capture is the test.
• H-B (high confidence): credits-roll model artifacts = RC1. Confirm by implementing G_SETTEX and re-capturing the roll.
• H-C (unresolved, non-blocking): the offline contact sheet "still looks off" to the reviewer despite stage-by-stage verification of the decoder (§4; exact byte-count matches, verbatim function copies, clean odd/even row-boundary statistics). Possible explanations: 32×32 CI8 textures are inherently noisy at native res; small-cell presentation; or a residual misunderstanding of the final layout. Fallback if it ever matters: a standalone C harness running GE's actual texInflateZlib on the ROM, byte-diffed against the Python decoder. Not on the critical path — the in-game fixes don't depend on it.

6. Fix plan (when read-only lifts), in priority order

1. G_SETTEX (gfx_pc.cpp dispatch): rebind render tile to the texpool entry for texture_id per gmain.s semantics. Biggest single visual win (characters).
2. Mip contamination: upload base level only in gfx_dp_load_block/import_texture_*; drop glGenerateMipmap and the MIPMAP_LINEAR min-filter default. Fixes Depot floor noise.
3. Wrap period: wrap at the N64 mask period (texDimensionToMask) — fix the dead D74 guard (cms == G_TX_WRAP), extend to the T axis and non-PoT dims.
4. Palette off-by-one (gfx_pc.cpp:835): one-line-class fix per channel.
5. Verification hook: env-gated dump of the actual uploaded GL image + tile setup for the first N texLoads (~10 lines in fast3d) → one Depot run gives true ground truth and a before/after reference (also settles H-C if it ever resurfaces).

Each item gets its own Dxx entry in docs/PCPortResearch.md §F/§H at commit time (proposed: next free labels after D126 — check the §F index first; a stray "D160" appears once in the doc and may need reconciling).

6b. M-30 follow-up — implementation notes (before you touch RC2)

Re-checked against the current tree while chasing the user's "interlaced textures" screenshot (screenshots/interlaced texture example.jpg — main menu, wallet-Bond photo + right panel show alternating-row tearing).

• RC1 (G_SETTEX) is not a simple case add. src/game/tex.c texLoadFromGdl already expands every G_SETTEX (opcode 0xc0 == G_NOOP slot) in a model GDL into a full standard load sequence (texLoadFromTextureNum + texFindInPool + texWriteTextureCmd) written into a replacement GDL, and src/game/objecthandler_2.c (~line 82) drives that per display list at model load + modelNodeReplaceGdls the node. It is #ifdef PORT-ported. So on PC the RSP/fast3d should normally not see raw G_SETTEX. The user's crash log showed fast3d walking into 0xfafbfbfc… garbage (opcode 0x00, not 0xc0) — i.e. the model GDL pointer / expansion is broken for the front-end wallet models, not "an opcode is missing." This is the D75 front-end-model family (D80/D82/D83 model-GDL relocation, objecthandler_2.c), not a fast3d opcode gap. Implementing G_SETTEX in fast3d would be a fallback that only helps models that reach it with an otherwise-intact DL.
• RC2 (mip contamination) — the naive height clamp was already tried and reverted. gfx_pc.cpp import_texture() ~line 917 has a comment: a prior branch that set height = line * tile.height was removed because it "dropped mip chains" and "truncated sub-tiled textures" (Rare-logo D_02005FF0 20×3 tile uploaded as 32×3). So the fix must distinguish "extra rows are mip levels" (drop) from "tile is a window into a larger image" (keep). The signal is rdp.tex_lod (passed to every import_texture_* as gen_mipmaps): when LOD is on and size_bytes/row > tile_height, the excess is mip data → clamp height to ((lrt-ult)>>2)+1 from rdp.texture_tile[tile] and pass gen_mipmaps=false (don't let GL build mips from the stacked image). When rdp.tex_lod is off, keep today's behaviour. Verify against the Rare logo (sub-tile case) + Depot floor (mip case) + BUNKER1 (regression).
• The alternating-row look specifically may also be texSwapAltRowBytes (image.c:2191, §4: applied to every level of every texture on every path — odd rows get adjacent u32 groups pairwise swapped). The game swaps the RAM buffer before upload, so fast3d should read the swapped bytes — confirm fast3d isn't reading a pre-swap copy, or double-swapping. This is the RenderDoc / §6-item-5 dump task; do that before editing.

Bottom line (M-30): #3 is not a grind-fix. Highest-leverage next step is §6-item-5 (env-gated dump of the actual uploaded GL image + tile setup for the first ~10 texLoads on the main menu and on Depot) to see whether the base image is wrong (decode/swap) or just over-tall (RC2 height). Then RC2 per the rdp.tex_lod-gated plan above. G_SETTEX / D75 front-end models are a separate, larger track.

7. Artifacts (in CAPTURES_DIR, outside repo)

File	What it is
depot_d85.log	Full Depot run with GE_D63=1 GE_D85TEX=1 — 342 texLoad records (texnum/thisoff/nextoff/size), zero pool-full events
decode_depot_tex.py	Offline rarezip/bitstream decoder (verified against §4)
depot_texsheet.png	Contact sheet, 342 tiles, labeled by texnum (zlib-decoded only; non-zlib I4/IA4 cells blank)
depot_texstats.txt	Per-texture format/size/lod/color stats for all 342
tiles_big.png, tile_*.png	Individual full-size decodes (760, 313, 1283, 233, 1082, 21, 451, 7)