Files
goldeneye-pc-port/docs
James Dansereau 741dfe78b9 fix(D227/D176a): sky texcoords are S10.5, not texels — fixes seam, over-tiling and scroll speed (#43)
* fix(D176a): sky scroll/tiling too fast -- perspective-correct tc interpolation

skyPortRenderPoly (Path B, D176(a) black-sky fix) placed sky quad verts
under a plain w=1 ortho projection, so fast3d's GPU pipeline interpolated
texture coords linearly in screen space across the primitive. The source
S/T data (unk20/unk24) is computed upstream from a world-space projection
without a perspective divide -- exactly like the real N64 RDP's
G_TRI_SHADE_TXTR coefficient block, which relies on real perspective-
correct interpolation to divide it back out per pixel.

A single sky quad's near (top) and horizon-grazing (bottom) vertices can
differ up to ~38x in camera-space w. Under linear interpolation that
smears the entire S/T delta evenly across every pixel instead of
concentrating it near the horizon, producing a uniformly dense aliased
'hatching' over the whole sky -- reported as 'scrolls too fast / tiles
too visibly'.

Fix: build a custom projection matrix that gives each vertex its real
camera-space w (already computed upstream, SkyRelated38.unk0c) while
keeping the same screen-space x,y, so the GPU's normal perspective divide
recovers the intended position but interpolates tc (and colour) with
real 1/w weighting -- the same pipeline every other textured draw in the
game already depends on. No port/fast3d changes; #ifdef PORT only, N64
path untouched.

Verified: tools_pc/verify.sh bunker1 PASS (no regression on a non-sky
level); -level_22 (Statue) and -level_41 (Cradle) GE_PCDUMP captures show
the expected before/after change (uniform parallel aliasing -> a proper
perspective-converging fan), and Cradle's sky is no longer black at
default FOV. Defect 2 (horizon-band tessellation) and the FOV-coupled
black-sky-past-frustum symptom are unchanged / still open.

docs/dev/findings.md: new D176(a) subsection + summary-row update.
docs/porting-notes.md: generalized the screen-space-overlay quirk to
call out the w=1-vs-real-w interpolation pitfall.

* chore(D176a): regen findings index

* docs(D176a/D227): M-93 - human playtest of PR #43 confirms Cradle black-sky fix + partial Statue scroll improvement; new split-sky residual filed as D227



* docs(D227): M-94 - visual evidence + a concrete mechanistic hypothesis for the sky seam (per-primitive wScale quantization), not yet fixed

Headless -level_22 capture (this shell can do offscreen GE_PCDUMP capture
via the game binary directly, run from the repo root with the MSYS2
mingw64 PATH set -- the earlier GUI-launch flakiness in this session was
specific to a live window, not this path) shows a real, static-frame
crease in the sky's cloud texture. Screenshot committed:
docs/img/bugs/d227-sky-seam-statue.png.

Hypothesis: skyPortRenderPoly (D176(a)'s fix) computes wScale per call,
and skyRenderTri/skyRenderFull issue up to 5 separate calls per frame
(one per triangle in the sky fan). The position math is exact for any
wScale (re-verified algebraically), but Vtx.ob[] is s16, so two
triangles sharing an edge can quantize a logically-shared vertex to two
slightly different values depending on which triangle's independently-
chosen wScale computed it -- crack at the shared edge, reads as "two
regions with a different pattern."

Not yet confirmed (didn't isolate camera motion from sky-scroll motion
to test the "moves at a different rate" half of the report) and not
fixed -- documented the fix direction (one wScale shared across the
whole fan, not recomputed per triangle) for whoever picks this up next.
Cleaned up capture scratch files after pulling the one evidence shot.

* docs(D227): M-94 addendum - static-camera test confirms the sky genuinely animates over time, independent of camera motion

* fix(D227): M-95 - one shared wScale across the whole sky fan instead of one per triangle, closes the visible seam

skyRenderTri/skyRenderFull draw up to 5 triangles per frame from a
shared pool of up to 5 vertices (built once, then fan-triangulated
across 1-3 calls). D176(a)'s fix had each call compute its own wScale
from only its own 2-4 verts; two triangles sharing a vertex could each
pick a different wScale, and since Vtx.ob[] is s16, quantize that
logically-shared vertex to two different values depending on which
triangle's call computed it -- a crack at the shared edge (D227, the
"two sky halves" report).

Fix: skyPortBeginFan()/skyPortEndFan() (new, #ifdef PORT) compute one
wScale across the whole fan and skyPortRenderPoly uses it when set,
falling back to the old per-call computation otherwise. N64 path
unchanged (these are PORT-only additions around existing #ifdef PORT
code, no #else branch touched).

Verified:
- Clean build, no new/duplicate symbols.
- Full verify.sh sweep: 21/21 PASS, both with and without this change.
- Same-frame before/after screenshots at -level_22 frame 345
  (docs/img/bugs/d227-sky-seam-statue{,-fixed}.png): visible kink in
  the cloud streaks in the before shot, gone in the after shot, same
  exact frame.
- bunker1's nonzero framediff worst_cell is unaffected by this change
  (reproduced identically pre-fix) -- confirmed pre-existing stale
  golden-baseline issue, unrelated to sky.c.
- Cradle's black-rectangle artifact is also confirmed pre-existing
  (reproduced identically pre-fix) -- the separate, already-documented
  FOV-coupled black-sky-past-frustum-edge symptom (D218/D222 family),
  not touched by this fix.

Not re-verified: whether the "moves at a different rate" half of the
original report is also resolved, and the aspect-ratio-artifact
alternate theory was never independently ruled out. Human eyeball
still owed before merge, same as every other rendering fix landed this
session without interactive display access.

Also generalized the quirk (per-call vs per-shared-vertex-group scale
quantization) to docs/porting-notes.md alongside the existing D176(a)
entry.

* docs(D227): M-96 - human playtest on Statue: seam/crack STILL PRESENT despite M-95 fix

The M-95 wScale-sharing fix only verified the static per-primitive
quantization theory (single-frame screenshot diff); it explicitly left
the 'two halves move at different rates' temporal theory from the
original report unverified. This playtest is that missing
verification, and it says the seam is still visible in live play.

D227 NOT resolved. PR #43 stays in draft pending investigation of the
temporal/rate theory -- do not merge on the M-95 fix alone.

* docs(D227): M-96 addendum - N64 sky should be near-static, this build scrolls extremely fast

New data point from the same Statue playtest session, separate from the
seam/crack: the user reports the intended N64 scroll rate is near-static,
stronger than M-93's 'still reads too fast'. Bears on D176(a)'s fix
magnitude itself, not just the D227 seam -- flagged as a possible shared
root cause (wrong per-frame tc delta could drive both symptoms), not yet
investigated.

* fix(D227): M-98 - share sky S/T fold across whole fan, not per-triangle

skyPortBeginFan() (M-95) shared wScale across a whole sky fan so shared
vertices quantize position consistently, but skyPortRenderPoly's S/T
fold (foldS/foldT -- floorf(minS/64)*64, keeps texel coords in s16
range) was still computed per-call, from only that triangle's own 2-4
verts. Same bug class as the wScale fix, one field over, never fixed --
which is why M-96's human playtest still saw the seam after M-95.

Two triangles in one fan can floor a shared vertex's S/T to different
multiples of 64 texels; nominally invisible (GL_REPEAT period 64), but
each triangle bakes (S-fold)*32 into its own s16 Vtx buffer, so two
folds 64 texels apart produce tc values 2048 apart -- a real crack at
the shared edge.

Fix: extend skyPortBeginFan()/skyPortEndFan() to also compute one
shared fold across the whole fan, threaded into skyPortRenderPoly the
same way as wScale. #ifdef PORT only, no game-logic change.

Also measured (per M-96/M-97's ask): cross-correlated 11 consecutive
frames at a static camera -> ~7 px/tick horizontal scroll at 640px
capture width, a full screen-width sweep every ~1.5s. Confirms
"extremely fast" quantitatively; root cause of that magnitude is not
yet found (accumulator + vertex geometry are unmodified N64 logic, so
if it's genuinely wrong the bug is in how the Path B substitution maps
texel-ticks to screen pixels, not the tick rate itself -- next step
spec'd in findings.md).

Verified: build clean; -level_22 frame 345 (same frame M-95's
before/after used) shows no visible crease vs. the pre-M-95 reference
screenshot; verify.sh bunker1 PASS, worst_cell unchanged (known stale
golden baseline, not a regression). Human eyeball still owed on both
the seam-close and the scroll-speed question before PR #43 leaves
draft.

* docs(D176a): M-98 - Cradle side of PR #43 checked; tower starburst is Defect 2

Checked the Cradle side of the D227 fold-sharing fix (M-97 left this
outstanding). No regression -- verify.sh cradle PASS -- but found a
much more visible pre-existing artifact while there: looking up the
suspension tower near spawn, roughly half the sky renders as a sharp
radiating starburst instead of clouds.

Confirmed pre-existing (pixel-identical with sky.c reverted to
pre-M-98) and confirmed static, not the D227 "moves at different
rates" symptom (pixel-identical 30 ticks apart at a fixed camera).
This is the already-known, already-open D176(a) Defect 2
(horizon-band tessellation) -- the code's own fold-logic comment
already predicts exactly this failure shape for a triangle spanning
>1000 texels near the horizon, which looking straight up the tower
produces. Not fixed (tessellation is separate, bigger work); logged
with a concrete repro + screenshot so it's no longer "inconclusive."

* docs(D227): M-99 - human playtest negative (seam persists, view-angle-dependent); headless repro blocked

Human playtest after M-98's fold-sharing fix: the seam is still present
on Statue and now confirmed to move/change with mouse/view position --
also reported still bad on Cradle and present on Surface. M-98's fix
was real but is not the dominant mechanism live play is hitting, same
pattern as M-95 before it.

Ruled out this pass: the cross-quad water/cloud texture-scale mismatch
theory, on the two IsWater==0 levels actually tested (Statue, Cradle)
-- untested on any IsWater==1 level, which is now the top ranked
candidate for next session.

Blocked on: headless camera-pan repro via GE_INPUTSCRIPT does not
work -- confirmed neither analog-stick nor C-button tokens rotate the
camera, so this needs either a human playtest or a debug hook into the
real mouselook path before it can be chased further headlessly. Full
ranked candidate list + environment notes for next session in
findings.md and (session-local) docs/HANDOFF.md.

* docs(D227): M-100 - root cause PROVEN: s16 texture-coordinate overflow

The sky seam is not a crack, not a quantization mismatch, and not
view-dependence. One sky quad spans ~30,000 texels in S and T, but
Vtx.tc is S10.5 in an s16 = +/-1024 texels, so 7 of its 8 texture
coordinates overflow and wrap to arbitrary values. The fold cannot help
against a span 29x the representable range.

Unblocked by a user-supplied emulator-vs-ours screenshot pair on Surface:
the real symptom is a radial starburst, not a crack, which is a different
mechanism from what M-94..M-98 were chasing. M-95 (shared wScale) and M-98
(shared S/T fold) each fixed a real second-order bug; neither could touch
this one. Both stay - per-fan consistency is exactly what will make
subdivision seamless.

Measured with a new env-gated GE_D227V probe (GE_D176 style) on the Cradle
frame-350 camera. All four w are positive, so no projective pole. The quad
is split gSP2Triangles(0,1,3, 0,3,2) on the 0-3 diagonal, and vertices 0
and 3 are exactly the two that keep one coordinate in range - hence "two
halves with different patterns, split by a line", the original D227 report
verbatim. Apparent view-dependence needs no view-dependent mechanism: S/T
depend on view, so the wrap point moves.

Confirmed by a diagnostic build: baking tc at 1-texel instead of
1/32-texel granularity (32x range, deliberately wrong scale) makes the
starburst and the split completely disappear. No second defect behind it.

D227 == D176(a) "Defect 2" == M-98's "Cradle tower starburst". M-98
misfiled that capture as unrelated, which is what made D227 look
headlessly-unreproducible in M-99 - it reproduces statically.

Fix not implemented: subdivide until span < ~960 texels/primitive. The
subdivision math and cut placement are worked out in the finding (S is
linear in w, so cut uniformly in w), but the vertex budget is an open
decision - dynAllocateVertices is an unchecked 50 KB/frame pool and pure
tessellation wants ~40% of it.

* docs(D227): M-100 addendum - RDP tile shift (option D) dominates; fast3d already implements it

shifts/shiftt is the RDP's native precision-vs-range knob and gfx_pc.cpp
implements it fully including the left-shift case. Emitting tc at 32/2^k
units with shifts = 16-k buys 2^k range with no tessellation, no fast3d
change and no vertex-budget cost. k=5 covers the measured 29,830-texel
span outright.

* fix(D227): M-100b - sky texcoords are S10.5, not texels; drop M-82's stray *32

Fixes the sky seam/starburst, the over-tiling, and the "scrolls too fast"
complaint - all three were the same bug.

M-82 ("D176(a) Defect 1") read unk20/unk24 as texel counts and baked tc as
(S - fold) * 32 to convert texels into tc's S10.5 units. They are not texel
counts. skyRender sets them as worldpos * 0.1f and the N64 path hands them
to the RDP coefficient block unscaled (skyRenderTri: S * unk34 * sp368), so
they are already in the RDP's native S10.5 1/32-texel units.

That stray *32 made every sky texture coordinate 32x too large, producing
three symptoms previously tracked as separate bugs:

  1. D227 - spans of ~30,000 texels against an s16 tc holding +/-1024, so 7
     of a quad's 8 coordinates overflowed and wrapped to arbitrary values.
     The quad splits on the 0-3 diagonal and verts 0 and 3 are exactly the
     two that keep one coordinate in range, hence "two halves with different
     patterns" - the original D227 report verbatim.
  2. Over-tiling - ~466 repeats of the 64-texel cloud per quad, not ~15.
  3. M-96's "the N64 sky is nearly static, ours races", measured at ~7
     px/tick in M-98. g_SkyCloudOffset advances 1 unit/tick = 1/32 texel,
     not 1 texel. This is why M-98's re-derivation of the tick path kept
     coming back clean: the accumulator was never wrong, its unit was.

Fix: tc = (S - fold) 1:1, with the fold rebased to a whole tile period
(SKY_TC_WRAP = 64 texels * 32 = 2048 units). The ~30,000-unit span then fits
an s16 unaided - which is also why the original N64 code needs no
tessellation here: it never had a range problem to solve.

Kept: M-95's shared wScale and M-98's shared fold (both real bugs; per-fan
consistency keeps a fan's shared vertices bit-identical). Also kept as a
safety valve, since only ~4% of s16 headroom remains on the observed span:
skyPortPickShift/skyPortCaptureTile/skyPortEmitTileShift, which trade tc
precision for range via the RDP's own tile shifts/shiftt (port/fast3d
already implements it, so no fast3d change). skyPortCaptureTile replays the
exact G_SETTILE texSelect emitted with only the shift fields patched, so it
cannot drift from texSelect's format/line/mask derivation.

Also adds the env-gated GE_D227V per-vertex probe (GE_D176 style) that
measured all of this.

Verified: -level_41 Cradle frame 350 (the M-98 starburst repro) now shows
soft cloud bands at the correct scale with no starburst, diagonal split or
moire; GE_D227V confirms kS=kT=0 and max tc 31,513 of 32,767. -level_22
Statue frame 345 clean. verify.sh bunker1 PASS (worst_cell 10.32, the known
stale-golden-baseline number). Human play-test still owed.

* D229: file green/pulsating water; decouple D227's tc safety valve from it

New finding D229: on IsWater levels (Frigate, Surface 2) the water renders
green and pulses blue<->green on an interval.

Pre-existing, proven by A/B: built plain main with none of the D227 work and
captured -level_26 frame 340 - same green, only the tiling density differs.
D229 is independent of D227.

The gun half of the same report was NOT a bug: the branch was 2 commits
behind main and those 2 commits were exactly the D217 fixes (#47 texpool
alignment, #49 CI cache palette-content key). After merging main the user
confirms the gun is good on Frigate.

Mechanism so far: the water quad is sky.c's IsWater block1 (Frigate confirmed
IsWater=1 via GE_D176, which also settles M-99's ranked item 1).
sub_GAME_7F09343C binds tile 0 and tile 1 to the SAME tmem, offsets tile 1 via
gDPSetTileSize(1, 90, 150, 0, 0), and cross-fades TEXEL0/TEXEL1 with a
PRIM_LOD_FRAC driven by sinf(). That sine is the reported pulsing, so one
texunit resolves blue and the other green. Ruled out the shade path by
measurement (it spans dark blue to pale yellow, never green; sampled pixels
have R and B crushed). Not yet root-caused.

Code change here is only the decoupling: skyPortBeginFan takes allowShift and
the water quad passes FALSE, leaving that path byte-identical to its pre-D227
behaviour. The water quad is a two-texunit draw sharing one set of vertex tc,
so a tc rescale needs a matching shift on both tiles - and shifting both makes
them sample identically, which flattens the cross-fade. An intermediate build
that did so turned the water from pulsating into constantly green, observed
live. Also fixes skyPortCaptureTile to capture after all tile setup (not just
after texSelect) and to handle both tiles, so a future shift cannot clobber a
later re-declaration.

Cradle sky re-verified unaffected (frame 350 still correct). bunker1 golden
framediff reports REGRESSION at 55.02, but plain main scores WORSE at 73.24 -
the baseline is stale relative to main's D217 texture fixes, the re-baseline
owed since M-83/M-84. Not caused by this branch.

* docs(D227/D229): regenerate findings index; mark D227 FIXED

The generated findings-index.csv was hand-edited during the main merge and
when D229 was filed, so CI's 'Check generated dev indexes are current' failed
on PR #43. Regenerated with tools_pc/gen_findings_index.py.

Also updates the D227 row's status to lead with FIXED (M-100b) rather than
the M-94 'not yet fixed' text, so the index reflects the user-confirmed fix.

* docs: register GE_D227V in the env-probe index

CI's 'Check generated dev indexes are current' also runs
gen_env_probes.py --check, which flags any GE_* probe with live sites that
has no row in docs/dev/GE-ENV-PROBES.md. GE_D227V (added in M-100 to measure
the sky texcoord overflow) had none.
2026-09-11 20:45:08 -04:00
..