Description
Currently in Bloodborne there's a seemingly random chance for vertex explosions to occur. Based on my own testing and user reports I believe I have isolated the issue to files used in FACEGEN, A tool used to handle dynamic facial features used in FromSoft and Bethesda titles.
Explosions can occur on the player and any humanoid NPC. Explosions have been consistently prevented on the player by wearing helmet items that prevent the facegen meshes from loading
relevant facegen files include
/dvdroot_ps4/facegen/facegen.fgbnd.dcx
/dvdroot_ps4/parts/fg_a_****.partsbnd.dcx
.dcx files are data containers FromSoft titles use. In particular FACEGEN's mesh data revolves around the following file formats
.flver
.tri
.egm
While briefly testing Dark Souls III I also had my characters face texture corrupt, which is a common issue for PC Bethesda games that is connected to corrupted FACEGEN data
I also found a mod for Fallout 4 that solves a similar vertex explosion that is tied to modifying FACEGEN data
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4london/mods/490
Some links to relevant FACEGEN documentation
https://facegen.com/dl/sdk/doc/manual/indepth.html
https://facegen.com/customizer_help.htm
https://facegen.com/dl/sdk/doc/manual/overview.html
Activity
Hermiten commentedon Oct 4, 2024
This is a good issue, very complete but there is also some report about vertex things. I'm thinking about pairing up with the others
Thanks you
IAmBatby commentedon Oct 4, 2024
Also worth mentioning that I while I have no data to back this up, the chances of this occurring significantly increase after dying, To the point where on my personal setup I'd guess a 80-90% success rate of re-producing via suicide
IAmBatby commentedon Oct 5, 2024
To elaborate on this more I feel like these vertex explosions are tied to a race condition type situation. As far as I know almost every occurrence is from either loading a level directly (main menu, lamp, death) or walking into a zone that would trigger more stuff to be loaded
I think the reason why explosions seem to much more likely when the player dies is in relation to the fact the game should/ideally is loading a lot less because it can keep a lot of the current area loaded into memory which is not applicable in scenarios like loading from main menu or lamp transport
Perhaps the facegen related meshes are a victim of said issue rather than the perpetrator
abnerfreitas commentedon Oct 5, 2024
Im having the same issues. Its almost unplayable, have to go to main menu to reset constatly.
REALCAZMANIAC commentedon Oct 5, 2024
I also have the same issue which is the only thing preventing me from playing through the game. But that doesn't mean this isn't a fantastic emulation of an exclusive ps4 title. Been wanting to play this again because i never beat it and love just playing.
IAmBatby commentedon Oct 8, 2024
I have found that Fallout 3 via RPCS3 seems to be having a similar issue, With a correlation of FACEGEN usage and overall inconsistent framerate/frame pacing on a game heavily built for their target framerate.
RPCS3/rpcs3#14862 (comment)
IAmBatby commentedon Oct 8, 2024
Also likely unrelated but I found this issue and PR from kd-11 in regards to a Demon Souls explosion that was resolved by narrowing down potential race conditions when unprotecting memory which seems somewhat similar to some of the theories that have been floated around for this problem
RPCS3/rpcs3#3858
rainmakerv3 commentedon Oct 8, 2024
I noticed when using the Vertex explosion mod (which removes facegen basically) that vertex explosions still happen, but they resolve themselves in succeeding frames in much the same way as a vertex explosion from certain race conditions. This can be observed in my gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lurb4eXEyBE&ab_channel=rainmakerv2 from 13:00 to 13:10.
This could perhaps mean that Facegen never really caused the vertex explosions, but instead somehow prevented them from being resolved like they normally are when caused by race.
If this is true, then I would suppose fixing the presumed race conditions during load would be the solution to this issue.
rafael-57 commentedon Nov 5, 2024
You can trigger this 100% reliably by:
Selecting new game -> Going into face details, and swapping between hair/beard options. It takes some moving in the menus but you will get it very fast.
I recommend it for any dev trying to debug this
Hermiten commentedon Nov 14, 2024
Duplicate of #1232
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