hootOS

HOOT_OS - V.30

Stryxnine Amity Pulsatrix
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57RYX9 DESIGN - Visual FX and Graphic Design North American Cohost Racing Series organizer & founder
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MSN Escargot
hootwheelz@escargot.chat

Here are some screenshots of NFS Unbound. This is probably the most significant visual error I've seen in the game so far, and I've been wondering what the hell causes something like this. Hopefully you're the one reading this chost who might have a better guess than me.

The first image happened first. It was instantaneous, and hard on the eyes when it happened. I paused the game and things seemed normal, then returned to gameplay and everything was fine again... except the windshield, which was less fucked but still fucked.

I've got two guesses:

  • Depth of Field and Motion Blur effects would show up through a windshield, meaning you can rotate your camera around the car and see the scenery whipping by much more clearly through the glass. Since the windshield is the only material/shader that continued to be affected by this bug while everything else was fixed, I believe it may be a Post-Processing issue.
  • EA's game developers all encrypt their assets when they ship the game. Since it's always the textures getting screwed up and not 3D assets like vegetation, cars, traffic or lamp posts, it makes me wonder if the live decryption tool they're using is corrupting the texture data it's decrypting somehow.

what's y'all's guesses? cuz that's all i can think of aside from "Frostbite engine just sucks lol"


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in reply to @hootOS's post:

ooh I love playing bug detective. got a guess or two, but more information would help if you have it. while it was still in the state in the first screenshot, did you move the camera? if so, did the messed-up corruption pattern on the car (both body and windows) move like a reflection, or stay put in screen space, or what?

but it did on the rest of the scene? if so, my hypothesis is that you got two textures corrupted around the same time (maybe due to a GPU fart but who knows): one being used for the windows (like a roughness or normal map) and, more interestingly, one containing the current environment lighting.

in the first screenshot the differing colors (e.g. white vs. orange-brown vs. gray vs. pink) appear to correspond to different surface roughnesses; since those would be sampling from different mip levels of the environment map (which gets progressively blurrier at each level, to be used in rendering rougher surfaces), it would make sense for them to be showing different parts of the presumably-corrupted environment texture. the issue disappearing after you unpaused the game could be either due to it getting regenerated from scratch (which some engines will do periodically or as you move around) or due to your viewpoint moving along the track and getting close to a different pre-placed environment probe.

that’s guesswork of course but I think it’s plausible. if you encounter the bug again I’d be very curious to see a video of it in action.

That looks wild!

I would say it reminds me of something you might get from an edge detection shader if your convolution kernel is messed up or you're blending it wrong. Convoluton can also be used for blurring, screenspace anti-aliasing, or maybe even ambient occlusion techniques. Maybe that plays a part in it somehow haha?