So what's up with the missing environment graphics? Luckily, I stumbled upon a Citra issue from back in the day that shows a screenshot resembling Mikage's output very closely. A couple of days later I at least managed to make the characters render properly: Seeing your character is good enough to play the game, right? :) Stencil Support Super cool! Somehow the geometry is missing colors though, and we somehow lost all environment graphics along the way. Some of the graphics fixes were fixed to the point you could recognize the 3D geometry better now: No more glitchy blue graphics! But oh no, where did the floor go? Luckily, this was the only thing that caused unpredictable crashes in the game - after fixing my implementation to use a non-recursive algorithm, the game was rock-solid! Fast ForwardĪ couple of weeks later, many more fixes had landed, most notably the Render Target Cache Revamp. My first command processor implementation struggled with this: While handling secondary command lists using a C++ function call each worked for most games, for SM3DL it leads to such deep recursion that the game eventually ran out of stack space. However, since there's no equivalent of a call stack, all return offsets are hardcoded in the command lists themselves, and hence it's equivalently just one huge pile of nested command lists calls. Technically there's just one a primary list that calls smaller, secondary lists, which then return back to the primary one after processing. SM3DL likes to keep the 3DS GPU busy while doing processing on the CPU, and hence schedules a lot of work using command lists that call other command lists. This hadn't always been the case, but at some point it just started doing so. Shortly after entering the title screen, the game would randomly freeze up for no apparent reason. But there was another roadblock that had to be dealt with first. Eventually though, we succeeded and got this beauty of a title screen:Īll the rendering glitches notwithstanding, what's really cool about this picture is what's happening on the top screen behind the game logo: Look closely, it's actually rendering the 3D graphics properly! For instance the geometry of the block in the top right corner is completely fine.ĭebugging issues with 3D geometry can be a royal pain, so seeing it just work meant that fixing the rendering for good was within close reach. There were some obvious and some not-so-obvious features not implemented in Mikage.

Of course, a blocker was found quickly, and so the game didn't make it past the initial setup dialogs.

While this achievement looks simple on the surface, getting a game to draw anything is really the biggest hurdle from a development perspective: After all, how do you debug a game that simply doesn't do anything? A Title Screen First signs of life in Super Mario 3D Land

Super mario 3d land citra android