Bugs with dynamic lighting/shadow/???

[Skirmisher]

I'm seeing a lot of graphical issues on my current playthrough of this game. First of all, at various points throughout the game (but especially in dark sections like Power Up) having dynamic lighting on any setting above "POTATO" results in artifacts such as:

• Part of the screen being covered in a black translucent box
  
• Dynamic light (flashlight, floodlights) disappearing at certain angles/positions
  
• Silhouettes of level objects seen through walls while flashlight is active
  
• Fog overlaying the scene, sometimes in odd ways (flickering lines across the screen)

These all (as far as I can tell) go away when reducing dynamic lighting to its lowest setting, which is unfortunate but bearable. However. now that I've gotten to Surface Tension, there's a new issue that doesn't seem to go away: glitchy shadows will appear stretched across the screen, usually in midair, with streaks of light breaking them up. This seems to occur most often around areas in sunlight, but no combination of dynamic shadow/sunshadow/etc. options I've tried has changed anything, the result is the same. It really sucks to have all these distracting artifacts when the game looks so beautiful otherwise :(

Fedora 33 (Linux 5.10.13, Mesa 20.3.4)
Intel Core i7-6700K
AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB)
32 GB RAM

[vmv.084]

I have a similar problem. Until the last global update, the game worked fine and without any problems, with launch parameters: '-oldgameui' -force_vendor_id 0x10DE -force_device_id 0x1180 -dxlevel 98

Manjaro Linux (Linux 5.10.15-1, Mesa 20.3.4)
AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics
16 GB RAM

[ulukai55]

Having the same issue too. Arch Linux, Radeon 5700 XT, mesa 21.0.1.
Very distracting. please fix or report upstream!

EDIT 1: Seems to be fixed for me. What I did: verify game files, disable Steam Overlay for this title and restart the computer. Not sure about the exact culprit.

EDIT 2: I have spoken too soon. I'm in the Office levels now and the glitches are back. Seems like the game had randomly set the dynamic lighting level to Potato without me noticing. I restored it back to high and the game glitched again.

[|LL⟩]

Disabling SunShadow fixed some of the glitches in my case.

[mkv]

Same issue for me, no fix other than put dynamic lighting to POTATO quality so far

[Grumpy Grampa]

None of these fixes help in my case. I'm on POP OS with a RX6800XT and Open Source drivers as far as I'm aware.
Any other fixes to this?

[シェービングフォーム]

yeah the game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess on linux and has been for the past five years reported it on several occasions but most threads either end up going unanswered or locked by mods

[Grumpy Grampa]

Seems like that to me too, could find the same issue dating several years back in the discussions. Sad.

[gru]

Originally posted by Raklödder:

yeah the game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess on linux and has been for the past five years reported it on several occasions but most threads either end up going unanswered or locked by mods

I do not believe we’ve locked any threads for linux discussions. We only do so if a thread has no further need for discussion or it has run it’s course.

That said we do bring up the linux issues to devs themselves, but since we mods don’t use linux, we can’t assist beyond pointing it out to the devs.

I of course can’t speak for several years ago, since we only became mods way later than that.

[netraven5000]

Yeah, this sounds like what I am seeing, setting dynamic lighting to potato seems to take care of it.

[RandomChain]

I'm seeing this issue as well. Any new fix for it yet?

[cmdmole]

I also encountered lightning bugs and later stutters on OpenSUSE with
Mesa 21.3.5
Kernel 5.16.5
AMD RX 580 (8GB)
(Both with and without public beta for Black Mesa)

Initially setting the dynamic light quality to POTATO fixed it and I could play perfectly fine. However once I got to the outside map of the satellite rocker launch site, I experienced very hefty frame time stutters which persited even after lowering all quality settings significantly. In all prior levels I always had stable FPS matching the monitor refresh rate (vsync is enabled).
These stutters made playing nauseating for me; changing to the Windows version and relying on Proton (+ the workaround for the game UI) allowed me to play further with stable FPS on the same map with high settings (including dynamic lightning).
@Mods/Devs: Should I create a new thread to document the stutters?

If you need more information to diagnose tell me what and I can likely provide them.

Since the WIndows version uses DirectX and the Linux version one of OpenGL or Vulkan (don't know which) I wonder if perhaps this is causing some of the differences? Can a Windows build using the same rendering API (OpenGL or Vulkan) as used on Linux be created and if so does it show (some of) the same issues?

[S△LO POWEЯ]

Originally posted by cmdmole:

Since the WIndows version uses DirectX and the Linux version one of OpenGL or Vulkan (don't know which) I wonder if perhaps this is causing some of the differences? Can a Windows build using the same rendering API (OpenGL or Vulkan) as used on Linux be created and if so does it show (some of) the same issues?

As far as I know was fixed the bug with cascade lighting in dxvk 1.9.4
Link to the github project in the video description
https://youtu.be/mDa4XNHf0vY

[cmdmole]

Originally posted by ZG SΛLO POWEЯ:

As far as I know was fixed the bug with cascade lighting in dxvk 1.9.4

I'm not sure how this relates to the problem, can you elaborate? Is there perhaps something in the video I'm missing?

To clarify: when I'm playing the DirectX-using Windows-build, which utilises Proton (which employs DXVK to translate DirectX-calls to Vulkan) it does work well enough (one workaround required for the Game-UI).
When I'm playing the native Linux-build, which uses one of Vulkan or OpenGL (not sure which, but there's afaik no DXVK involved), there are bugs with the lightning on non-POTATO settings and in at least one map severe frame stutters which persist even at low settings and lowered resolution.

I mused that perhaps BlackMesa's shaders (or other parts of the code) depend on some DirectX-specific behaviour. So when the code is built to use Vulkan/OpenGL this assumption breaks and we get the bugs described in this thread — or part of the bugs.
DXVK on the other hand makes sure to carefully emulate all DirectX behaviours exactly, thus no lighting-bugs. If that's the case, the discussed lighting-bugs are likely to appear on MS Windows with a Windows-binary built to target Vulkan/OpenGL instead of DirectX. Meaning part of the bugs might(!) also be able to be debugged and fixed on Windows if that’s more comfortable for the devs.
But that's only speculation, it would need to be tested. Judging by this thread and the reports on ProtonDB, the issue appears accross many kernel and mesa versions and also across GPU vendors.

[chivs688]

I'm encountering this exact issue on the Steam Deck.

[KillerUnleashed]

Same here on the Steam Deck. It has issues displaying lights properly with Dynamic Lighting at anything higher than Potato.

Update; Played up to Xen and had the same issues as other people when outdoors with weird shadow glitches. In Xen it's REALLY bad. This is a screenshot of it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786707856