petrishevgeorgii-debug/prototype-pc-slop v0.5.3

PROTOTYPE PC Port v0.5.3

on GitHub

The endless loading screen fix for the native PC port of PROTOTYPE (PS4 PROTOTYPE BIOHAZARD BUNDLE, CUSA06545), together with everything since 0.5.0: picked-up objects at high resolutions and keyboard icons for archive dumps.

No game files are included. You need your own legally obtained, decrypted dump of CUSA06545 (01.00). Your game folder is never modified.

Download and play

1. Download PROTOTYPE-PC-Port-v0.5.3.zip below and unpack it anywhere (or over an earlier version: your saves in user\ are kept).
2. Start Prototype.exe, choose your game folder, press PLAY.

Fixed in 0.5.3

• Endless loading screens and soft locks. The game could hang after a mission, when loading a save or opening the pause menu (black or endless loading screen), or freeze after consuming. All of these came from one cause.
  • What went wrong: the game unpacks its compressed files (world areas, menus) with the help of worker threads. Each worker reports "done" in two steps: it lowers a counter, then wakes whoever waits. When the next job was set up between those two steps, the late wake-up landed on the new job. The unpacker read an empty result and then went in circles forever.
  • Why it hit the port so often: on the PS4 the gap between the two steps is a few instructions. In the port the wake-up first queued for a lock that every thread shares, which made the gap far wider.
  • The fix: the port now runs the game's "done" and "re-arm" steps each as a single step. Your game files are not changed: this is done in memory at start.
• The F10 hang report now shows the game's own call stacks, which thread waits on what, and how far each open file has been read.

Fixed in 0.5.2 (published as a tag only)

• Picked-up objects were invisible at render resolutions above 1080p. A car or a person Alex holds should turn half-transparent so you can see past it. At 2560x1440 it vanished completely. The game draws the held object into its own image, blurs it and lays it over the scene. It reserves a fixed amount of video memory for these images, sized for 1080p. At higher resolutions the blur image no longer fitted, so the blur read nothing and wiped the object's image. The 1440p, 1800p and 4K resolution patches now give that memory pool more room: 640, 1000 and 1440 MiB instead of 360 MiB. The 1800p and 4K patches also reserve 1 GiB more system memory at start. As before, this is applied in memory and your game files stay untouched.

Also fixed since 0.5.0 (0.5.1 was not published)

• Endless loading screens after a cutscene, when loading a save or when opening the pause menu. The game runs its loading jobs as fibers that different threads pick up. A fiber was marked free a moment before its state was saved, so another thread could resume it from an old state. A fiber is now free only once it is saved. A stress test with two threads resuming one fiber failed 1 run in 5 before the fix and never after.
• Reads into GPU-tracked memory. The port write-protects memory the GPU uses, so it can notice changes. A file read into such memory could fail or stop short when the protection came back at the wrong moment. The game then retried the file forever: the logs showed an ambience or sound file reopened every 4 seconds. These reads now complete through a host buffer, and failed reads are logged.
• Keyboard and mouse button icons with archive dumps. Dumps that keep the game's files in its archives (p1\art.rcf and the others, as the PS4 package has them) now get the keyboard and mouse icons too. 0.5.0 made them only for dumps with the files unpacked.
• Archive dumps: several game threads read the same archive at once, and on Windows one thread's read could move another's position in the file. Every read of a game file now keeps its own position.
• The F10 hang report also lists the game's fibers and the semaphores threads wait on.
• For problem reports: frame captures now record every draw's render state (developer option, off by default).

Known issues

• If a loading screen still never ends: press F10 while it hangs, then send last_run.log and out\hang_sample.txt
• Render resolutions above 1080p are still experimental
• PROTOTYPE 2 (bundle menu) does not start yet
• Tested on AMD Radeon and one NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti; please report how other GPUs run
• FSR 4.1 is hidden: AMD's Windows driver lacks a Vulkan feature it needs

All changes so far: CHANGELOG.md.

Built on The Order: 1886 port, the God of War III port, bloodborne_pc and shadPS4 — see CREDITS.md. GPL-2.0-or-later. Unofficial fan project, not affiliated with Activision, Radical Entertainment or Sony Interactive Entertainment.