"Disappearing trees" surreal RBR graphics bug

[MJQT]

Frustrated newbie here who recently installed RBR for the first time. What a game – it lives up to the hype and more, even nowadays! Loving the stock content... for the first two minutes or so after I boot up the game. After that, all trees and most trackside (stage-side?) objects disappear and never return. Below is the beginning of Harwood Forest before and after:

From then on, in other stages (and even in the menu screen background) the trees etc. are gone. Worth noting that you can still crash into the invisible trees – as I've discovered many times already!

A little research revealed that this is a longstanding bug. See for example:

New to RBR... wouldn't mind some help

Hi, I am considering getting RBR. To see how it ran I downloaded the demo. The game ran smoothly, however there are some graphical issues. The wheels are blacked out as are the crew in the car. Also when I do a first run from starting up the game, the trees of the Harwood stage are there and...

www.racedepartment.com

Richard Burns Rally - missing textures - Rage3D Discussion Area

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Richard Burns Rally - Freak Graphics Glitch! - Ask for Help (Game Ports) - The Porting Team

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Any RBR veterans out there know of any fixes? Thank you in advance for your help, folks.

Note that I'm playing it through a VMware virtual machine on a Mac. Mac specs:

The VM can use 2 CPU cores, 4.6 GB of RAM, and a little over a GB of shared graphics memory.
Not spectacular, but RBR runs well on the VM (with very good FPS from the get-go) so I doubt it's that my machine is overloaded. However, let me know if you think that's the problem!

Also, I receive this concerning message when I boot up the game:

Perhaps it's related to this?

Lastly, FYI I am using the latest FixUp plugin, as well as these settings in the RichardBurnsRally config file:

 

[MJQT]

Anyone? I'd really appreciate any ideas or advice on what's wrong (and maybe even how to fix it!). Thanks in advance folks.

 

[Dioptra]

In general, vm's yield rendering bugs more often than not. I'd suggest creating a new completely vanilla install on another disk. There's an up-to-date standalone application called RBRPRO Manager, similar to RSRBR with ngp & other plugins already installed. I get runtime errors (on real windows) when using ngp plugin with a cd installment or with RSRBR, unlike with RBRPRO. So perhaps that's worth a try

 

[MJQT]

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, the VM on a laptop thing definitely isn't ideal... just a stopgap for my blossoming simracing addiction until I upgrade

How much space does a basic RBRPRO install take? Hopefully not too much more than the original game – don't have much free space right now on the VM.

Also, I might be able to get my hands on an old laptop running XP – would RBRPRO work on XP? At the very least I could do a vanilla install there, which'd be nice.

 

[Mikko Mutkanen]

I know this issue from running RBR with wine on Linux:

WineHQ Bugzilla – Bug 11531 – Richard Burns Rally - Trees/buildings/fences disappear after a while

bugs.winehq.org

I have tried all kinds of things, but never could get it to work properly. Tried with Intel and Nvidia GPUs.

My research back then showed that this bug is very, very common on wine, but it doesn't happen for everybody. I have no hard facts, but it seemed like this bug happened less with ATI cards. Still many people with ATI cards experiencing it.

Interestingly this bug also happens on Windows, just a lot less often. And again no hard numbers, but the posts I read made it sound like on Windows it would happen mostly with ATI cards.

You are the first person I hear that has this issue inside a full-blown virtual machine (though it's not too surprising as the issue also happens with Windows on plain hardware).

Your error message regarding FixUp might come from the weird name of the DLL with ._ in the beginning. Looks like some kind of hidden/temp file of MacOS!? Make sure the Plugin-DLL is called just "FixUp.dll".

I think back then I tried with FixUp and without, not sure though. You might want to try to make sure. I don't think it causes it, but I think it could be possible for workerbee to fix this bug with it, if only anyone one fine day finds out what on earth causes this bug.

It's a very weird one, that's for sure. And I'm not sure at all any more, that it's even GPU-related. It might be something completely different. Maybe it's something timing-related, that works just ever so slightly differently (better), if it's not a real Windows on real hardware. Absolutely no clue. If you ever find anything out, please let me know. I'd love to be able to do recce with trees. (I do recce on my laptop and then play on my gaming rig in a KVM virtual machine with NVidia and Win10 on Linux.)

 

[MJQT]

Hey @Mikko Mutkanen -- sorry to have not noticed your message until now! Thanks for chiming in about this. So, I can't help but ask: it's only on your laptop (using Wine) where you have issues, not on your KVM Win10 VM?

Just thought of this thread again because I tried reinstalling RBR on my more powerful 5k iMac in a VMware Fusion VM (with a macOS Catalina host). I know, I know, I should have learned my lesson from the last time, but I was intrigued to see if it worked this time with a fresh install.

Short answer -- same result as before. 2-4 minutes with trees and other trackside objects, then they disappear. Damn! I don't provide screenshots, because they look the exact same as last time. One bit of progress, though: no FixUp bugs. Not sure what was wrong last time, but anyway, that's a bit of good news.

Other than just sucking it up and doing a bare metal Bootcamp Windows install (the obvious solution) maybe I should set up a QEMU Win10 with GPU passthrough (if that's feasible). Also, haven't tried this with the rallysimfans plugin due to disk space, but may give that a go eventually.

 

[frankstar]

Hey @Mikko Mutkanen -- sorry to have not noticed your message until now! Thanks for chiming in about this. So, I can't help but ask: it's only on your laptop (using Wine) where you have issues, not on your KVM Win10 VM?

Just thought of this thread again because I tried reinstalling RBR on my more powerful 5k iMac in a VMware Fusion VM (with a macOS Catalina host). I know, I know, I should have learned my lesson from the last time, but I was intrigued to see if it worked this time with a fresh install.

Short answer -- same result as before. 2-4 minutes with trees and other trackside objects, then they disappear. Damn! I don't provide screenshots, because they look the exact same as last time. One bit of progress, though: no FixUp bugs. Not sure what was wrong last time, but anyway, that's a bit of good news.

Other than just sucking it up and doing a bare metal Bootcamp Windows install (the obvious solution) maybe I should set up a QEMU Win10 with GPU passthrough (if that's feasible). Also, haven't tried this with the rallysimfans plugin due to disk space, but may give that a go eventually.

You can fix this on wine at least with a d3d wrapper. Stick the x86 binary d3d9.dll in Richard burns rally game directory.

Release v2.75.1 - A minor incremental update · dege-diosg/dgVoodoo2

Improving the implementation of user clip planes in the DX backends Minor performance optimization in the D3D11 DX backend Fixing potential D3D12 cache overflow Fixing an incompatibility of GetDC/R...

github.com

 

[MJQT]

You can fix this on wine at least with a d3d wrapper. Stick the x86 binary d3d9.dll in Richard burns rally game directory.

Release v2.75.1 - A minor incremental update · dege-diosg/dgVoodoo2

Improving the implementation of user clip planes in the DX backends Minor performance optimization in the D3D11 DX backend Fixing potential D3D12 cache overflow Fixing an incompatibility of GetDC/R...

github.com

Thank you! Great news. When I have time, I will try this out. Have to figure out Wine first though, have never used it before (foolish me thought a VM would be easier lol).

 

[frankstar]

Thank you! Great news. When I have time, I will try this out. Have to figure out Wine first though, have never used it before (foolish me thought a VM would be easier lol).

It may fix it in the vm too.

 

[MJQT]

It may fix it in the vm too.

Okey dokey, will give it a try!

EDIT: just went to the VM, did a clean install and put the a d3d9.dll in the main game folder, and still trees disappear, just as before. Darn.

EDIT #2: went and installed Wineskin using Homebrew on Mac, copied in my RBR folder from the VM including a d3d9 DLL, and same result. Christ, this is annoying. I actually couldn't follow the usual install process, because it wasn't recognizing the 1.02 patch as a installer.