TL;DR - if you are not interested in an in-depth overview of what was wrong with the game and how it was fixed,scroll down to Download section for a link anda Patreon announcement.
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Today’s subject is Scarface: The World is Yours. This tie-in game to a 1983 movie Scarface wasdeveloped by Radical Entertainment and released in late 2006.
Naturally, by now you likely know where it’s going – what is wrong this time?As always, PCGamingWiki page providesan answer – at the time of writing this post, you can see the issue listed as one of the key points:
Graphics are corrupted on modern versions of Windows
This doesn’t tell much about how bad is it, so what does it look like?
It is… very bad. While results vary across different PC’s greatly, nearly every modern PC displays thisbroken mess, rendering the game unplayable. Of course, community came up with workarounds, but they sadly have their drawbacks:
- dgVoodoo can be used with the game, and it seems to fix the issue. However, dgVoodoo wraps game’s Direct3D 9 to Direct3D 11,which might bump up system requirements considerably. Considering how complex DX9 is, it’s also hard to prove that absolutelyeverything renders flawlessly.
- Curiously, this issue also goes away when the game runs through… PIX, a graphics debugger! However, similar issues apply– given PIX is used to collect data, it might introduce additional overhead. Also, having to always run the game throughit is a bit clunky, isn’t it?
While these might suffice for casual play, neither of these workarounds address the root cause of the issue.However, we want to know what exactly went wrong, so those aren’t enough – armed with a debugger anda virtual machine, I can proceed to figuring this issue out.
Step one to figuring out such issues is of course attaching a debugger. This time, since the issue seems to bespecific to D3D, I aided myself with DirectX Wrappersfrom Elisha Riedlinger. Having a minimal d3d9.dll wrapper is excellent for prototyping,since it allows me to instantly and reliably tap into game’s rendering code without any game specific hacking.
That said, this issue could really be anything. That’s where experience helps, so I was able to come up with theoriesby just observing how the bug looks visually:
- When in game, moving around makes those shapes move, possibly corresponding player character’s animations.This means that at least part of this garbage is in fact Tony’s model.
- Results vary every session, and on some machines it might even look very different – for example, I have seen variations where most of the environment was not corrupted, but people were T-posing.
I theoretized that this issue relates to vertex buffers not updating properly. At this point it’s worthto mention that people thought this issue shows up only on multicore CPU’s. If this is true, then it could meanthat the issue is a classic race condition – which also would explain why it looks different every time.Conceptually, it also makes sense – game could be loading models on multiple threads, setting up D3D resourcesconcurrently and I imagine that failing to do so in a thread safe manner could result in artifacts looking like that.
That theory is trivial to confirm or debunk via a DX9 wrapper. Set up additional code to verifythat all calls to IDirect3DVertexBuffer9::Lock and IDirect3DVertexBuffer9::Unlock are done from the same thread.If they are done from multiple threads, it could be a possible culprit.
I set up verification, and… nothing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Theory debunked.
Let’s take another look at vertex buffer locks though. I spotted that some (not all) locks are done with aD3DLOCK_DISCARD flag. Looking at MSDN docs, it’s defined as (emphasis added by me):
The application discards all memory within the locked region.For vertex and index buffers, the entire buffer will be discarded.This option is only valid when the resource is created with dynamic usage.
I don’t know about you, but I see possible room for error here. It is possible to lock only a part of the buffer,so I can imagine somebody not realizing that locking a part of the buffer with discard flag would throw it awayentirely.
However, game always locks entire buffers:
Analyzing the code further though, I was not fully convinced that after discarding game always fills the entire buffer.So what if we assume the flag is added there wrongly and remove it?
It works! It doesn’t seem to be a fluke either – the game was consistently fixed for me and several other peoplewho tested.
A cautious reader might stop right here and ask a few questions:
- Clearly, game worked as-is at some point, so how do you know this is not just another workaround andit’ll break again?
- Why does using PIX and dgVoodoo fix it?
With a DX9 wrapper and knowledge on when D3DLOCK_DISCARD is supposed to be used, I could come up with proofthat this flag was used wrongly. In principle, you’d use this flag when locking a buffer if you did not careabout the buffer’s past contents and intended to fill it with new data. If the game used this flag, but also expectedthe buffer to retain its old contents, then the flag was misused.
To test whether the game really cares about previous buffer contents, I deliberately filled it with garbageif the game locked it with D3DLOCK_DISCARD:
Much to my relief, the result was more or less what I expected:
Graphics were once again broken, which proves that game locks buffers with a D3DLOCK_DISCARD flag andexpects the contents not to be thrown away! For me that’s a satisfactory enough proof of API misuse,and a proof that removing this flag is not a workaround, but a correct fix.
What about PIX and dgVoodoo? The latter is a wrapper, so I can imagine it not emulating the behaviour ofthe discard flag. PIX on the other hand is a graphics debugger, and in order to be able to capture the frameit likely preserves past and current buffer’s contents. While I can’t prove it for certain, I wouldn’t be surprisedif PIX just ignored this flag overall.
Are we done? Well…
I could technically finish here, as the most important issue has been fixed, and the game is playable.However, something was still off…
I have a i7-6700K and GTX 1070, mind you.
My PC is nowhere close to “bad”, yet I was unable to maintain stable 60 FPS – in the area presented on a screenshot,I in fact got consistent 40-45 FPS. To say it’s “terrible” would be an understatement.
Scarface Pc Game
However, looking up process affinity in Task Manager reveals something… interesting:
It is like this on every game launch.
Looking into the game’s code again, it seems like the game voluntarily sets itself to run on only one core.Why? I don’t know for sure, but I theoretized that this might have been a workaround for the aforementionedgraphics corruption bug. Recall that people claimed this bug occurs only on multicore CPU’s –and so I theoretized perhaps in WinXP days limiting CPU affinity to one core “fixed” this issue,and on newer systems it stopped being the case due to changes in how drivers work (eg. if WDDM driversmanage buffers out of process, then affinity settings would not affect them). It’s a very long shot,but hey – we’ve seen this before already.
Remove this code so game runs on all cores, and sure enough – it’s smooth as butter now.It also does not seem to have any visible race conditions (which could have been “hidden” by setting CPU affinity),because people tested it for hours and encountered no crashes or new bugs.
Now we're talking.
On top of that, I also identified the game was creating the D3D device with a multithreaded flag – which is saidto degrade performance, and was absolutely unneeded for the game. Another performance gain!
Is there more we can do? Turns out, yes.
When testing these fixes, aap observed that the game ran really poorly on his PC – technically,it was full speed, but when driving around it’d hitch a lot. I also observed the same when debugging the gameon a virtual machine, sometimes having the game pause for seconds at a time!
I checked it in a debugger, and much to my surprise, during those hitches the game spent a lot of time…releasing buffers! I fired up PIX and immediately noticed how happy the game is to create new buffers (and thusunload old buffers) when driving around:
Load it all.
This is really unhealthy. There is no reason the game can’t reuse buffers instead of throwing them awayand creating new ones. Luckily, the game has only two types of vertex buffers (static buffers in a managed pool,dynamic buffers in a default pool), and one type of index buffer,which makes the buffer cache relatively simple to implement. It looks like this game might really need it.
I settled on implementing a simplistic cache with the following behaviour:
- On creating buffers, try to find a buffer of matching type and size.
- If it doesn’t exist, check if there is a bigger buffer of matching type.However, to prevent unnecessary hogging of resources, only test for buffers at most twice as big as requested.
- If not found, create a new buffer.
I implemented the cache and ran the same test – it was really smooth in comparison for both me and aap!PIX graphs also looked much, much better now:
Reuse it all.
With this fix implemented, I finally was satisfied with the state of the game.Few final touches, and SilentPatch for Scarface is good to go!
Aside from the “exciting” fixes presented above, I also implemented a few more “boring” changes.The full changelog is as follows:
- Game-breaking graphical corruptions have been fixed, making the game playable on modern multicore machines
- Allowed the game to use all CPU cores (instead of locking to one core), dramatically improving performance
- Removed an unneeded multithreaded flag from the D3D device, possibly improving performance slightly
- Introduced a cache for some D3D resources used by the game, dramatically reducing the amount of stutter when roaming around the city
- Made the game list all selectable resolutions instead of a cherry picked list
- Moved the game’s settings from the Registry to settings.ini in the game directory - this resolves possible issues with saving settings
Head to Mods & Patches via the button below to download SilentPatch for Scarface.But before you do, stick with me for a bit longer!
Upon downloading, all you need to do is to extract the archive to the game’s directory and that’s it!When asked whether to overwrite files, select Yes.
Over the past few months, I’velaunchedseveralnewreleases,and I tried to be fairly active on the emulation scene. As I became increasingly productive over this time,some people wished to see a new way to support my work,since GitHub Sponsors – although very nice – has too much friction for some people to start using.
With this in mind, together with the release of SP for Scarface I’m starting a Patreon campaign!Fear not, paid early releases are not happening – as of now, perks include:
- Place in credits for every release
- Access to my personal to-do list (with the ability to comment/suggest!)
This is not much, but depending on the response I might end up modifying the rewards a bit.
Thank you!
For those interested,full source code of the patch has been published on GitHub, so it can be freely used as a point of reference:
By lashaziorlashazior. Last updated
This is a comprehensive guide on how to get Scarface working on your PC and what my stream setup looks like. I can only attest this working on Windows 7 but the guide I borrowed this from says it will work on Windows 8, 8.1, and 10. It is not guaranteed to work and I am not responsible for any screw ups you do to your computer. I recommend reading the whole guide throughly to keep yourself from screwing up things.
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First off, the issue with Scarface not running on anything other than XP has to do with how it renders pixels. Whatever plugins they used to code the game they are not liked by newer operating systems. The simple fix that we're going to implement here is Wine. For those familiar with Linux systems, you may have or already use Wine. Wine lets you use Windows applications under Linux based systems, but it just so happens that some plugins can be used to re-render Scarface on newer Windows operating systems.
The plugins we are using here are under the Wine D3D for Windows Link. Essentially, they re-render Direct3D pixels through an OpenGL wrapper based on the Wine D3D that Linux uses, allowing us to play Scarface on our newer operating systems.
So how do we get this working? We follow the steps listed below:
1. Make sure your Scarface is on Patch 1.00.2 before attempting these steps.
2. Download Wine D3D for Windows v1.6.2 - Link
3. Locate your Scarface directory (usually it's under c:Program Files (x86)Radical GamesScarface)
4. Copy the contents d3d9.dll, libwine.dll, and wined3d.dll to this directory (the same folder where the Scarface.exe is located). Be sure you do NOT copy the whole zip contents folder over. They have more plugins than what is needed and your game will just not work.
5. If you reached this step, attempt to start your game. If it works, you're golden. Otherwise, you may have to look into other methods such as 3Dripper - Link
If you reached this part and your game is running then you are good to go. If you want to stream this game, read more below.
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If you thought getting this game to work on newer operating systems was bad, getting it to stream is probably worse. For starters, I've only managed to get OBS Classic to recognize a windowed mode of the game. Secondly, it tends to crash at random intervals later in the run, possibly due to memory or graphics overload, I'm not sure which. As such, I recommend saving often.
The first step to getting it streamable is we need to force the game into windowed mode. For this, I highly highly highly (say it with me) HIGHLY! recommend using DXWnd - Link. This nifty program brute forces windowed mode on older games and is just overall pleasant to work with the interface. I actually use this program to force Stronghold Crusader and The Godfather as well, although the latter takes a little more work that I won't go into for this guide.
I'm not going to go into all the gritty details other than linking some settings and explaining a few things.
To start off, we want to add Scarface as a game under DXWnd. File -> Import should load up a folder with a bunch of game names. You can find Scarface in this section. The other option is Edit -> Add to make a blank setting. Here you select your Name you want it to be called (irrelevant, but I call mine the exact game name for completeness sake) and select the Path and Launch .exe. These are still in the same folder as before (usually it's under c:Program Files (x86)Radical GamesScarfaceScarface.exe). Make sure you link directly to the .exe in both Path and Launch.
From here, there's a few different settings we can tinker with. Under the Main tab, which is where we choose Path and Launch, there is settings for resolution and windowed mode. Selecting 'Run in Window' under Generic will force windowed mode and we can change the resolution under position. For instance, I stream my gameplay at 720p, so I set my W and H to 1280 and 720 respectively. With windowed mode selected and these numbers, Scarface will run at 1280x720 in a windowed mode.
BIG IMPORTANT NOTE HERE - if you want OBS Classic to recognize the game in windowed mode, we can't use fullscreen borderless. In other words, your game screen can't be the same resolution as your monitor as modern games allow you to do this for alt-tabbing purposes. OBS Classic can't recognize Scarface in this manner which is why I personally prefer doing a 720p capture.
Most of the other settings in DXWnd are irrelevant for our situation as we mostly just want it to be recognized in OBS and playable. We have the window selection fixed to our liking, now we just need to make sure the mouse stays in the window. To do this, we go under the Input tab, look under Cursor Clipper (second on the left side) and make sure that it is in the ON position. This forces the mouse to stay within the windowed game window like a normal fullscreen game operates.
Scarface Pc Game Crack Filehippo
Once you get your desired window settings and mouse not clipping out of the game window, you should be able to get it recognized in OBS Classic. The source we use here is Window Capture on a specific application. Simply boot your game up, alt tab, and change the settings to get it to show up in OBS. I'm not going to go into details on how to setup OBS as there are much more in depth guides but the simple way I do it is set my base resolution for the stream to my game resolution. This let's me 'Fit to screen' on the window capture source and have a no black borders around my edges.
Scarface Video Game Pc
If you got this far, and your game is working in windowed mode the way you like it and OBS is set up the way you like it, then you probably don't really need to read much further. Except one additional caveat - this game will crash on alt-tab with the Wine D3D and DXWnd method. I'm not exactly sure why but if you are the type of person to alt-tab a lot during gameplay, I recommend you SAVE OFTEN in game. If you are speedrunning this game, save after every mission to alleviate any potential issue with a crash.
If you have any more specific questions about this guide, feel free to message me personally here on Speedrun.com or send me a Tweet at http://twitter.com/lashazior