thpsX

- => Questions & Tutorials => Topic started by: Challenger on September 11, 2016, 09:26:16 am

Title: THUG2 CAS Flash Glitch Discussion
Post by: Challenger on September 11, 2016, 09:26:16 am
If you played THUG2 on PS2 you used to see this a lot. People would have this crazy CAS with parts that flashed all colors of the rainbow. I love this, but seems it's not possible on PC. Has anyone looked into seeing if this is possible in THUG Pro? You need the infinite saturation/value hacks for colors. I still remember how to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRbILL-rNPg

I have tried everything I can think of from replacing script files with their PS2 counterparts to importing flashed CAS files from my memory card to hex editing saturation and values manually. I have been able to replicate the effect in PCSX2 so the effect itself is possible to reproduce on the PC platform. The main thread I have on Phun is here with lots of details on what I tried:

http://phun.freeforums.org/anyone-remember-the-cas-flash-glitch-t6032.html
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: ShutMeUp! on September 11, 2016, 12:44:28 pm
If i recall correctly, i think the flash glitch is only possible on PS2 because of the way the PS2 renders stuff.

Not an answer from myself, just kinda quoting something that was said already i think in this forum, i believe it was TomoAlien who said it.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: Challenger on September 11, 2016, 01:20:35 pm
Yeah that's what I've been hearing from all angles. However, I learned from sk8ace yesterday it has been done in THUG Pro but sk8ace doesn't have the name of the guy who pulled it off. He literally saw the guy come into a room with a flashed CAS. I mainly posted this thread in hopes he would see it and chime in. There another guy from the Phun forums who seemed to be going heavy into it about a year ago, Uncle Lester. However, I never heard back from him. Is he an active member of THPSX?
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: SK8.William on September 11, 2016, 01:35:27 pm
I think he has an account here,but not very active.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: sk8ace on September 11, 2016, 03:13:10 pm
Now that I think of it, I believe is was the guy's skateboard that was flashing, not his cas. I think he did it with the gold deck.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: Challenger on September 11, 2016, 03:49:11 pm
Hmm, I've gotten boards to flash on PS2 using wheel color, but only with custom boards swapped with a Gameshark code. In this case wheel color affects the whole board, which may have been what you're seeing.
Title: Is it possible?
Post by: ShutMeUp! on September 11, 2016, 09:43:32 pm
Not sure why, but just reading this posts, now i wanna see a color-changeable golden board.. ._.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BlazE on September 12, 2016, 05:26:29 pm
Correct, it only works on PS2 because it's essentially an overload on the PS2's part. PC and Xbox 360 do not create that affect.

Flashy board is done using Infinite Board Scale and making it completely flat.

Someone tried telling me they had a flashy skater on thugpro but in reality it was just scaled flat which causes the glitchy flash affect.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: ShutMeUp! on September 12, 2016, 10:37:27 pm
Correct, it only works on PS2 because it's essentially an overload on the PS2's part. PC and Xbox 360 do not create that affect.

Flashy board is done using Infinite Board Scale and making it completely flat.

Someone tried telling me they had a flashy skater on thugpro but in reality it was just scaled flat which causes the glitchy flash affect.
It just flashes bright, no rainbow unfortunately, i just wish i'd seen that effect before. :/
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: Challenger on June 06, 2017, 10:06:09 pm
So I started digging back in to this, not with an expectation of finding the cause of the glitch, but in attempt to learn more about the effect. First I did some more research on the Graphics Synthesizer chip and how it operates. It runs on surprisingly basic principles:

Quote
To try to answer the original vague question - the PS2 was exceedingly basic. You have a pool of embedded memory the GPU can access, and that's used for everything - all your framebuffers (colour, z, scanout) and textures.

...

The PS2 has a very simplistic rasteriser - you get a colour at each vertex, interpolated across the polygon (non-perspective correct at that) and one texure co-ordinate per-vertex, fixed point (which means you get wobbly textures if you don't keep your co-ordinates in a sensible range), again interpolated - though at least the texture is perspective correct.

For each pixel it can look up a texture at the interpolated co-ordinate (the most you get in filtering is trilinear, but typically you would use bilinear with nearest-level mipmapping), modulate the texel with the interpolated colour, and then blend that with whatever was in the display using a fairly basic set of alpha-blend modes (you don't even get a modulated blend, except with an alpha value... most you can do with colour is add or substract).

So what I take from this is something is going wrong during the final "blending" stage causing a random mess of colors to be mapped to each vertex and overlaid onto the original texture before the mesh is rendered to the screen. I found a program called Texmod, a DirectX texture viewing and ripping tool. I ran this on top of PCSX2 and it shows the following output in the upper left:

(http://i.imgur.com/jRWfzaQ.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/I15gGfO.png)

Texmod allows you to cycle and highlight each texture in VRAM. When a texture is selected it's replaced with green and the texture itself is shown in the upper left. So I selected my flashed angel wings and got this result:

(http://i.imgur.com/mEvF9Uq.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/gNUylET.png)

The green wings still have a flickery shadow over them with the original texture remaining uncorrupted and unchanging, which confirms my theory regarding the transforming overlay. This falls in line with what WhoElseButMe suggested.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: Grand on June 11, 2017, 12:00:46 pm
Word, cool to see an update on this.

Any chance it's doable in ThugPRO?
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BloodshotBiz on June 12, 2017, 04:27:34 am
there is a method for this i found sometime last year that involves a glitch.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: ShutMeUp! on June 19, 2017, 01:33:13 am
Interesting.
Amazing how even when highlighted with TexMod, it still has flickery shadows!
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BlazE on June 20, 2017, 10:31:54 am
there is a method for this i found sometime last year that involves a glitch.

proof or gtfo
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BloodshotBiz on June 20, 2017, 05:48:09 pm
You must not know who I am...


https://youtu.be/qKqyHLNzCW0

Not quite the same but very similar
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BlazE on June 21, 2017, 01:20:48 pm
You must not know who I am...


https://youtu.be/qKqyHLNzCW0

Not quite the same but very similar

"You must not know who I am..." lol

Too bad that's probably just done in lighting tools with debug and people online wouldn't even see it.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BloodshotBiz on June 21, 2017, 03:56:00 pm
Again you must not know who I am. This is done via glitch kid


Edit: mhmmm
https://youtu.be/Ij7lvgyLkF4
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BlazE on June 21, 2017, 08:36:27 pm
Again you must not know who I am. This is done via glitch kid


Edit: mhmmm
https://youtu.be/Ij7lvgyLkF4

Lol get over yourself "kid" don't get mad because someone doubted the amazing leet haxor skills of biz.
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BloodshotBiz on June 21, 2017, 09:26:51 pm
glitchmaster. no "leet haxor" here. get over yourself, DOH ;)
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: BlazE on June 22, 2017, 12:42:06 am
glitchmaster. no "leet haxor" here. get over yourself, DOH ;)

 ;D
Title: Re: CAS Flash Glitch in THUG Pro?
Post by: GokuStrikeBack (Goku.FTR) on July 22, 2017, 10:21:49 pm
In Early Versions Of Thug Pro wich includes THEMOD 1.3 In THEMOD the saturation and value are infinite by itself and saving on THEMOD and opening thug pro should work
Title: Re: THUG2 CAS Flash Glitch Discussion
Post by: Challenger on October 08, 2019, 01:58:00 pm
Old Phun forum thread for reference:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/phun/anyone-remember-the-cas-flash-glitch-t6032.html

Wayback Machine snapshot in case Phun goes away:
http://web.archive.org/web/20191008180052/https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/phun/anyone-remember-the-cas-flash-glitch-t6032.html

I’m trying to get this to work with other games. Doing some research on THUG, it was the third RenderWare based game in the series, with THUG2 using a different render engine. Comparing the save file formats, I don’t see the color variables used in THUG. However, I’m checking in to THAW which appears to be a similar file layout to THUG2. Once I can isolate the addresses for the saturation and value adjustments I’ll try injecting 0x65 and 0x56 to see if I can replicate the effect in the PS2 version.

Regarding the underlying cause, reaching out to the PCSX2 community on this one.
https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Curious-About-Crazy-Graphics-Bug-on-Original-PS2

Stay tuned!
Title: Re: THUG2 CAS Flash Glitch Discussion
Post by: Challenger on October 08, 2019, 08:26:19 pm
I modified a THAW CAS and loaded it in the game. Unfortunately Neversoft has clamped the values to a maximum of 0x5A and 0x4B. I verified this by changing the values, updating the checksum, importing the save file, loading THAW, saving the file in THAW, and re-exporting it again to view in a hex editor. So in short, Neversoft took note of this in THUG2 and didn't want a bunch of flashy messes when people were playing online in THAW.

That doesn't mean the effect itself isn't achievable, if someone would be so kind as to write an infinite colors Gameshark code for THAW I would be able to say for sure if it's possible at all or not. For reference, here is the code for THUG2. It unlocks the saturation and value adjustments.

Inf Sat
207C2D88 00000000
207C2D74 00000000

Inf Val
207C2D88 00000000
207C2D9C 00000000

Someone look into this code please. If we find this effect is possible in THAW that would be pretty amazing.