Few thoughts on RPCS3

[Annie]

Hey everyone, just wanted to leave my two cents:

- RPCS3's website (http://rpcs3.net) needs to be completely updated / revamped. That has been talked already a few months back, tambre was going to do it but he didn't have the time to change it much. Since then the website hasn't been changed much besides random announcements.
- It needs a game compatibility list. There's this (#1449) regarding that, but it hasn't been updated for a while now.
- It needs more people helping out either testing or submitting changes to GitHub, that being why it needs more people spreading out the word about it. How to do that? The forums need to be updated so people feel more interested to participate and help, because it feels a bit empty right now for a project this big.
- A Discord server? Seems like everyone has one nowadays. Would be good, although there is already an IRC channel, but that's mostly for dev talk, a discord server would be more friendly and allow for a lot more options than the IRC channel currently has.
- More frequent and detailed announcements on the website / sub-reddit (r/RPCS3).
- Automatic rpcs3 builds should be renamed to RPCS3 Legacy Builds and the titles of further topics should be "RPCS3 revision <gitcommit> [date]". Either that or the area should be purged. I don't feel like the latter would be a good idea though, because topics inside that area get quite a good number of views.
- Should games be moved back if they suffer some kind of regression? Currently, games are only being moved up (Loadable -> Intro -> Half-Playable -> Playable).

Cheers~

[ssshadow]

Incoming wall of text:

Something I have been thinking about. What exactly is useful testing? Just a log file doesn't always say much, ideally a developer would need a full stack trace and perhaps more information to tell why a game crashes. This disorganized mess we have now is pretty much only useful for tracking changes to how certain games run, nothing more really.

And when should a proper bug report be filed on Github? When any particular errors occur? Is "this game runs but looks supremely broken" with a renderdoc trace actually a useful bug report, or just more noise since everyone involved already knows pretty much nothing works?

Do we really need like 4 different threads for the same game just because they have different ID's even though they run identically with the same issues?

Is anyone except Annie here even actively moderating this forum? Right now some threads are in the wrong category, and some of the pinned threads could probably need some updating (for instance the newcomers guide should mention that certain LLE modules are pretty much always safe to use and needed, and the very first sentence above everything else should be no no no you can't play a single good game yet). If anyone here trusts me I volunteer to do some basic moderation, like editing posts and moving threads.

One more thing, maybe we should actually make topics, or at least keep a list of games that have been tested but are not even loadable. We occasionally get people wondering if anyone has tried AAA game X and of course people have, but there is nothing on the forum about it. I did that with Persona 5 here and that thread got a lot of views in quite the short amount of time. (And someone had already asked if it was working in the support subforum).

[Annie]

The games area right now is there pretty much just to keep track on games' statuses and sometimes spot a bug that can be reported and easily fixed.

Log files are useful to have for someone who either wants to test the same game, compare the results and/or help the person who posted it go further in the emulation by enabling/disabling libraries.

For developers it's useful if they want to implement something and they want to know what games use that or why a certain game isn't reaching further in its emulation. However, that would require some kind of indexing, which would be possible to do if we had a game compatibility list where the logs could be uploaded and properly parsed. There was an excel document with games / unimplemented functions somewhere but it's pretty outdated.

Stack traces are mostly needed when the emulator actually crashes (it asks for stack traces along the report), which doesn't happen in a lot of cases, but commonly it's possible to tell why a game is stuck by the log. If not sure, I do believe devs may test the game themselves (see: Resogun).

It's not that easy to tell right now when should a bug report be filed on GitHub, mainly for less experienced users.
Basically: stuff that is already implemented and is meant to work properly but it isn't / regressions. That would include graphical discrepancies (ex: wrong colors, graphical glitches) on games that aren't utterly broken.

Ideally, yes, but although one game has several variants and they usually behave the same, it's not always the case as technically they're not the same, whereas one may work and the other may not. I found this happening to me in the Rub a Duck games I think. And in a structured game list, games would be either sorted by Game ID and/or Title.

I've been wanting to update the newcomers' guide, will probably do soon. I'm not part of the administration, you'd have to talk to shadow or nick but if you see something wrong feel free to report it.

An area for Non-working games would be a good idea. Usually, currently those may be posted in Commercial Games - General Discussion.

[Nezarn]

I'm no mod or anything, but since this thread was made, I wanna leave some recommendations here:

- Some kinda template on how to report issues on github (and whats isn't need any reporting (like every "error" with TODO))
- Well this would be a pain in the a** to do, but what about a "Nothing" category in the current comp. list in the forum, move every decent threads from General Discussion to there (so General Discussion would be much cleaner [maybe]), and also make threads for games that aren't reported yet stating "DOESN'T WORK YET" in the biggest font size as first post (and this would be a pain to do because theres like 1 mod only)
- Provide a list for braindead people, that which modules should be never LLE'd since they wouldn't work.

@Annie

- Yeah, a nicer website would be nice, and wouldn't be hard to make, there are a lot of different CMS available, for example Joomla, so we would only need an unique theme
- Some kinda compatibility list would be nice, I suggest hosting a Wiki on the website with MediaWiki, or find something that would work with a CMS (if we would use one for the new site) so it would be easy to make it (and make it similiar for Dolphin\PCSX2, so every game would have its recommended settings posted, and some test cases, free wiki sites suck tho, once i've tried making a comp. list (while learning how to do stuff in mediawiki, but the editor is a mess, and there are tons of crap ads everywhere, so i gave up))
- Well people who want to help the emulator to grow\get fixed are already posting stuff on github and here on the forum, the remaining people are either braindead or has "meh rpcs3 is shit it can't run anything good" mentality.
- A discord server would be nice, but then im sure we would need more mods. (and inb4 "WHY XYZ GAME DOESNT WORK? THIS EMULATOR SUCKZ!!!!!!!" kinda spam)
- What would you want to announce since theres barely any visible development (aside from RSX\Renderer fixes) ?
- I would vote for purging the Automatic RPCS3 builds thread, and either make 1 post stating "You can get the latest RPCS3 build from here: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/rpcs3/rp.../artifacts " or just make the whole thread instantly redirect to appveyor when someone clicks on it (so basically the thread name itself is a link), because now, the whole thread is a spam fest, people without brains are posting issues there.
- I think if theres a regression, then wait for 1 or 2 weeks (for fix) and then move it to its current category (so if a game is in Intro but regresses and doesn't work anymore, move it to Loadable)

[ssshadow]

It's not that easy to tell right now when should a bug report be filed on GitHub, mainly for less experienced users.
Basically: stuff that is already implemented and is meant to work properly but it isn't / regressions. That would include graphical discrepancies (ex: wrong colors, graphical glitches) on games that aren't utterly broken.

If this is the case then it should be clearly defined somewhere. Or maybe not, because it might cause more spam on github.

It's hard to tell though, for instance the Gust games work just fine until they randomly don't, no errors or anything. Is this worth reporting? Maybe? But then again I could find 100 games with strange bugs if I wanted to. It's best if a dev answers this I think.

An area for Non-working games would be a good idea. Usually, currently those may be posted in Commercial Games - General Discussion.

I would vote in favor of this, I think. Back in 2013 such a category was obviously meaningless since only a single commercial game (or two) displayed a black screen, but recently I think about a third of the games I have do at least that. So it might soon be meaningful. (And again, people would know that no, Last of Us isn't working)

[Annie]

@Nezarn

The error message on the emulator that asks people to check FAQs and stuff was an attempt to prevent people from creating useless reports, but somehow people still get 0.0.0.6 builds that ask them to report every exception they get. I have no idea on how that could be done, but maybe a dev could offer more insight.
Probably writing somewhere that red and orange output is normal and moving common "errors" that don't break games out of the Error log category to a separate one (?).
Creating the not working area wouldn't give much work because there's only a few threads to move there, but it needs to be done by a forum administrator.
Someone once wanted to make a list of modules that work or not when LLE loaded, but I don't think they finished it. We could probably make one with the most common stuff that should and shouldn't be loaded and then add more information based on whatever people try to load.


@ssshadow

It's hard to tell as there are many scenarios, though I'm not part of the RPCS3 dev team, just leaving my POV. If there were more devs probably those games who wield strange bugs would be able to be frequently tested by them so that the cause of the bug could be found and fixed.