A beloved classic franchise from Evolution Studios. Where we race against AI and online opponents in muddy race tracks with big trucks, sounds exciting? Because it is!

Original Experience

Motorstorm Titles on PS3 ran at a wobbly 30FPS, 720p with dynamic resolution scaling, that’s right the game has DRS, all the way back in 2006.

Low sample motion blur, although it looks fine at it’s original resolution and framerate but it does not hold up particularly well at high resolution and framerates and at first sight, fixed timestep.

Hidden Gems - Part 1 (Framerate Modes)

Running the game on the RPCS3 emulator with increased vblank shows disappointing results. sped up gameplay.

The hidden gem here is game speed. When you crash your vehicle, the game slows down to 0.125f. And normal gameplay it’s 1.00f. peeking at this area shows some curious values.

3F 80 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 01

Setting the byte 2 to 1 gives us..

60FPS Gameplay? Alright, that’s cool but it’s still fixed timestep and double speed at 120FPS.

Not shippable if you ask me.

Let’s pay a little more attention to what’s down below, what happens if I set this next int32 to 1…

I apologize if that clip made you all jelly. It did for me seeing it for the first time as well.

The same memory pattern exists in other games all the way to Motorstorm RC.

As for the names, the files were left bare within MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

-- globalparams.lua: auto-generated by GoStorm2 at 17/07/2007 14:28:25
FrameRateMode("30Hz Lock")
-- Possible values:
-- See game_config.xml for more info.
-- 30Hz Lock    -- 30 FPS    (No Havok Deltatime) -- Default for all games.
-- 60Hz Lock    -- 60 FPS    (No Havok Deltatime)
-- Compensation -- Deltatime (Use Havok Deltatime)

Blur, Blurryness Everywhere - Part 2 (Dynamic Resolution Scaling)

Two things stood out to me when I played this with the unlocked framerate, the image can become blurry out of nowhere and the motion blur doesn’t look as good.

Let’s start with the most obvious image quality flaw, dynamic resolution scaling. The game scales the resolution based on frametime targets, if it is below its threshold of 33.3ms, the game drops its resolution to 360p at it’s lowest, to find it? 720p during the clearest moments and Decreased Values when things get blurry.

I narrowed it down to this subroutine (0x002634c8) with a compare float statement and all I have to do is to skip this operation, simple.

Blur, Blurryness Everywhere - Part 3 (Motion Blur)

Peeking at the game executable and searching for Blur, I got a few results. WorldMotionBlurBase BlurAccel and BlurDecel. This smells like some sort of configuration key. Let’s try memory.

-- Taken from NPEA90006/NPEA80017 1.01 at address 0x300767ba

-- Begin original file:
-- advancedsettings.lua: auto-generated by GoStorm2 at 28/02/2007 10:28 am
WorldMotionBlurBase(0.55)
CarMotionBlurBase(0.43)
BoostBlurEnabled(true)
BlurAccel(0.01)
BlurDecel(0.01)
WorldBlurMax(1)
CarBlurMax(1)
ParticleEmissionRate(1)
VehicleDamageRate(0.81)

Setting these to 0.0f gets rid of the motion blur and it looks good!

Blur, Blurryness Everywhere - Part 4 (Porting to Newer Games)

Get ready because the things we learned in the past two sections of this post is going to be thrown out the window, Starting with Motorstorm Pacific Rift, they changed the settings to use the XML format and the code being much easier to read.

// Motorstorm RC for demonstration, similar code is used in Pacific Rift and Apocalypse.
// at 0x001a8050 for NPUA80678 01.02
ParseFile("scripts/viewportquality.xml");
// -- snip --
GetSectionKeyName       = ParseSectionKey("General");
bool GetBoolValFromFile = ParseValueKey("enableMotionBlur");
// <General enableMotionBlur="true"/>
enableMotionBlur = GetValFromFile;

Take enableMotionBlur for example, the game code looks for this key in a file named viewportquality.xml within the scripts folder and reads this value, and since this may change depending on user tweaks, let’s always load this variable using the load intermediate instruction.

The same can be done for variableScaling (Dynamic Resolution Scaling)

Comparison Images:

I won’t lie, this is actually me when I figured out that hidden deltatime feature in these games.

I have already covered MLAA in a previous post of mine for Motorstorm Apocalypse so if you are interested, check it out!

Closing Words

That’s going to be it for this post, if you like it be sure to share this with others and let them know that if they have a powerful PC, high framerate Motorstorm is a reality, enjoy your enhanced video games!

Oh and one more thing, I wished we got a remaster for these games on the current platform, would be interesting to see how that plays out. Yes, including Driveclub and my beloved Gravity Rush (Gravity Daze) 2

Ah well, I guess emulation will do just fine on our computers.

Showcase

Patch

For those looking to use the patch on the emulator, you can head over to the patch manager, click on the “Download Latest Patches” and find the patch you wanted to use with your game Title ID and version, click on the checkbox to enable the patch and save changes.

Supporters

Thanks to the patrons who supported me on various platforms! You guys are awesome!

Monthly supporters:

• Patreon:

  • ac2pic
  • Alexa
  • Brett
  • Ciril
  • GarnetSunset
  • Mmmmmhno
  • Paul
  • PlayStation5Mods
  • RazzySxPB
  • Ryan
  • Voredy
  • YveltalGriffin
  • Zackery
  • alessaro92
  • ashenC
  • embee
  • erdosadam24
  • faith
  • maplemiyazaki
  • patrick
  • rudi

• Github Sponsors:

  • VIPO777
  • WardFail
  • Whitehawkx
  • gorshco
  • jrson83
  • regal.
  • suwagawaki