nxnative-easy/dm/games/01004A4010FEA000/README.md

Bayonetta 3 (01004A4010FEA000)

Update 1.2.0 (v131072) over the base game, SDK 13.3.2 (no other game's sdk build). PlatinumGames' own engine on NVN; Wwise sound through AudioOut. Modules main, subsdk0 (the movie library, NintendoSDK_movie: WebM movies, VP9) and sdk. Languages: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Plays on the iPhone (IPA 14.2 GB); 60 fps in play, 30 where the game asks for it (the title and loading screens).

What it needs

Setting	Where	Why
4 GB layout: mem_reserve 0x100000000, mem_alias 0x10000000, mem_stack 0x10000000, app_pool 0xCD500000, sys_resource 0x0	game.tsv	the NPDM declares no system resource (META +0x14 = 0): no virtual address memory; nninitStartup sets a heap of the pool − used memory (3.09 GB), which the game maps only as it touches it
mem_used 0x7400000 (116 MB)	game.tsv	the rewritten modules are larger than the default 64 MB of used memory (the game's SetHeapSize asks for pool − used)
pad_layout full	game.tsv	the 3D gamepad layout: the camera is on the right stick, and the D-pad picks items

Services and SDK

• Resolved: null read at main+0xb8462c right after the first two textures, called from main+0x670eb0. Not the fault itself: nnMain's start-up (main+0x6705c0) returns false when any of its 30 steps fails, the game then skips its main loop and goes straight to shutdown, and the shutdown walks a pool (main+0x4efce70) whose initialization (main+0xb840d0) came after the failed step. DM_PROBE on each step's entry (lldb was unavailable: developer mode off) showed the last one entered, main+0x69c698, the built-in shaders of shader2.dat (hwfillcolor, hwshaderpf, …), and probes inside it the step that failed: creating a shader from its object (main+0xd0d998). The engine checks each shader object's GPU code version (byte 6 major, byte 7 minor of the object) against the driver's range (nvnDeviceGetInteger 0x2E–0x31: newest major, oldest major, newest minor, oldest minor) and refuses newer code; the host reported 1.14, the table measured on Super Mario Odyssey's SDK 7 driver, and hwfillcolor.vso is 1.15 (the game's objects run from 1.9 to 1.16). The host now reports the translator's supported GPU-code range; see Newest GPU code version reported by the driver.
• Two NVN getters were red stubs: nvnWindowGetCrop (read back every few frames; before any SetCrop it is the whole first window texture) and nvnSamplerBuilderGetLodClamp.
• Not a hang: the first boot sat on the loading clock for about a minute, the CPU idle, with every file read done after 12 s: that run compiled its Metal libraries and pipelines on first use (cold cache). With a warm cache the title is up after about 15 s; what looked like a 40-second wait in the read log (DM_FSLOG) was the title screen itself, which reads nothing. Screenshots every few seconds (ctl.sh snap from a script) told the two apart.

Rendering

• Shaders are single-stage programs: the engine makes a program of each object and binds them per stage at draw time, so each is paired with a cover pixel shader. It finds its built-in ones by name (hwfillcolor.vso, …).
• Two domain shaders do not build (DS_Vanish05_*.dso: SPIRV-Cross threw an exception: Subgroup builtins are not available in this type of function); the one-lane rewrite (spv_single_lane) covers vertex shaders only, and tessellated draws are skipped anyway.
• From the title to the prologue's first play the picture is right as far as compared (title scene, menus, the VP9 opening movie, the first real-time scene, play with the HUD). Two red lines, once each: a pixel shader declares a cube texture where the game binds a 2D one (the zero cube is bound), and a draw whose stage 0 reads cb1 with none bound.
• The spin-wait search takes 37 loops in main (35 before its store rule) (development.md, Power).

Files and shaders

• 72 PKZ archives in the RomFS root (14 GB; root_000.pkz, core_000.pkz, pl_000.pkz, st1_000.pkz, sound_000.pkz … sound_017.pkz, …) of DAT archives, compressed per entry with Oodle Kraken or stored (OodleKraken 11,760 entries, None 5,159; main knows ZStandard too, main+0xcbdf80 maps the three names to 0xc9, 0x65 and 0), beside 478 loose WebM movies in movie/ (01). romfs_marker is root_000.pkz.
• main reads the archives only through Oodle's streaming decoder (main+0xcbc698 creates one, main+0xcbc7f8 feeds it 256 KB at a time into a 10 MB window), so OodleLZ_Decompress was never linked in and its name string is not there. The Mac host's Oodle tool mode now finds OodleLZDecoder_MemorySizeNeeded, Create, Destroy and DecodeSome instead (by the strings of Oodle's oodlelzcompressors.cpp and their order) and decodes each entry with them in DM_OODLE_SERVE (hle_oodle.c). profile_guess.py turns it on for any game with Kraken PKZ archives (oodle_packs). The shader split decodes every entry of every PKZ (8 workers, one Mac host each) in about 20 s; only root_000.pkz holds shaders.
• Shaders: 8,024 PlatinumGames shader objects in root_000.pkz (shader.dat, shader2.dat, shadereff*.dat, autoshadereff.dat): VSO\0 / PSO\0 / CSO\0 / HSO\0 / DSO\0 (the stage), u32 compiler version, u32 control length, u32 control offset (0x18), u32 code length, u32 code offset. 6,424 distinct keys (4,288 pixel, 2,047 vertex, 78 compute, 6 domain, 5 hull) (shader_split.py pkz_entries, pgdat_members, pg_shader). All but two domain shaders build.

Status on the Mac

• The boot, the title, a new game (difficulty, Naive Angel Mode, brightness, the auto-save notice), the VP9 opening movie, the prologue's first real-time scene and a minute of play in it, with sound.
• 60 fps in play (frame time p50 16.67 ms, p95 17.5 ms; GPU about 5 ms a frame on an M6), 30 where the game asks for it (the title and loading screens); about 2 GB resident and 3.1 GB of Metal allocations, flat after the first scene. The title is up about 15 s after launch with a warm shader cache. The prewarm list covers that route (678 lines).

Mac routes

• The work folder's run/ctl.sh drives a run started with DM_CTL (CTL=<file> picks another run's control file), run/step.sh <shot> <presses…> presses and takes a screenshot, run/snapseq.sh boots and takes one every few seconds, and run/route.sh <run> boots on a fresh save and drives the route above: A at the title, A through the logo, A (Standard), A, B (closes the Naive Angel Mode help), A (Off), A (brightness), A (the auto-save notice), then Plus, Down, A skips the opening movie.

Found on this game

General host changes first needed here; each applies to every game:

• The NVN layer advertises support for the game’s GPU-code versions (hle_nvn.c), nvnWindowGetCrop and nvnSamplerBuilderGetLodClamp: Newest GPU code version reported by the driver, NVN calls that were red stubs.
• Oodle's streaming decoder in the Mac host's tool mode (hle_oodle.c, OodleLZDecoder_*, oodle_packs) and the PKZ / DAT readers: 01, Compressed RomFS content.
• PlatinumGames shader objects (pg_shader): PlatinumGames' shader objects.

Open

• Dotted patches on some surfaces (a grid every 4 pixels: the platforms breaking up in the prologue, a floor near the camera) look like the engine's dithered dissolve; not compared with the Switch yet.
• The two domain shaders and the two red lines above.