Audio Popping

Regardless of the SFX Volume and Music Volume settings, there will be some short audio pops that play at full volume sporadically while driving. These sounds originate from the Sound Manager; patching out the Sound Manager update function makes them, and every other sound, stop playing. The game thinks it is playing these sounds at the correct volume as the DisplaySoundInfo command shows the user-selected volume for all of the sounds it displays. It is likely that they are being configured using a different interface than the rest of the sounds; one that does not set the Direct Sound buffer volume to be the same as the game's internal sound structure volume in the Sound Manager's update function. They are created and played with the same interface as the rest of the sounds, so the bug must originate in proximity to creation when the game's internal sound structure is configured. Hooking the IDirectSound::CreateSoundBuffer method and setting the volume to DSBVOLUME_MIN before handing the buffer handle back to the game successfully eliminates the popping. This is proof that the game is never setting the volume of these buffers.

No VSync

The EnableVSYnc command appears to have no effect on the actual VSync setting.

Weird FPS Locking Behavior

When launching the game with DisableMOvie so that the intro video is never played, the framerate will be capped 64 fps. After enabling movies again and playing one, the framerate cap will rise to 500 fps. This indicates that the Bink Video player used by the game is affecting the game's framerate cap.

Prominent Zouna Underground member 0x5abe has discovered the cause of this bug and introduced a fix for the Ratatouille video game in commit 7bdc9cb: Added 64fps bug fix. Added removeFpsCap option of his RatataR custom launcher for the PC version of Ratatouille. An explanation of the cause of the bug as described by 0x5abe follows.

The bug is caused by a change from the default value of the system timer resolution by binkw32.dll, the dynamic library used by Bink Video. The game calls Sleep(1) in the message loop intending to sleep for 1ms, instead of the 15.625ms the game was actually sleeping for due to the low default resolution. Bink would change the resolution by calling timeBeginPeriod/timeEndPeriod which raised the fps cap. The article Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change was instrumental in 0x5abe's discovery of the cause of the bug.

Weird Driver Model Pose On Spawn

Sometimes when the driver respawns after a crash, the mount points will be in the right place but the other parts of the mesh will be in weird positions. This bug appears to go away when the fps is locked to 60. If you Alt-Tab at the right time while loading, the guy wont respawn on the bike but you can still drive it.

Alt-Tab Unload Behavior

When alt-tabbing out of the game in full-screen mode, all world objects will unload and slowly load back in when the window gains focus. This has the side effect of disabling collision with most things while the game is minimized.

Alt-Tab Soft Lock

If you Alt-Tab fast enough, the screen will go black and lock until the process is killed.

Alt-Tab During Shaders Compiling

If you alt-tab while the compiling shaders screen is up, the game might crash or freeze. This might be a special case of the previous bug.

Camp Menu Text Replacement When Exiting With GFWL

When you exit with GFWL the camp menu's name gets replaced by the networking menu's name.

DirectInput Support Is Broken

Only the XInput support is fully functional.

Ghost Barn

One of the barn meshes doesn't have collision.

Invisible/Disappearing FUEL Barrels

Sometimes the FUEL Barrels will disappear while on screen.

Memory Leaks

Performance decreases dramatically as the game runs and memory usage increases. I'm not too sure about this. When running with dmalloc on the decomp it didn't report anything, so maybe the game is just holding on to resources for longer than it needs to, and it's not a proper memory leak. More research to be done for sure.

Collision Crash

The game will crash during a physics collision very rarely. Although if you play for a long enough time it will happen eventually. It can also happen only 1-2 hours into playing. The address of EIP that raises the out-of-bounds memory access looks like a float value. Maybe they are dereferencing a float. This most commonly happens when checking if it's ok to save the respawn location at 0x00527D64. When it crashes there, the pointer value is always 0x3f800000 aka 1.0f, that gets set at 0x00807DCF. But it can also happen at 0x004063b9 in the CameraMove_G class. Patching the float assignment to nops seems to fix the crash. See also: Respawn Behavior.

Tree Missing Face

One of the "ramp trees" is missing a face on the underside of the ramp part.

Select any Car Glitch

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=408757353

Respawn in Ground

If a respawn point is recorded on a steep slope and you are oriented perpendicular to the slope, there is a chance you will respawn with half of the vehicle embedded in the slope.

Flickering

I don't think this is related to fps. Looks like really fast scanlines. Most noticeable in snowy areas.

Transparent Terrain

Sometimes when returning from Alt-Tab certain models like trees will be visible through the terrain.

Invisible Bush

There's a bush that has collision but no model.

Bad Bridge Collision

Sometimes trucks will drive through the bridges if you aren't close enough for collision to be enabled.

Flattened Terrain No Collision

Sometimes when running under a debugger, the flattened terrain will render but not be collideable. Instead, you will fall through it/drive over it on the height map terrain. This happens when having a breakpoint on where the vehicle params pointer is copied, and other times too I guess.

Ghost A-Frame Fence

When hitting the 2 A-frame fences that line some dirt roads a third one will pop in. This only happens for the fences placed on a certain road type, like the ones at (6148.37, -21667.72) and (6267.63, -23439.29). The same fence can spawn on a different road type, like at (5303.70, -26513.78), too but this bug doesn't happen for those fences. It kind of looks like they're spaced as if there should be 3 of the fences with the ones that break into 3. Maybe it's more about the type of fence prefab that gets placed than the road.

Render Order

Sometimes water will render over leaves, or far smoke renders over near smoke. Seems to be a problem with sorting the transparent meshes.

Ghost Window Shutter

The shutters on one of the house models are 1-sided, and transparent stuff renders over them from one direction. Probably marked transparent by accident, and this is a special case of the previous bug.

Firefly Bumper Duplication

Every time you crash into something with the Firefly, the front bumper is left behind, even if it has already fallen off. If you crash just right, then it might leave behind >20 bumpers at once.

AutoSave Spinner Draws Over Mouse

During the opening sequence, the spinner on the autosave warning screen will draw over the mouse cursor. Also, the stars and fuel count in the pause menu draw over the mouse cursor.

Crash deep in SpecialEffectsManager_G::~SpecialEffectsManager_G on exit

After finishing a race with a tornado and returning to freeride, if you exit the game normally, it may crash several calls deep in the SpecialEffectsManager_G destructor. See also: https://github.com/widberg/FUELDecompilation/issues/1

Helicopter Name Not Translated

The hardcoded string "heloico" is used as the name of the helicopter in the race ranking. It should probably be translated.

Sitting in Place for a Long Time

If you get unlucky, the game might crash from sitting in place for a long time due to how the respawn location list works. See also: Respawn Behavior.

Day Night Stutter

The game freezes up for a second or two when switching to the nighttime shaders.

Binary_Z Stutter

The game can occasionally get stuck in the loop at 0x0069C597 in Binary_Z. edx will have a crazy high number in it like 0x80000000, possibly indicating a signedness bug. This manifests as a few seconds of the game being frozen, I often worry that this is a case of the collision crash bug which also freezes before crashing, but the game unfreezes, and I stop worrying.

Crazy Rendering Bugs

Not sure how to reproduce all cases of this reliably, but after playing for ~2 hours, a weird green strap texture may appear in the bottom left of the screen. Also, trees and other meshes may flicker when close by and viewed at certain angles, and large white triangles may stick out of the vehicle. On rare occasions, the skybox will become subject to this glitch and look very strange. See also: https://github.com/widberg/FUELDecompilation/issues/2

Startup Stutter

Really jittery frames while the game is loading, but then it settles down, and the game runs fine once you make it to the main menu. This is caused by running the game with a relative path "../../FUEL.exe" -W for example. When you do this, the game will have to recalculate the absolute path to every file it tries to load, and there are a lot of shader cache files it has to load when starting up. The solution is to either run the game directly from the FUEL directory using "FUEL.exe" -W so it will get the absolute path to itself using GetModuleFileName or similar, I haven't actually checked. Or the even more recommended fix, use the absolute path when launching the game, "D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FUEL\FUEL.exe" -W. This last method is required for older games like Ratatouille; they will crash otherwise. WALL-E more closely mirrors FUEL's laggy startup behavior.

Bugs in 3rd Party Tools Interacting With FUEL

Not bugs in FUEL, but if I don't write them down somewhere, I'll forget. And maybe it's kind of FUEL's fault, who knows?

RenderDoc

When using RenderDoc with DXVK, since it doesn't support D3D9 (see note at the end), and doing a frame capture of FUEL anywhere but the loading screens, it will fail with the message Capture failed: Encountered an out of memory error: Couldn't allocate readback memory. It was suggested to disable GPUReadbackDeviceLocal in UI Settings window → Core → Config Editor Vulkan → GPUReadbackDeviceLocal here https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/2060#issuecomment-697911665. This made the capture slower, and it still failed for me. There was also a reported VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DEVICE_MEMORY here https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/issues/2157 where baldurk responded with the classic "don't use RenderDoc for games you didn't create". RenderDoc with DXVK works with other Zouna games, and it's very useful. I would like it to work with FUEL. It seems like the root of this is a DXVK problem. I'll wait it out and hope the next time I feel like I need to use RenderDoc for something, this was fixed in a newer version; if not, maybe I'll look into it more. As being tracked on the How To Help page, I am "working" on a fork of RenderDoc that works with D3D9, widberg/renderdoc-d3d9.