Emulator

Can you turn on EFB2Ram and see if this happens?

I've seen this before, it seems like after certain minigames it can get corrupted.

Do you mean turn on the EFB Copies and set it to RAM?

If that's what you mean then I'll turn on that preference setting once I have time. But I'll also have to check my settings in the preference window as well to be sure if I need to check or uncheck certain settings.

If it resolves the corrupted issue with the un-rendered tiles, then I'll leave it. But if not, then we're gonna have to keep digging deeper to resolve this corrupted file issue.

I do mean that, sorry for my shorthand. When you use the emulator a lot, you just get used to calling things by the simplest names possible.

Now, I agree, there are multiple possible causes for something like this.

Safe Texture Cache is known to fix weird issues like this; but, if turning it on doesn't fix the issue, that usually means it won't. You'd still have to test it (and in conjunction with EFB2Ram as well if it failed with EFB2Texture)

I don't know how easy it is to reproduce. If you could find a guaranteed way to reproduce this bug (like, a certain minigame triggering it, for instance) then I'd be all over doing this. But uh, I beat Mario Party 4 in Dolphin (the Story mode for a stream) and never saw one glitched tile. BUT, I know friends that did run into the issue (playing on netplay, too, so it wasn't random; every player in the group had the glitch,) after a long time of playing.

IF it happens very fast for you, that just means it'll be easier for you to debug it. Anyway, a short rundown of the settings that could affect this.

EFB Copies set to Ram -> If the game is doing something weird to draw all the tiles cheaply, then this could definitely affect it. For this to fix it, you will have to turn on EFB2RAM before you start the game. Don't turn it on right before the glitch happened, it won't help.

Texture Cache -> If it's not set to safe, there are chances of texture defects. Usually you can change this /after/ the glitch has happened and it'll clear itself up, but not in certain cases. Turning it on before the glitch happens should be okay too, but, if you're fast enough to play with it set to safe all along, that'd be best.

Single Core -> Thanks to the netplayers, I know this isn't the cause, but a lot of times a dualcore desync can cause weird textures to load. This issue isn't really plausible because the netplayers were either on single core or an old build with dualcore sync; which gives the same results as single core.

Driver issues -> This is a scary one, but I wouldn't put it passed the apple drivers to do something stupid. Because it happened to the netplayers, I'm not concerned that this one a driver issue, though, I just thought I'd bring it up for other cases like this.

If you could tell me how long it takes you on average to get to the corrupted tiles, that'd be great, if there are any specific things I can do other than play the game (because I haven't been able to reproduce yet) please do.

Alright, I changed the Texture Cache setting from Fast to Safe this time, and it took approximately 30 minutes for the Invisible Tile glitch to trigger again. But this time, yes sigh even though the tiles are invisible since the glitch triggered again, they are not solid black as they were before because since I configured the Texture Cache to be on Safe, the Invisible Tiles are now Transparent, so it's a little bit better and since I changed it to Safe, the issue isn't quite as bad as it was before, but it's still an annoying glitchy issue that's still needs to be fixed so please try to give me some more advice on how I can possibly try to resolve this glitch. And if there's nothing I can do, then I recommend that you report this game issue to the rest of the Dolphin Developers to see if they can possibly fix this glitchy issue.

I'll turn on the EFB Copies suggestion that you said earlier and set it to RAM and I'll see if that fixes the issue. I'll cross my fingers.

I'm not sure that means anything. It could be a different form of the same glitch; just different due to the minigame that triggered it.

I changed the EFB Copies setting from Texture to RAM and as soon as I hit the play button ... it Fixed It!

Wow, you are a genius, I have a good feeling that what you suggested earlier probably permanently fixed the glitch, although there's no guarantee that it's permanently fixed, if the glitch triggers again then I'll let you know but for now, In my perspective, I think its safe to assume that since I changed the Texture Cache from Fast to Safe, and since I changed the EFB Copies from Texture to RAM, I have a good feeling that it most likely resolved the issue.

Thanks a lot!

Okay, I think there's some textures being invalidated/killed which is causing the corruption. I guess for now the best thing to do is to add this to the wiki.

EFB2Ram is a lot slower than EFB2Texture, so I don't know about making it default over a problem like this. Will ping necessary people.

I can't replicate it here...

It's a weird bug; easier way to force it to happen is to change IR while playing in EFB2Texture. Same rules as F-Zero GX's shadows.

EFB2RAM is certainly a lot slower then EFB2Texture since it dramatically hogs the CPU and slows down the game a lot and once again the bug had triggered. You're right, this is such a very weird bug that still doesn't make any sense as to why this is screwing and corrupting the textures in certain insidents after playing a mini game. I sure hope that you and the rest of your Dolphin Developers continue to investigate this weird issue and try to come up with a resolve for the bug.

No, it makes sense totally. Textures are getting invalidated. EFB2Ram handles it like consoles, EFB2Texture is a hack to make it faster.

Oh I see what you're saying, so I guess it does make sense since the textures are getting invalidated and corrupted somehow due to some thread in the process causing it I'm guessing. Good idea to add this important information to the wikipedia, it'll be useful resources for developers.

Is this a bug with the game file or the Dolphin Application specifically? Because If it's a bug with the game file then I suggest that you or someone should add a patch to fix the corrupted textures.

Nah, it's a side-effect of using the EFB2Texture hack. It's faster, but has limitations. You just ran into one.

If it's a side effect of using the EFB2Texture that causes the corrupted textures in tge game then I suggest that you report this to the Dolphin Developers directly, telling them to try to update the EFB2Texture setting and see if they can fix that annoying side effect in the next beta versions of the Dolphin App. 'Cause I'm still on Dolphin 4.0-3344.

Non, non, you still don't get it. EFB to Texture is inherently inaccurate and will inevitably cause certain bugs; that's the definition of a hack. There's no real way to fix it and still stay faster than EFB to RAM (though there are efforts to speed up EFB to RAM and the whole texture cache clusterfuck, which are unfortunately progressing slowly due to the difficulty of the tasks). This issue is only still open so that kosta can figure out whether he wants to force EFB to RAM in the .ini or not.

(Also, this issue tracker is the preferred way to report an issue to the developers. Some of us non-developers are just given this fancy Project Member status to be able to properly triage issues.)

This isn't likely to be fixed, I'm going to close this once the wiki is updated.