MIXIDtheSilly/kart-recomp v0.1.3

on GitHub

Updating no longer means building the whole game again: bring your older install over and Build only redoes what changed. This release also fixes the movie crash and makes the startup GPU crash much rarer.

Getting started

1. Download kart-recomp-0.1.3-windows.zip and unzip it somewhere without spaces in the path.
2. Run launcher\out\launcher.exe.
3. Follow its four steps: pick your dump (folder or .nup), click Set up, build (about half an hour the first time), play.

You need Windows 10/11 and a Vulkan 1.3 GPU. Set up installs everything else into the folder: Python, the .NET 10 SDK, the C++ compiler (LLVM MinGW) and the Python packages. It needs no admin rights and no Visual Studio.

Updating from an older version

1. Unzip 0.1.3 into a new folder and run its launcher.
2. On the first step, click Bring over an older version… and pick your old kart-recomp-… folder.
3. Click Build.

This moves your build, the tools Set up installed, your saves, the pipeline and texture caches and your settings into the new folder (instantly, if both folders are on the same drive; from another drive they're copied). The old folder won't run afterwards.

Coming from 0.1.1 or 0.1.2, the update takes about 15 minutes instead of a full build. Installs from before 0.1.3 get each build step checked once, and the shaders are translated again. Future updates will skip everything that didn't change.

What's new in 0.1.3

• Updates build only what changed. Each build step remembers which tools made it. Build reruns a step only when its output is missing or its tools changed, and then only the steps that depend on it.
• Bring over an older version… on the launcher's first step (see above).
• Fixed: the game could abort with an error when a movie was skipped or stopped, for example pressing a button during the intro movie or leaving a menu that plays a preview.
• Fewer GPU crashes at startup. The title screen loads a random course behind the loading screen, and some of them could freeze the GPU a few seconds in ("device lost"). The renderer left a render pass open at the end of almost every frame; that is fixed, and in testing these crashes went from about 1 in 5 starts to about 1 in 30.
• Movies that were hidden now show (thanks to Rafacasari, #21), and compressed textures no longer share images across incompatible formats.
• The shader step works with Python 3.14 (thanks to EPScorp, #20).
• The shader step no longer prints red "failed" lines for the one shader that can't be translated. That is expected: the game runs without it.
• Scripted launcher runs: launcher.exe --bring-over <old folder> --build --quit --log build.log. The exit code is 0 when everything finished.
• Files unzipped with older dates than your build are no longer missed when compiling. A change to the runtime headers now recompiles the game, and a change to the shader translator rebuilds it.
• The launcher runs host\build.bat by its full path. On PCs where Windows doesn't run programs from the current folder (NoDefaultCurrentDirectoryInExePath), the last build step failed with "'build.bat' is not recognized".

Known issues

• A GPU crash ("device lost") a few seconds after starting is rarer but can still happen, in some particle effects. Restarting the game picks another course for the title screen. A host.log from such a run helps.
• Black screen with only the 2D elements drawn on some PCs (#18), and a crash a few seconds in on AMD GPUs (#11). Both are still being looked into.
• One particle shader the GPU faults on in free roam is skipped, so an effect may be missing there.
• The first races can stutter while pipelines and textures are prepared (Bake textures in the launcher helps).