NoRain211/doaxvb-re v0.4

0.4 Beta

on GitHub

0.4 Beta

0.4 is the first Beta. Long player sessions report the game playable from start to finish: every stage, the Casino, Hotel and Shops, saving and reloading, and a vacation's last day carrying into a new vacation. Formal offline acceptance continues in #16.

This lists every change since 0.3.51; the last section summarizes 0.35 and 0.3.51, so together they cover everything since 0.3. 0.4 was first published as "0.4 Alpha (experimental)"; the Beta label changes no files, and the download keeps its original name, DOAXBV-0.4-Alpha.zip.

Added

• Launcher (#57). Launcher.cmd opens a small window with a resolution list (480p windowed, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 2160p), MSAA (Off, 2x, 4x, 8x) and an SMAA checkbox. Choices are saved in private/launcher.json, and Play starts RunGame.cmd, which still runs with the defaults on its own. On first run the launcher picks the largest preset that fits your display.
• Render scale, MSAA and SMAA (#44). RECOMP_D3D_SCALE (1–8) multiplies the render height; 3 renders 2560x1440. Above 1, the window is borderless and fills the screen height. RECOMP_D3D_MSAA sets the sample count and falls back to the highest count your GPU supports. RECOMP_D3D_SMAA=1 runs SMAA on the finished frame. The package bundles the SMAA shader and lookup tables (MIT, third_party/smaa). All three are off by default.
• 16:9 presentation (#38). The game renders true 16:9 into an 854x480 window by default. RECOMP_D3D_WIDESCREEN=0 reports the dashboard's Normal video setting, so the game renders 4:3 into a 640x480 window.
• Casino and hotel gift tapes (#40). Blackjack, Poker and Slots no longer stop at missing or split functions, and playing a gift tape in the hotel no longer stops the game. The recipe grows from 45 to 61 recovery inputs.
• App icon (#48). When private/doaxbv.ico is present, setup embeds it in the runner for the title bar and taskbar. The package ships the icon.
• Frame pacing report (#53). With RECOMP_PERF_COUNTER=1 (the launcher default), the once-a-second performance line adds the worst frame gap, late frames and the slowest present. A recomp pacing: line shows whether the game thread or the render thread was slow.

Fixed: gameplay and generated code

• Lifter carry and loop fixes (#40, #50). Compare and test instructions now set the carry flag when the next flag reader is ADC or SBB, including a reader in another block; before, every such pair read a stale carry. This affected 40 generated functions across game, D3D, DirectSound, WMA decoder and controller code, and two sort comparators that sorted wrongly. LOOP, LOOPE and LOOPNE now decrement ECX and branch on it; their back edge used to read a flag value that was never set. A jump table whose first slot is unusable is now read from its second slot.
• Shop and menu sound effects (#51). Buying items quickly in a shop no longer silences shop and menu sound effects until you leave the scene. The game stops looping sounds with DirectSound StopEx, which the audio adapter did not handle, so short shop loops kept "playing" and filled the voice pool.

Fixed: rendering

• Casino rendering (#39). The Poker and Blackjack double-up prompt no longer flashes solid white, Zack's icon draws once instead of twice, and Poker cards show their faces. The fixes cover supersampled back buffers, texture clamp and wrap modes, and back-face culling.
• Retail shop meshes (#41). Some shop models use vertex streams shorter than their declared layout. They were skipped; they now draw, including their reflection material.
• Item previews (#49). Each ball in View items now shows its own colors. The texture cache served the first ball's texture because the viewer refills one buffer without freeing it. Cached textures now rebuild when their contents change.
• Two vertex-program defects (#37). A texture could be freed while still bound during alpha-mask draws, which could crash with heap corruption. A paired instruction could also corrupt a shader register and shade with the wrong color.
• Depth buffers at the main render size no longer count against the render target budget (#44).

Fixed: audio

• Crackle and dropouts (#42). A dedicated high-priority thread now feeds audio output instead of the game thread, so game stalls, loading and window dragging no longer starve it. Each voice starts behind 50 ms of silence, and a small pitch trim (at most 1%) holds that cushion against XAudio2's rate drift. On the same route, dropped buffers fell from 50 to 0 and underruns from 352 to 0.

Fixed: saves

• Faster, safer save journal (#52). A save now writes one undo file of the pre-save data; deleting it commits the save. This cuts a save's file work on the game thread from about 48 ms to about 2.5 ms. An undo file cut short by an interruption is discarded, since it never allowed the game to write. Recovery validates the undo image and the live save data before it restores anything, keeps a malformed undo image for inspection instead of deleting it, rejects absolute paths, and compares file names the way Windows does.

Performance

• Menus and maps at 60 FPS (#43). The texture cache grew from 256 to 4096 entries. Menu and map screens sample about 300 textures a frame, so the old cache rebuilt every texture every frame. Two per-draw system calls were also removed. Menu and map screens went from a median of 54 FPS to 60, and a Niki Beach match from 24 seconds below 55 FPS to 1.
• Render thread (#46). D3D11 rendering runs on its own thread. Vertex and index uploads use a ring buffer, and common shaders compile at boot. Loading the island map no longer drops to 4–5 FPS, and first use of a scene no longer hitches while its shaders compile.
• Game-thread stalls (#52). The game and render threads run at high priority; a busy machine had dropped matches to 12–18 FPS. Vblank waits use a high-resolution timer, so 99% of waits overshoot by at most 0.1 ms instead of 1.9 ms. The renderer no longer zero-fills every capture packet, and error output is buffered and flushed every 250 ms instead of written one character at a time.
• Guest memory (#45). Plain RAM reads and writes, the hottest calls in the generated code, take an inline fast path. Process CPU during a match fell from about 750 to 620–710 ms per second.

Known issues

• The second Hopping Game in a session can be played before it finishes loading (#54).
• An upside-down map briefly flashes when leaving the pool area (#55).
• Some underwater beach textures may be missing (#56).
• Boot movies still run near their 30 FPS source rate, and loading can still pause for up to about a second.

Release and setup

• Setup builds the lifter from the codex/doaxbv-recipe branch of NoRain211/xboxrecomp (#50) and fails unless the submodule is a clean checkout of LIFTER_REVISION. The earlier build-time patch against upstream is gone. tools/update_lifter_pin.py moves the pin and updates the recipe.
• Setup regenerates the game program byte for byte to match the play-tested local program, and builds an x64 Release runner with Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools.
• A save journal left by an interrupted save in 0.35 or earlier stops startup. Run that older build once to finish its recovery, then start 0.4.
• Download and build in a new folder. Keep your previous install and saves; saves are not imported automatically.
• The README and status pages were rewritten, and the status now labels the game fully playable (#47, #59).

Also since 0.3 (from 0.35 and 0.3.51)

• Dusk pool glare. Constant-color blend factors are correct, so the huge white glare at the dusk pool is gone.
• Volleyball input. Input-history expiry stays in one recovered function, so a released action button no longer causes a delayed crouch.
• Radio Station opens, and Take a Rest no longer stops, including Tina's midday rest.
• Long sessions. Freed guest memory is reused, fixing the out-of-memory sound failure behind the dusk Jungle crash.
• Performance readout. The window title shows FPS and frame time.
• Build fix (0.3.51). The final link no longer fails with LNK2001 on recomp_memory.
• Setup moved to Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools, x64 Release.

Setup

Extract into a new folder with a short path, drag your supported USA ISO onto BuildGame.cmd, wait for Setup complete, then run Launcher.cmd. You need Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the C++ desktop workload and a Windows SDK, plus Git and CMake. Keep your previous install and saves; saves are not imported automatically.

The package contains source and setup tools only, with no game files and no prebuilt game runner. Setup regenerates the game program byte for byte to match the play-tested build.

If you already installed 0.4 Alpha, you have this release: nothing to download or rebuild.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full history.

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