DriveClub Recomp 0.4.0

DriveClub for PS4 (version 1.28), running natively on Windows.

The source code is in this repository.

Highlights of 0.4.0

Private multiplayer with friends

Race with your friends. One player hosts on their own PC, the others join, and everyone sees each other in the game: friends list and presence, private lobbies and invitations, live races, clubs (create, join, invite, customise), and driver and club statistics, fame and accolades.

• In the launcher's General tab, ONLINE: choose Host a session, or Join a session and type the host's IP address. The host's launcher shows the addresses to give to friends. With Off, the game runs exactly as before and nothing online is touched.
• Players reach each other over a home network or a VPN (Tailscale, Hamachi, Radmin). Run Allow-Firewall.bat once so Windows lets them in. It only opens the game to those networks, never to the internet.
• The server is included in the server folder (GPL-2.0, source linked in licenses), and the launcher starts it for you when you host. More in online\README.md.
• This is private play between friends. There are no public servers yet.

Contributed by @Judaswick (races, lobbies, clubs, statistics and the server work).

Trophies

Trophies are back, as on a PlayStation: a banner slides in at the top right with the trophy's own picture, its name and description and the grade cup. Your trophies are saved, the pictures are read from your own game files.

A new launcher

The launcher has a new look, with grouped settings, a mod manager, a startup splash, an exit confirmation and a PS4 compatibility preset. Contributed by @HeyOkay (#227).

Which one do I run? Always DriveClub.exe. It opens the new launcher, which needs the free .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (the launcher offers to install it). Under Wine and Proton, or when .NET is missing, it opens the classic launcher (DriveClub.Native.exe) instead. Both have the same settings and play the same game.

About 11% faster

The game program is now built with link-time optimization and a recorded profile of real races. In our matched test (Japan Road Circuit, Ferrari 458, overcast with heavy rain, 1080p render to 4K output with DLSS Performance, 120 seconds of AI driving) the average went from 91.4 to 101.2 FPS (+11%), the 1% low from 60.4 to 68.1 FPS (+13%) and the 99th percentile frame time from 15.0 to 13.0 ms. Results depend on your PC, and the gain is largest where the processor is the limit.

Save profiles and backups

General, SAVES: four separate careers on one install. Picking another profile swaps your saves in when you press Play. The launcher backs up your saves at every start (the last ten are kept), and has Back up now and Restore the latest backup buttons.

Steering wheels

Force feedback from a reworked tyre physics model (tyre relaxation, self-centring, combined slip), gain per car on two wheel buttons, and a pedal overlay on F2. Contributed by @red1ty (#247, #248).

More picture and camera options

• Picture: brightness, contrast and gamma sliders in the launcher, and live in the game (F4, then Page Up / Page Down). Contributed by @red1ty (#262).
• Lock to horizon (Off, Cockpit, All views) and a Camera shake slider. Contributed by @red1ty (#265).
• Unlimited frame rate: no cap and no V-Sync, above your display's refresh rate if your PC can. Unlocked (VRR) is unchanged, for G-Sync and FreeSync displays. Contributed by @red1ty (#263).

Highlights of 0.3.2

Join the community

We have just opened a Discord server for this project, and everyone who plays is welcome, whether you have raced it for years or only just got it running. Come and say hello, get a hand getting it running, show off your pictures and replays, swap mods, and tell us what you would like next. Bug reports are welcome there too, and new versions are announced there. It is brand new, so you will be among the first to join: https://discord.gg/62b8jceumR. The launcher has a new Discord button that opens it.

Changelog

0.4.0

• New: private multiplayer (#282): sessions and private lobbies, races with friends, clubs, driver and club statistics, presence, over a LAN or VPN. The community server is in the zip and starts from the launcher. The game side has libSceRudp, a peer-to-peer transport, a local account (no PlayStation Network) and settings for the server's address. Contributed by @Judaswick.
• New: Online play in the launcher (Host or Join, the host's IP address shown, off by default). Works in both launchers.
• New: trophies. A PS4-style banner with the trophy's picture, name, description and grade, saved unlocks (#183, #260 by @cedarquartz7429). The names and descriptions are in runtime\trophies.tsv.
• New: save profiles (four careers) and automatic backups with restore buttons.
• New: Unlock every car and bike option.
• New: the new launcher with a mod manager (#227 by @HeyOkay), and the classic launcher as the fallback. The launcher also asks for the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime when it is missing.
• New: Unlimited frame rate (#263), Picture settings (#262), Lock to horizon and Camera shake (#265), all by @red1ty.
• New: reworked force feedback physics, per-car gain on wheel buttons and the pedal overlay (F2) (#247, #248) by @red1ty.
• Changed: faster. The release is built with link-time optimization and a recorded profile, about +11% average FPS and +13% in the 1% lows in our test.
• Changed: shader cache. Shader files are stored by their content instead of by discovery order, so they no longer overwrite each other when the order changes (#259 by @cedarquartz7429). Your shader cache is rebuilt once on the first start, so expect some stutter for a few minutes.
• Fixed: the tyre marks missing after a cache preload (#281 by @HeyOkay).
• Fixed: smoke and fountain mist flickering at high frame rates (#280 by @HeyOkay, #254).
• Fixed: replay seeking at high frame rates (#279 by @cedarquartz7429).
• Fixed: the startup intro looking uneven at your frame cap. It is shown at 30 FPS, then your cap returns (#277 by @philol98).
• Fixed: a crash when a particle effect had no curve data (#214). The function that sampled it read a null pointer and now returns instead.
• Fixed: a black screen on laptops with two graphics chips (#284 by @rupam2234). The launcher and the runtime pick the right chip.
• Changed: the launcher's hints now say that the overlay setting and the "No reset-to-track timer" and "Disable track barriers" patches can cause random collision penalties, stutter and cars teleporting (#182, #256).
• Changed: plainer names in the launcher: "Camera" card with "High-FPS camera fix", frame rate hints that say what VRR means.
• Changed: the build. bash build.sh stays the quick build; the release uses BB_PGO=use BB_LTO=ON with pgo/default.profdata (see BUILDING.md).

0.3.2

• Changed: rain on the windshield and the camera lens on AMD (#184, #212, #233). A shader's writes to the GDS buffer are now noted for barriers, so the copy of the drop count waits for the shader that wrote it. Found and verified on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX by @renancsilva and @fulalas. Please say whether the rain is back on your card.
• New: faster frames (#220, #221). Per-draw work on the command thread, memory copies, readbacks, barriers and the GPU command thread's core are reworked; the picture is unchanged. Our matched benchmark against 0.3.1 went from 51.3 to 57.5 FPS on average (+12%). Contributed by @MoonFuji, tested by @HeyOkay.
• New: high-FPS camera and replay workaround (#187), on by default, switch in Patches. Contributed by @HeyOkay.
• New: Slow and Fast motion blur exposure (#216) and seamless native cube-map filtering for wet-road reflections (#213). Contributed by @HeyOkay.
• Changed: the car select freeze while scrolling through cars (#185, #201). Contributed by @MoonFuji; not confirmed by the reporter yet.
• Fixed: a wheel whose gain stayed at 0 after the game (#207, #210). Contributed by @igorexa225.
• Fixed: the launcher's update never deletes a player's update folder (#196, #199). Contributed by @MoonFuji.
• Fixed: soft, smeared cars with DLSS (#211). Contributed by @sniperspy69.
• New: a Discord button in the launcher.
• Changed: the launcher's updater installs the update itself, which also works under Wine and Proton.
• Changed: the launcher under Wine and Proton. Text is drawn with another font when Segoe UI is missing.
• Changed: a buffer that does not fit in a full card goes to system memory instead of ending the game.
• Changed: diagnostics are a build option (#222, BB_DIAGNOSTICS, off by default). Contributed by @HeyOkay.
• Changed: building from source with the current MSYS2 (#237).

Older versions: see the Releases page.

Updating from an older version

Extract the new zip over your existing folder, or copy the new DriveClub.exe, the launcher files, the runtime folder and the licenses folder into it. Your folder choices, settings and saves are kept. The first start rebuilds the shader cache, so expect some stutter for a few minutes.

On 0.3.1 under Wine or Proton: the 0.3.1 updater cannot install this version there, so extract the zip over your folder once; later updates install from the launcher.

New in the zip: the server and online folders, Allow-Firewall.bat, and the new launcher files. Online play needs nothing else.

How to play

1. Download driveclub-recomp-0.4.0-win64.zip and extract it anywhere you can write to.
2. Have your own game dumps ready: the version 1.28 update folder (it contains eboot.bin) and the base game folder (it contains game000.dat).
3. Double-click DriveClub.exe, press Browse next to each folder, check the settings and press Play.

Nothing to install except the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime for the new launcher (the classic launcher needs nothing). Your own files are never modified or copied.

Logs are in the logs folder.

Highlights

• The game's own x86-64 code runs directly on your CPU, with no CPU emulation. The PS4 system libraries are reimplemented and the GPU commands are translated to Vulkan, similar to Wine and DXVK
• Playable from the menus through races, photo mode and saves, now with trophies and private multiplayer
• Keyboard racing layout, any gamepad (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch Pro, 8BitDo) and steering wheels with force feedback

Controls

Any gamepad works. Keyboard, mouse and gamepad can be used at the same time.

F7 turns mouse look on or off. F2 shows the pedals, F4 the picture controls, F12 the performance overlay.

Known issues

• Online play is private. It works between friends on a LAN or a VPN, with the same version for everyone. There are no public servers. Please say how it goes for you.
• Some reflections are too bright, for example rain drops on the side window and the paint on cars on the vehicle select and paint job screens.
• Static (faster) stops reflections and rain on the glass from updating.
• The US version (CUSA00093) 1.28 is the tested one. The European version (CUSA00003) 1.28 is accepted but has been played less.
• Above 120 FPS the game can have issues.
• Anti-aliasing: fast cars can leave a faint trail. It does not work together with the patch "Disable motion blur and depth of field".
• AMD and Intel graphics cards: some players still see colour glitches, white edges with FSR, or "device lost" crashes. Please include your GPU model, driver version and the newest file from the logs folder.
• A crash that starts an event can come from the game running out of its own memory at 4K on a card with 8 GB.
• The 30 FPS mode can run faster than 30 with FSR 3.1 on some AMD cards (#272).
• The processor is the limit. Heavy scenes (many cars, trees and rain) drop frames first on slower CPUs.
• First play builds shaders: short stutters in the first minutes until they are cached.

Notes

• You must supply your own, legally obtained dump of the game. No game files are included.
• Tested with: DriveClub, title ID CUSA00093, version 1.28 (the European CUSA00003 1.28 is accepted too). Other versions and repacked dumps have not been tested and may not work.
• SmartScreen may warn (More info, then Run anyway). Verify with the checksum.
• Requires Windows 10/11 64-bit and a graphics card with a Vulkan 1.3 driver. About 40 GB of free space is needed for the game dumps.

Checksums (SHA-256)

60bc08bf031a39302daa78a6a12edec714228803564e674c79e23333e84d0ff3 driveclub-recomp-0.4.0-win64.zip

Reporting problems

Please open an issue and attach the log files, because without them an issue usually cannot be solved. In the folder next to DriveClub.exe, open logs and drag these into the issue:

• the newest driveclub_<date>_<time>.log (one per start: take the one from the run that went wrong)
• launcher.log (it exists even when the game never started, for example when the launcher shows an error)
• any crash_*.dmp (a small file written when the game crashes)

Also say what you were doing when it happened (menu, loading, which event and car).

DriveClub is a trademark and copyright of its respective owners; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.