COGBox 0.2.5
New
- Sharp keyboard prompts (#41). Button prompts show your actual keyboard keys, drawn at 4× detail by the launcher, including custom key bindings, the d-pad and stick presses, and WASD and mouse in Gears 2.
- Chapter shader recipes. Every chapter's shaders are built while the opening videos and loading screens play, from your own game files, so chapters stutter far less the first time you play them. (The package reader builds on legoliamneeson's shader-compiler work in PR #43.)
- "Prepare all shaders" button. Builds every shader for a game in one go. Do it again after a driver update.
- Judgment languages (#45). Every language on your Judgment disc now works, not just English and Polish.
- Region discs (#45). European and Japanese Judgment discs and European Gears 2 discs, and their title updates, are recognised as tested, with no warning.
- More frame rate limits: 45, 90, 144 and 165.
- One Display mode box: Windowed, Borderless or Exclusive fullscreen.
- Graphics API on Proton / Wine: Automatic. DirectX 12 on a Mac, Vulkan on SteamOS and Linux.
- Untested game versions. The launcher now accepts them with a warning instead of refusing them.
Fixes and improvements
- Judgment (#38): loading screens are capped at 60 fps, which fixes the long loading hang at high frame-rate limits.
- Smoother frame pacing and lighter occlusion (from PR #43 by legoliamneeson):
- the renderer wakes as soon as the GPU finishes instead of polling;
- occlusion results are copied in batches and submitted earlier;
- "Real occlusion" (strict occlusion) is now a launcher option, on by default in Gears 3 and Judgment, which stops light and lens flares showing through walls;
- the shader cache list is written in the background;
- resolve textures are reused;
- background shader builds run at the lowest priority;
- batched texture loading is included as an experimental option, off by default.
- Smaller, faster shaders: three rounds of shader-translator optimisations.
- Full-screen effects wait for their shaders instead of being skipped, so effects no longer pop in.
- Frame log is off by default. Texture replacement support has been added.
- Updating from 0.2.2 keeps your settings, including Exclusive fullscreen.
- "Detect best settings" keeps Real occlusion at the game's default.
- Stopping "Prepare all shaders" on purpose no longer shows an error.
- General hardening from a full code review of this release.
Confirmed working
- RAAM's Shadow (Gears 3 DLC). Chapters 31, 32 and 34 were played at 30, 60 and 120 fps, including checkpoint reloads after a death, with no falling through the level. Start the DLC from the game's own menus: press START and sign in, so the DLC is loaded.
Thanks
- legoliamneeson for PR #43: the frame-pacing, occlusion, shader-compiler and memory work that much of this release builds on. Thank you!
- Everyone who sent logs and reports in #38, #41 and #45.