YuutaTsubasa/Free-Riders-Recompiled v0.10.1

v0.10.1 — Online check, smoother speed rail, older GPUs

on GitHub

Changes

• Online play: the launcher checks the server first (#161). With Host the server off, the game used to try the server once. If that failed, the in-game Xbox LIVE page simply wasn't there, and it looked as if online play didn't exist. Now:
  • Test connection next to Server address says whether the server answers, and if not, why: address not found, nothing running there, no answer (firewall/port 47800), or not a Free Riders server.
  • Start game runs the same check first and asks before starting anyway.
  • With Host the server on, the launcher shows the address your friends should type, and on Windows a note about allowing the game through the firewall.
  • The game keeps trying if the host wasn't up yet, and once it connects, Xbox LIVE becomes available without restarting.
• Smoother Metropolis Speedway speed rail (#164). The vertex cache's bookkeeping sometimes ran in one go during a race: a stall of about 25 ms on the speed rail after the side-ramp jump, and about 38 ms later in the race on an AYN Thor. It now does a little each frame. Drawing also looks fewer things up per draw.
• Older GPUs without descriptor indexing (#134). Vulkan drivers without descriptor indexing (for example Mesa's hasvk on Intel HD 5500 / Broadwell) now draw through a smaller, fixed set of textures per draw instead of crashing or stopping. Not yet tested on such a GPU; reports welcome.
• Rendering fixes:
  • Some passes that read back the surface they were drawing to sampled it while it was still being drawn into. They now read the copy.
  • The renderer's blank textures were destroyed by the first real textures while still in use. They now stay alive.

Everything else is the same as v0.10.0.

Validation

• Windows x64 package: D3D12, Vulkan and ultrawide runs reached the race, with no untranslatable code and the save left unchanged.
• Linux x64 package (WSL): prepared all 455 Vulkan pipelines and ran to its frame limit; 147 unit tests passed.
• AYN Thor, this release's APK: Dolphin Resort at full speed (0.999, 60 fps). On Metropolis Speedway's speed rail after the side-ramp jump, the worst draw dropped from about 25 ms (v0.10.0, four runs) to 5.8 ms, with 60 fps over the race. All 455 pipelines were prepared.
• Vulkan fallback for GPUs without descriptor indexing, forced on an RTX 4090 with the Khronos validation layer: a whole Dolphin Resort race (2,668 race frames) with no validation errors.
• macOS app, as packaged (M1 Mac mini): prepared all 455 pipelines, no untranslatable code, reached the race.
• Unit tests: GitHub Actions builds and tests passed on Windows, Linux, macOS and Android.

Downloads

• Windows x64: download and extract the Windows ZIP; run FreeRidersRecompiled.exe.
• Linux x64: download and extract the Linux archive; run FreeRidersRecompiled.
• Android 10 or later: prefer android10-arm64.apk.
• Android 9: use android-arm64.apk.
• Android version code: 49. The companion licence archive applies to both APKs.
• macOS (Apple Silicon): download and extract the macOS ZIP; open FreeRidersRecompiled.app (right-click › Open the first time). Races are still slow on a Mac.
• iOS: ios-arm64.ipa, to install with your own sideloading tool (untested on a device).
• Checksums: SHA256SUMS.txt.

Use your own game disc image. No game data, private saves or test overrides are included.

Known limitations

The same as v0.10.0.