Changes
- Install folders with non-Latin letters (#74, Issue #71): on Windows, the game stopped right after its window opened when its folder path had letters outside the Latin alphabet (a Cyrillic, Chinese or Japanese user or folder name). The launcher passed the path in one encoding and the game read it in another. The game now reads paths as UTF-8.
- Full screen on Linux with Vulkan (#75, Issue #70): starting in full screen stopped the game with "failed to acquire native presentation texture". It now makes the swap chain again and skips that frame.
- Voices apart from the text (#68): the launcher's new Voice language setting, below Game language, picks English or Japanese voices on their own, for example Japanese text (or a translation mod) with English voices. "Same as the game" keeps the old behaviour.
- Steadier sound (#73, Issue #47): sound was played as soon as the game made each 5 ms block, with nothing queued ahead, so any short delay could leave a crackle. About 64 ms is now kept queued.
game.lognotesNATIVE_AUDIO_UNDERRUNif the sound still runs dry. - 4-core CPUs (#67, Issue #52): with fewer than six logical processors, the main thread is no longer pinned to a core it shared with a game thread. On an i5-3470 the race ran 44% faster.
- Program icon (#69, Issue #63): the launcher and the game have an icon.
- HedgeModManager groundwork (#72): the launcher records where it is installed, where HedgeModManager looks for games, and leaves HedgeModManager's mod list alone when HedgeModManager manages the mods. HedgeModManager itself doesn't list the game yet.
- Translation tools (#66): scripts to export and rebuild the game's text, font and textures, used by the Traditional Chinese mod.
Validation
- Unit tests: the full CTest suite (143) passed on Windows, with new cases for the sound cushion, voice language settings and HedgeModManager's files; GitHub Actions builds passed.
- Non-Latin folders: the shader pack, the image and the game files under a folder named
路徑測試Тест. Before the fix it stopped with the same message as Issue #71; after, it ran normally on D3D12 and Vulkan. - Sound: fed through XAudio2 for 20 s with a coarse 15.6 ms timer: 16 drops before, none after; with 20–40 ms hold-ups about five times a second: 12 before, none after.
- Windows package: completed race checks on D3D12 (Frozen Forest) and Vulkan (Dolphin Resort), with every pipeline prepared and the save left unchanged.
- Linux package: passed a Vulkan startup smoke test in WSL (all 455 pipelines prepared).
- Android: the APKs keep the existing signing certificate.
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: 28. The companion licence archive applies to both APKs.
- Checksums:
SHA256SUMS.txt.
Use your own game disc image. No game data, private saves or test overrides are included.
Known limitations
- Being investigated: a crash in a race on a 4-core PC (Issue #64, a racer slot read while empty), and a character occasionally saying a winning line after losing (Issue #47).
- Sound and full-screen fixes: the sound fix was measured in a test harness, not yet in a real race; the full-screen fix has not been tried on Linux yet.
- Windows 10 before 1903: paths with non-Latin letters still don't work there.
- Relay Race: 2P vs 2P is not supported yet.
- Mali GPUs: only the graphics start-up has been checked on Mali GPUs.
- From v0.5.0: lighting has not been compared with the Xbox 360; no camera motion inference on Linux or Android; performance varies by device.