TriAevum v0.8.0-beta.1.1

The Mod Moved House, So It Lives With Us Now

It is called beta.1.1 and not beta.1d because beta.1d sounded like a vitamin.
It is the update for everyone: Windows and Linux, beta.1b and beta.1c.

Forge installs again

• No download, no archive, no TopScreen 2.1.1 (#81, #82, #86, #88). The
  author of TopScreen replaced version 2.1.1 on GameBanana with its successor,
  SingleScreen 3.0, so Forge's pinned download received a web page instead of
  a ZIP and every new installation stopped at "Could not prepare TopScreen
  textures". Hosting someone else's mod on a random drive is not a plan, so:
  with the author's permission, the two SingleScreen 3.0 files TriAevum needs
  (the low-resolution UI atlas and Link's extra animations) now ship inside the
  package. Forge needs your ROM and nothing else. All rights in those files stay
  with M-1 (rlgcarrot), the author of
  SingleScreen; see
  LICENSES/SingleScreen-3.0.md.
• HD interface, if you want it. Place the official SingleScreen 3.1
  (singlescreen_31_989c3.zip) or 3.0 (singlescreen_30_25aeb.zip) archive
  beside TriAevumForge.exe, in mods/ beside it, or in data/downloads/:
  Forge verifies it and imports its HD UI atlas and HD fonts. Without it you
  get the native resolution, as on a 3DS.

TopScreen grows into SingleScreen 3.0 and 3.1

TriAevum's TopScreen profile is now a port of SingleScreen 3.0 with the 3.1
fixes, written as typed code at the game's own block boundaries. None of the
mod's code or patches is executed.

• Items page with the four-row shortcut column: circle pad and D-pad
  navigation, reordering, the in-page D-pad picker (hold A, also from the Gear
  page) and held-X clearing.
• View Model: X on the Gear page, or Y in the D-pad picker, shows the
  item's 3D model; the circle pad turns it, X and Y zoom, the D-pad pans it, B
  closes it. Yes, you can now inspect the Hylian Shield like it owes you money.
• Gameplay options: quick put away, landing roll, roll dash and the aiming
  reticle, plus 3D rain.
• SingleScreen 3.0's HUD: its button circles, D-pad cross and labels, its
  placement of the A and button groups, the rupee counter, the C-stick aim
  speed, the Items hint and the D-pad cycle marks, the cutscene rules (no HUD
  during cutscenes) and the pause page titles. Compared side by side with the
  real mod running in an emulator, not eyeballed.
• SingleScreen 3.1 fixes: the landing roll breaks the Deku Tree's floor
  web again, as any self-respecting landing should; leaving a scene while
  objects were still loading could
  corrupt memory, and no longer can; room changes wait for their files the
  same way; the roll dash cross-fades its animation.

One TopScreen layout for everyone

The maintainer's layout is now the standard: HUD at 70 %, its margins, every
gameplay option and 3D rain on. F1 → Display → TopScreen HUD offers one
choice, Native (100 %) or Optimized (70 %, the default), and the
SingleScreen credit. The HUD tab is gone; the TopScreen sections of Controls
(shortcuts, gameplay options, C-stick aiming, free camera) stay where they
were. Fewer sliders, fewer ways to make Link's hearts sit on his head.

Fewer crashes

• AMD Radeon cards dying during preparation (#78, #84). When the driver
  refused a Vulkan pipeline, NVIDIA's NRI library called DebugBreak(), which
  outside a debugger simply means "close the game". A refused pipeline is now
  retried as a whole pipeline and reported in the log
  (TRIAEVUM_NRI_PIPELINE_CREATE_FAILED), and the game carries on. There is no
  AMD GPU in the test lab, so this is unverified on AMD hardware. The access
  violation inside amdvlk64.dll reported later in #84 may be a different
  problem: if it still happens, the console output and a crash dump would help
  a lot.
• Changing the window or display settings on the title screen no longer
  closes the game (#87), and runs with the TopScreen profile no longer end
  after a minute with "native PICA display transfer source has no Vulkan render
  target". Resizing during parallel presentation also kept its GPU copies
  instead of reaching into the running game.
• SELECT opens Save/Quit again (#80), as in TopScreen.
• "Cannot query the playable runtime: Expecting value" (#85): the cause on
  the affected machines is still unknown. Forge now saves everything the
  runtime printed in TriAevum-preflight-error.json and ignores lines another
  program prints before the answer. If it happens to you, please attach that
  file.

Faster, and no shader compiling in the middle of a boss fight

• Barinade stops stuttering (#76). The Enhanced graphics preset relies on a
  library of precompiled shaders, and that library had quietly fallen behind
  the renderer: from an empty cache, the boss fight compiled shaders on the
  spot, for about 22 seconds in total. The library is now rebuilt from recorded play, every scene
  of the game under both the default and the maintainer's settings, plus boss
  fights, storms, a game over, a cutscene and the boot to the file select. A
  release now refuses a library that does not match its own source code. With
  an empty cache, the Barinade fight compiles zero shaders.
• 4K is faster. At 3840×2160 without an upscaler, the water reflections
  searched every pixel for a pond that was not on screen. They now look only
  where water can be: on an RTX 3060, Kokiri Forest goes from 37 to 55 fps, the
  opening scenes from 52 to 54, with the same image.
• Grass is cheaper: its selection runs on the GPU, entering Hyrule Field
  stalls less, and trees, bushes, rocks and signposts shadow the grass again
  (their shadows are cached instead of redrawn every frame).
• Texture packs reach the TopScreen HUD (#73): with Henriko's 4K pack the
  hearts, item icons, rupees, button rings and digits are upscaled too.
• A video memory leak is gone: each change of the texture pack setting
  kept about 15 MiB of the previous textures until the game closed.

For Intel Arc on Linux

The noise reported in #72 is not confirmed fixed: two kinds of behaviour
that Vulkan leaves undefined, and that only some drivers forgive, are gone
(a texture level computed from log2(0), and upload buffers that were never
flushed). The log now starts a fresh file at every launch and keeps the
previous ten, so attaching it no longer means scrolling through a week.

Updating

Back up your saves first; it is still a beta.

• Windows: extract the ZIP to a new folder and run TriAevumForge.exe
  (under a minute on the development PC). To keep your progress, copy the
  data\savedata folder of your previous folder into the new one before
  starting the game.
• Linux: replace the AppImage, or install the new Flatpak bundle with the
  same flatpak install --user command; saves stay where they are.

Use your own decrypted EUR/USA .3ds or .cci dump (original or Rev 1);
Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese releases are not supported yet. The previous
notes: beta.1c, beta.1b,
beta.1.

Qualification record: v0.8.0-beta.1.1-qualification.md.