TriAevum v0.8.0-beta.1.2

The Grass Learned to Stay Put (and So Did the Credits)

Beta.1.2 is what happens when you publish a beta and people actually play it.
Every item in the first section below is somebody's bug report, and the rest is
the grass, 4K and input-lag work that had been waiting for a release to ride
on. Windows and Linux, as usual.

You reported it, we fixed it, you get to check

• The pause map forgot how stairs work (#89): in dungeons, the D-pad and
  the circle pad change floor again. Jabu-Jabu's belly is navigable once more,
  which is more than Jabu-Jabu can say.
• Holding A turned the lights off (#91, #95, #99): with Roll Dash on,
  holding A to run flickered the lighting, the shadows and Navi's hat into the
  "no scene" state, as if Link had sprinted out of the game world. The dash
  hook had been clobbering the game's own idea of which scene it was in. It
  keeps it now; Navi enters the hat only while Link actually dashes, and the
  scene identity survives the whole run.
• "Won't launch from a long folder" (#92) and "crashes on
  installation" (#103): same culprit, Windows' 259-character path limit,
  which the game's title files were cheerfully exceeding under any deep folder
  (OneDrive, Documents\Games\... and friends). The game and Forge keep their
  files within the limit now. If your folder path is very long, it works; if
  it is absurdly long, Forge tells you exactly how many characters to give
  back instead of letting Windows find out for you.
• Crash on the very last scene (#104): the end credits asked the DSP to
  flush and invalidate its data cache, two commands the host had never
  implemented, because who finishes the game? The reporter did. Both commands
  are served now and the credits roll to the end.
• Video memory growing until it crashed (#98): textures that no draw has
  sampled for a while are released, the grass refuses buffers past its VRAM
  budget and frees them after the frame, and the texture-pack cache no longer
  keeps the previous pack as a souvenir. The budget is read through the Vulkan
  loader at run time, so the executable still starts on a loader older than
  Vulkan 1.1 (the 0xC0000139 reports of the first beta, #12 and #35, stay
  fixed; the release audit caught the import before you could).
• Barinade, round two (#76): the precompiled Enhanced shader library is
  recorded again on this exact runtime, on both machines, and a release
  refuses a library that does not match its own source, or a recording made on
  a runtime that decides shaders differently. From an empty cache, the fight
  still compiles zero shaders. Round three is not planned.
• AMD (#78, #84, #93): this is the first release qualified on an AMD GPU
  (Radeon, Mesa RADV, Linux), because there is finally one in the room. Forge
  installed from the ROM, the game booted to the file select with zero shader
  compiles, twice, from both the AppImage and the Flatpak. Windows AMD drivers
  remain untested by us; please keep the reports coming.

Ocarina Reframed's file selection

The file select is now Ocarina Reframed's: Link stands beside the three files
on the upper screen, with the copy and erase confirmations, all drawn by typed
code at the game's own block boundaries. The title logo is drawn as a layer
over the resolved scene, and the file select has its own scene lighting
identity, so starting a new game and loading a save look the same, instead of
one of them looking like a different game.

SingleScreen 3.1 and the HD interface

• Sheikah Stone Visions list on the upper screen (3.1): play, complete and
  cancel without losing the game (#83 asked for the 3.1 update; here it is).
• HD interface by language: Forge offers the HD UI texture pack for the
  language your ROM boots in, downloaded with your consent and never bundled,
  and ships the SingleScreen HD font (with its author's permission). The
  SingleScreen 3.1 archive is preselected when you drop it beside Forge.
• Vanilla+ Link (optional): a local RomFS overlay in mods/ remodels Link
  without touching the ROM. Your ROM stays yours; Link gets a tailor.

Grass, 4K and input lag

• Grass that stays: its placement and residency now live within a VRAM
  budget; when the budget is tight the visible grass is thinned evenly instead
  of vanishing by cluster order in one camera direction. Hyrule Field no longer
  mows itself when you turn left. Whole blades draw with early depth, as
  camera-facing ribbons by default, and two more surface rules find grass
  where the first ones missed it.
• 4K without an upscaler: water reflections and ambient occlusion run at
  half resolution with a depth-aware upsample, which is where the 4K frame
  went. On an RTX 3060 at 3840×2160, Kokiri Forest goes from about 19 to 18 ms
  and Hyrule Field with the river from 26 to 18 ms per frame, with the same
  image and a lot less heroism from the GPU.
• Input lag: input is sampled after the previous frame ended and the
  presentation cadence was fixed; at 60 Hz with interpolation the time from
  button to screen goes from about 33 ms to 9 ms on the development PC. Link
  now jumps when you press the button, not shortly after.

In-game menu

Esc (or R3) opens a settings menu in the game's own UI renderer, with a photo
mode tab and an aspect ratio picture. F1 stays for everything else, because
some habits deserve respect.

Windows package layout

The ZIP's root holds TriAevumForge.exe, README.md and LICENSE; Forge
puts TriAevum.exe at the root when it installs, with its DLLs in runtime/.
Launch the game from the root as before. Fewer files to stare at, same game.

Updating

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

• Windows: extract the ZIP to a new folder and run TriAevumForge.exe.
  To keep your progress, copy the data\savedata folder of your previous
  folder into the new one before starting the game. The first installation on
  a machine prepares the larger shader library and takes a few minutes; later
  ones take under a minute.
• 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.1.1, beta.1c,
beta.1b, beta.1.