TriAevum v0.8.0-beta.1b

The Upscaler Has Left the Building (and Came Back Properly Dressed)

A hotfix for beta.1. Same game, same data, fewer ways to leave it.

• DLSS actually ships now. In beta.1, choosing NRI Upscaler on an NVIDIA
  GPU picked DLSS, which had nothing to run with, and the game closed; since
  the choice was saved, it closed at every launch after that. DLSS now comes
  with NVIDIA's own runtime in a separate module, and it works. Your saved
  DLSS setting from beta.1 simply starts working.
• No upscaler can close the game any more. F1 offers only the upscalers
  your machine can really run, and greys out the rest with the reason. If one
  still fails mid-game, you get the picture unscaled and the option is
  withdrawn, instead of a goodbye.
• FSR works on Windows (its runtime was missing too). On Linux FSR is not
  offered: AMD's runtime for it exists for Windows only.
• Too-old graphics drivers get a straight answer. A GPU whose driver
  stops before Vulkan 1.2 is no longer picked, and the message names the GPU,
  its Vulkan version and the fix (update the driver from the GPU maker's
  site), instead of vkCreateRenderPass2.
• Better crash reports. Errors that close the game now reach the log file,
  and a crash on Windows lists each frame's module and offset instead of the
  same wrong name.
• The item description no longer stays on screen after closing the
  Items menu with START at the wrong moment (#60). Closing it while the game
  was still preparing the description now closes both; closing it a moment
  earlier, while the item's icon was loading, could also crash the game, and
  no longer does. That crash is also the one behind pressing START over and
  over (#67).
• The START menu opens without the wait. The first START of a session
  froze the game for one to two seconds, and every later open or close
  stuttered: the scene drawn behind the page made the grass rebuild itself
  each time. Now nothing is rebuilt, and START opens the page directly, the
  way TopScreen 2.1.1 does, about a tenth of a second sooner than before.
• TopScreen catches up with 2.1.1. On an open Items or Gear page, SELECT
  shows the item's description over the page, like the 3DS mod; START
  reopens the page you left (Items, Gear or Map); L and R hints sit beside
  the page tabs; the Navi prompt sits in its 2.1.1 place and also shows with
  View unmapped or the D-pad icons hidden; the horse-stamina row and the
  dungeon key counter follow 2.1.1.
• Dungeon maps show their markers again with TopScreen. The boss skull
  and the chests (with the compass) were missing from the dungeon map page,
  because the minimap layout of the HUD also moved them; it now leaves them
  alone while a pause page is open, as TopScreen 2.1.1 does.
• The TopScreen FOV setting works. It never changed the view: it watched
  the wrong camera value. Release builds also skipped the TopScreen steps that
  sit in the middle of the game's code, such as the FOV, the scene guards
  behind the pause pages and the touch-button rule. The title module now
  starts a block at each of them, and the game refuses a title module that
  does not.
• The Items page uses the full width of the upper screen, as in
  TopScreen 2.1.1: the grid and the ZR/X/Y/ZL column move outward and the
  right stone edge gives way to the column. Dungeon maps widen the same way,
  with the map, compass and key icons on the left and the floors on the
  right.
• The Save page shows the game behind it, as in TopScreen 2.1.1, instead
  of the brown pause background and stone edges.
• No more thin lines across empty Gear slots. The Gear page samples its
  textures the way 2.1.1 does.
• Link no longer flattens when he turns round at 60 or 90 FPS. Between
  two game frames, a model turning to face the other way was squashed for a
  frame; it is now shown turned part of the way.
• No more freezes on scene changes with Extended draw distance (#69,
  #74). With the option on, the game drew more characters and objects than
  its per-frame lighting space holds. The overflow spilled into the queue
  that loads scenes and writes saves, so a door, a scene change or a save
  could hang or crash the game. Extended draw distance now adds only as many
  extra actors as that space has room for. Savestates made after an overflow
  may already be damaged: load an in-game save instead.
• New default grass, for everyone. The default grass profile now has 25
  maps that decide where grass grows, up from 6; Lon Lon Ranch gets its grass
  back. A configuration from beta.1 takes the new maps once, at the first
  start of this version, and keeps every other grass setting (density, draw
  distance, performance and the rest).
• One lighting standard for outdoor areas whose time is set on entry.
  Lon Lon Ranch no longer ships a lighting profile of its own, so it follows
  that group's standard, which has a new sun direction. Kokiri Forest keeps
  its own daytime profile.
• Smoother motion at 60 or 90 FPS. The frames drawn between game frames
  move each character as one piece (Link's hand stays on his arm, the Iron
  Knuckles stop trembling), and scrolling textures such as the clouds no
  longer jump for a frame. Motion vectors follow each actor by its own
  identity, so a repeated model no longer borrows another one's motion.
• DLSS with frame interpolation no longer loses the GPU after a scene
  change (the game closed with VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST).
• A resolution or display mode that crashes no longer locks you out (#65).
  If a launch ends within its first minute, the next one starts with the
  default resolution, window mode, anti-aliasing and upscaler, says so in the
  log, and keeps everything else.
• The AppImage starts more than once (#66). It used to remember where it
  was mounted the first time and could not find its own files afterwards
  ("OTR file not found"); an installation from beta.1 repairs itself on the
  first start of this version.
• The AppImage runs on older Linux systems (#72). It now carries the C++
  runtime it was built with and uses it only when the system's own is older,
  plus libdecor for SDL. On Intel GPUs with Mesa, graphics pipeline libraries
  are off by default, both in the game and in Forge: they made the process
  grow past 27 GB. TRIAEVUM_NRI_PIPELINE_LIBRARIES=0 now turns them off
  in Forge too, on any GPU.
• Controllers in the Flatpak (#71). The Flatpak asked only for the input
  devices permission that Flatpak 1.15.6 introduced; older Flatpak versions
  ignore it, so the game saw no controller at all. It now asks for device
  access the way emulators on Flathub do.
• Cleaner licensing. NVIDIA's NGX SDK no longer sits inside the GPL
  runtime: it lives only in the separately licensed DLSS module, next to
  NVIDIA's signed runtime and NVIDIA's licence (LICENSES/). Upscaling by
  NVIDIA DLSS. NVIDIA and DLSS are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of
  NVIDIA Corporation; TriAevum is not sponsored or endorsed by NVIDIA. The
  Linux packages list the licences of the system libraries they carry, with
  a link to their sources, in LICENSES/linux.

OptiScaler users: DLSS 5 neural rendering still attaches to TriAevum's DLSS
(docs/TRIAEVUM_OPTISCALER_DLSS5.md); nothing of OptiScaler is shipped.

Updating: back up your saves first; it is still a beta.

• Windows: extract the ZIP to a new folder and run TriAevumForge.exe, as for
  beta.1 (about 3 minutes on the development PC). To keep your progress, copy
  the data\savedata folder of your beta.1 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.

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