santiquiroz/gears-of-war-2-pc-port v0.3.10

on GitHub

What's new

• Launcher (PC). PC Options now opens before the game loads, with a Play button (Esc / B). Changes that need a restart apply when you press Play: the game restarts itself before anything has loaded, then goes straight in. It works with a controller before the game starts (Steam Deck). System → Show options at start turns it off (gow2_launcher).
• Texture packs (PC).
  • Graphics → Texture pack picks a folder from texture_packs next to the game (or the old textures folder, or Off). Open texture packs folder opens it, so adding a pack is copying its folder there.
  • Graphics → Build texture pack upscales the textures you dumped (Graphics → Dump textures, then play the parts you want) with Real-ESRGAN on your own GPU and writes a pack you then pick: 2x or 4x, same format as the disc or BC7. A 2x pack needs about 4 times the textures' video memory, 4x about 16 times.
  • Only colored textures of 128 px or more are upscaled. Normal maps, grayscale textures (masks, specular maps, light gradients), noise and small textures keep the disc version, because the upscaler made them worse in testing.
  • The tools ship in the zip (tools\: texconv from DirectXTex, and Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan with the realesr-animevideov3-x4 model); licenses in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Packs you build come from your own copy of the game: keep them on your PC. Details: docs/TEXTURE_PACKS.md.
• Frame counter. Display → Frame counter shows the game's frames per second and frame time in a corner, on PC and Android (gow2_show_fps).
• Android: fewer stutters on Mali (issue #27). Draw source → Automatic now uses console commands on Android too, after a Mali-G615 player reported far fewer stutters and freezes with it.
• Android: scrolling the options with your finger works (issue #27). Fingers reached the menu as a mouse, so the drag-to-scroll never started.

Not tested yet

These are built and pass their unit tests, but nobody has used them in the game yet. Please tell us in an issue if something is off.

• Frame counter, on PC and Android.
• The two Android changes (draw source default and finger scrolling): this release was not run on a phone.
• Texture pack builder on a full dump. Tested on PC (RX 7800 XT) with the chapter 2 hospital: building, picking the pack, Play restarting into the game and the pack loading. A pack built from a whole play-through has not been tried, and only Direct3D 12 loads packs (not Vulkan, not Android).

Known issues

• SteamOS / Proton: one Direct3D 12 crash while firing was reported. If it happens to you, please attach gow2.log and gow2_crash.log from the game folder to a new issue, and try Graphics → Graphics API → Vulkan meanwhile.
• Turnip on Adreno (issue #33): one report of the game closing with Turnip in 0.3.9; we are waiting for the log of that run. The phone's own driver works.
• Every player in a System Link or co-op session should run the same release.

Downloads

• gow2-recomp-0.3.10-win64.zip: Windows 10/11 x64. Bring your own game files: your .iso or an extracted folder (see QUICKSTART.txt).
• gow2-recomp-0.3.10-android-arm64.apk: Android 10+ arm64, experimental.

Both files were scanned with Microsoft Defender before upload. Windows 11 "Bad Image ... 0xc0e90002" is Smart App Control blocking the unsigned DLLs (see the README).