santiquiroz/gears-of-war-2-pc-port v0.3.15

on GitHub

What's new

• Renderer → Automatic now uses Emulated (EDRAM) on PC (issue #26). The native renderer leaves smears that follow the characters on an RX 7900 XT, an RX 9070 XT and, in our first online session over the internet, an RTX 3070 Ti, with or without an upscaler; Emulated (EDRAM) removes them on all three. Until the cause is found, Automatic picks Emulated on every PC (host render targets on AMD, ROV on NVIDIA and Intel, ROV on AMD in ultrawide). It is about 10 % slower than native in our hospital test on an RX 7800 XT. Graphics → Renderer → Native is still there if it looks right on your GPU. Android keeps native.
• Clearer errors when opening the ports for online play. "Host over the internet" now tells apart a router with UPnP off, a router that answers the UPnP search but whose UPnP service hangs (the case we hit), an outer router without UPnP, carrier-grade NAT, a router that refuses the mapping, and ports already taken, and says what to do for each, in English or Spanish, short enough for the status row.
• Two routers, the outer one with a DMZ. When the outer router (often the ISP modem) has no working UPnP but the inner router does, the ports are now opened on the inner router and the status says the outer router must send them on (a DMZ or a forward), instead of failing. scripts/host-online.ps1 -Json gains error_code, error_router, partial, unmanaged_router and unmanaged_target (docs/ONLINE.md).
• Letting anyone join. Multiplayer → Host → Friends allowed explains that 0.0.0.0/0 lets in anyone who has your address (only the game's two UDP ports are open).

Tested

• PC to PC co-op over the internet (two homes, two ISPs): the friend joined, played the campaign and left normally; the join and reconnect pattern in the logs is the game's own map travel.
• Host tests, SDK System Link tests and Python tests: all pass.

Not tested yet

• The DMZ case end to end: on our network the inner router answered the mapping with UPnP error 501, so we opened the ports by hand. The new message names that case; if your setup gets "Open until … (DMZ)", tell us whether friends could join.

Known issues

• White textures now and then on an RTX 3070 Ti with Emulated (EDRAM), first run. Seen in our online session while the shader cache was still empty; the log has no error. If you see it, open an issue with a screenshot, the chapter and your gow2.log.
• Death after being knocked down (issue #38): still needs a gow2.log from a run where it happens.
• Vulkan on Radeon Vega (issue #34): after quitting to the main menu, the menu text can turn invisible.
• Every player in a System Link or co-op session should run the same release.

Downloads

• gow2-recomp-0.3.15-win64.zip: Windows 10/11 x64. Bring your own game files: your .iso or an extracted folder (see QUICKSTART.txt).
• gow2-recomp-0.3.15-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).