santiquiroz/gears-of-war-2-pc-port v0.3.17 on GitHub

What's new

Updating no longer wipes your settings. Until 0.3.16 the zip shipped its own gow2.toml, so extracting a new release over your game folder replaced your settings. The zip now ships its defaults as gow2.default.toml, and the game makes gow2.toml from it only when the file is missing. Your saves and shader cache were never at risk: they live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\GearsOfWar2PC.
PC Options → System → Download works. It did nothing when the update check had not stored a release yet, and in fullscreen the browser opened behind the game. Now it always opens the latest release page, minimizes the game when it is fullscreen so you can see the browser, and shows the link in case no browser appears. Open the saves folder and Open texture packs folder minimize the game the same way.

How to update

Download gow2-recomp-0.3.17-win64.zip below.
Open the zip and copy everything inside its gow2-recomp-0.3.17-win64 folder into your game folder, replacing the files. Since this zip has no gow2.toml, your settings stay, also when you come from 0.3.16.

From 0.3.17 on, PC Options → System → Download takes you to this page.

Tested

Host tests: all pass, including a new check that the game creates gow2.toml from the defaults only when it is missing.
A rebuild left an existing gow2.toml byte for byte the same. The Download button has not been tried in a game yet.

Known issues

Missing characters and flickering weapons on an RTX 3070 Ti. In our online session on 0.3.14, with Emulated (EDRAM) at 21:9, some characters were not drawn. Their weapons floated in cinematics, and weapons flickered blue or red. It is not fixed in this release and we have not reproduced it on our AMD card yet. If you see it, please open an issue with a screenshot or a short clip, the chapter and your gow2.log.
White textures now and then on an RTX 3070 Ti with Emulated (EDRAM) the first time a chapter runs, while the shader cache is still empty.
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 must run the same release.

Downloads

gow2-recomp-0.3.17-win64.zip: Windows 10/11 x64. Bring your own game files: your .iso or an extracted folder (see QUICKSTART.txt).
gow2-recomp-0.3.17-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).