xenophobentx/takedawn v0.2.0

Takedawn 0.2.0 — Hot Night Crash

on GitHub

Saves and settings from 0.1.1 carry over.

New

• Finally there are sliders for bloom and motion blur, on the Graphics page. On my Steam Deck at 720p I keep bloom at 20% at most and motion blur at 80%, so neither is harsh. I recommend that, especially with HDR.
• HDR output on Windows, Linux and the Steam Deck. The row is on the Graphics page when the display runs HDR (Use HDR in Windows, HDR on in game mode on the Deck). Lamps, sparks, the boost glow and the sun go brighter than white. The HUD and menus keep their brightness. Peak, paper white, HUD brightness, shadows, highlights and gamma have their own rows. Macs show the row on an HDR display. I have not checked it there.
• How HDR works: Takedawn doesn't invent highlights. The game already lights its scenes past white: its frame pass doubles the 3D picture, so lamps, sparks, the boost and the sun go above white, and the Xbox's 8-bit output clipped them. With HDR on, Takedawn keeps those values and maps them to your display's peak (HDR10) with a soft roll-off. The HUD and menus are drawn separately at paper white. Two exceptions: three light sprites (the boost glow, the exhaust flame and the sun glints on the paint) get a fixed gain, and the sun's disc gets a smooth profile, because the original draw shows as a square in HDR.
• Frame pacing (Windows, Linux, Steam Deck): Smooth keeps one finished frame queued, so a late frame does not repeat the last one. Automatic picks it on the Deck.
• After a long stall, a resume from sleep or a display change, the game resets its frame timing.
• Potato mode, on the Graphics page. A machine under 60 fps runs the start of a race in slow motion until the first crash. With Potato mode on, the race keeps real time from the start. Off by default.
• Import Xbox save..., on the Advanced page. It copies a North America save from an original Xbox and signs it for Takedawn.
• Touch controls on Android. In a race: a stick, GAS, BRAKE, BOOST, BREAKER, LOOK and VIEW. In menus: a d-pad and buttons. They hide while a controller is in use. The settings menu works by touch.
• Change... in the setup window puts the game data in another folder (Mac, Windows, Linux).
• The first start builds all shaders and pipelines before the first picture ("Preparing graphics N/M"). The first race has no compile stutter. The setup's graphics step takes seconds.
• The settings menu plays the game's menu sounds, read from your disc. Audio > Menu sounds turns them off.

Fixed

• Windows with G-Sync or FreeSync: frame times were uneven and the game ran slightly fast (#4).
• The Crash Nav globe and the garage at car select were drawn too small. The recompiler dropped part of the game's field-of-view calculation (#15).
• A race could freeze at the start, or crash Takedawn, when a sound file from the disc failed to load (#17).
• Quitting could crash on some systems. The game now stops its render and sound threads before it closes the graphics device (#17).
• Windows, drive with 4096-byte sectors: the game said "There is a problem with the disc you are using".
• Reset this page and Reset all settings acted on one keypress. They ask once more now.
• Diagnostic logging switched on in the settings was off again at the next start.
• Some LED signs and chevron markers flickered on a few US and European tracks.

Platforms

• Windows: the game builds natively from Git Bash.
• Android: no Fullscreen setting. The game always fills the screen.
• Steam Deck: Smooth frame pacing by default, HDR in game mode.

Thanks

• d-b-c-e: the native Windows build from Git Bash (#12) and the 4096-byte sector fix.
• GeorgeSnes (#4), jillsandwich1998 (#15), SecularSteve (#17), Almirante-Ming (#8), JohnBurnout16 (#3), JamesIV4 (#11), PhantasmProject (#2): thanks for the reports.

The Android build is experimental. It brings its own Turnip graphics driver. I test it on a Retroid Pocket 5, and the README lists the other devices it has run on.

None of the desktop files is code signed. The APK is signed with the project's own key. To check a download, compare its SHA-256 with the line in SHA256SUMS.

Known issues

• With Driving controls set to PlayStation 2, Crash mode shows the wrong button prompts. The Crashbreaker prompt says B (or Circle), while R2 fires it.

Source

The packages were built from game commit eaf791b of my working repository and toolkit commit d7eacd3 (xenophobentx/xboxrecomp, branch takedawn, tag takedawn-0.2.0). Each package's SOURCE.txt and the BUILDINFO file name both commits.

• takedawn-0.2.0-source.tar.gz is the game tree at eaf791b, without my private task notes, unused screenshots and the export scripts.
• xboxrecomp-takedawn-0.2.0-source.tar.gz is the toolkit at d7eacd3.

Together they are the corresponding source for the LGPL-2.1 files listed in xboxrecomp-NOTICE.txt. The public repositories hold these two trees as one commit each (game a705952, toolkit 5ae8ad9, both tagged takedawn-0.2.0).