xenophobentx/takedawn v0.2.1

Takedawn 0.2.1 — Hot Night Crash

on GitHub

Saves and settings from 0.2.0 carry over. The update steps for each platform are in the README.

Added

• Menus, loading screens, the pause menu and the results are no longer stretched in 16:9: with Widescreen HUD on, their content keeps its 4:3 shape in the middle and the background fills the screen.
• High refresh rate (Graphics): draws at the display's refresh rate (120, 144 Hz and faster) while the game keeps its 60 steps a second. Cars and the camera are drawn between the steps. Off by default. Menus and split screen stay at the game's own rate, and so do crash cameras unless 60 fps crash cameras is on. It adds up to one 60 Hz step of delay. High refresh needs a fast machine. On the Steam Deck at 90 Hz, don't expect a steady 90 fps: there are small dips in heavy scenes, which we're working on smoothing out. High refresh is experimental. If something looks wrong with it on (a car, the camera, the HUD or an effect), turn it off to check, and open an issue with a bug report (Advanced > Create bug report). Details in docs/high-refresh.md. Started by Naitrate (#33).
  • Sparks keep the same length at any refresh rate.
  • The HUD animations, the flash at the end of a race, the race audio, the game's random numbers and the time played in your profile keep the game's speed at any refresh rate.
• Texture upscale (Graphics): Off, FSRCNNX or NNEDI3. It sharpens the world's textures on the graphics card while you play and keeps the results on disk, so the next race has them at once. Off by default. Scale 2x or 4x (a Steam Deck gets 2x only). Cut-outs such as fences and trees keep the game's own edges, and road surfaces stay as they are unless "Upscale road surfaces" is on. On Mac, Windows, Linux and Steam Deck, not Android. On Windows it held 120 Hz in tests on an RX 9060 XT. The shader files are LGPL-3.0 and listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
• Upscale while loading (Graphics, on by default): does most of the sharpening during the loading screen and the countdown, so the first race on a track hitches less. It adds no load time.
• Rival marker switch (Display): Original or Farther. Farther shows the race position from 60 m and the arrow again past 75 m, checked every frame, so the marker changes earlier and no longer flips back and forth.
• Overscan: Fill height. It drops only the black border at the top and bottom and stretches the picture to the full height, about 7% taller. The sides stay (#41).
• Crash Nav map (Display): Full width or 4:3. It applies with Widescreen HUD on in 16:9. Full width is the default.
• Custom music at start (Audio, on by default): with a music folder set, the game starts on the custom soundtrack you last chose in EA GAMES TRAX, without a visit to that screen.
• Android setup also installs from an extracted game folder (#23).
• The mouse cursor hides after 2.5 seconds without movement and when you press a key or a controller button (jillsandwich1998).

Changed

• Mac HDR: levels are in nits as on the Steam Deck, and the peak comes from what macOS gives the app.
• Custom music loudness: quiet old songs with a wide dynamic range now reach the level of the game's music, and a new song no longer starts too loud.
• Custom music: the folder picker offers the folder you are in and a way one level up. A folder you change while a custom soundtrack plays takes over from the next song, with no restart.
• Mac: frames reach the display from a thread of their own, no longer waiting for the window's event loop. Button press to picture was about 17 ms shorter on the built-in display.
• Frame pacing Smooth works only when the display refreshes near 60 Hz. At other rates it acts like Low latency.
• Windows: the game's threads are no longer tied to one CPU core. Drifting through corners at 120 Hz stutters about half as often (measured on a Ryzen 7 5800X).

Fixed

• The LED words on the warning signs over the road (Silver Lake and other US tracks) no longer show through the back of the sign. They read mirrored at a distance, flickered closer in, and then vanished (#53).
• A car's reflection showed no sky on King of the Road, near the steel bridge. Texels with alpha 0 are now discarded as on the Xbox (#27).
• Steam Deck: with Smooth, the game could drop to 45 fps after a long session and stay there until you switched to Low latency.
• Windows and Linux load Vulkan when the game starts. An old Vulkan loader no longer stops the program before it opens ("entry point vkCmdBeginRendering could not be located"). Without Vulkan 1.3 the game and the setup window say to update the graphics driver (#37).
• Linux and Steam Deck: a crash or hang at the start of a loading screen with a custom soundtrack (#17).
• Android: the setup could not create the game's folder on some phones, where the system hides the Android/data folder (#36).
• The folder picker in the settings could freeze the whole game when it reached a slow network share or one with many files. It no longer waits on the folder scan, and network shares are listed but not scanned.
• Linux: the AppImage's setup window did not open on systems without libxkbcommon-x11. The AppImage now brings its own copy for those systems.

Thanks

• Naitrate: High refresh rate (#33) and its documentation.
• jillsandwich1998: the mouse cursor that hides on its own.
• sp00nz: a fix in the recompiler's disassembler, from the upstream toolkit.
• CTNeptune (#53), idkwhatisthis123 (#27), mike-cb07 (#37), SecularSteve (#17), ktoplay (#36), GonzaloIRREGULAR (#41), JohnBurnout16 (#23): 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

• High refresh rate at 120 Hz and above needs a fast processor. On a Ryzen 7 5800X the game holds 120 on straights, but it can stutter briefly in drift corners and crashes. A Ryzen 7 7700X holds it. On the Steam Deck at 90 Hz, don't expect a steady 90 fps: there are small dips in heavy scenes, which we're working on smoothing out. High refresh is experimental. If something looks wrong with it on (a car, the camera, the HUD or an effect), turn it off to check, and open an issue with a bug report (Advanced > Create bug report).
• 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 daa1f33 of my working repository and toolkit commit e04d11d (xenophobentx/xboxrecomp, branch takedawn, tag takedawn-0.2.1). Each package's SOURCE.txt and the BUILDINFO file name both commits.

• takedawn-0.2.1-source.tar.gz is the game tree at daa1f33 with the 0.2.1 README and changelog, without my private task notes, unused screenshots and the export scripts.
• xboxrecomp-takedawn-0.2.1-source.tar.gz is the toolkit at e04d11d.

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 e493331, toolkit e3756d1, both tagged takedawn-0.2.1).

SHA256SUMS

69b95450124dab7b59e75e52232db57987e7c100e1a311d764e7d2b9c285173a  Takedawn-0.2.1-macos-arm64.dmg
85ab4e81ece174f29656f9e39bf68bc39cd7e1f0018870d89a49bc596d06da7e  Takedawn-0.2.1-windows-x64-setup.exe
255d5fa586285f34f2a6635ffb1d119cfe7924007421a500839f8db91015ff78  Takedawn-0.2.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage
d919562db6cc3108effac3f7dc1a9fa71de3ea3f9f08a10488ee574dad80099c  Takedawn-0.2.1-android-arm64.apk
f891bfaae3c4ddccb1111136cd27dbf31356ff770a3a2d3716d6b4b691cc19d4  takedawn-0.2.1-source.tar.gz
b036ca57132a01992a39671761caa3c3d7d1fa96251eb3582c1e2d74df928fa4  xboxrecomp-takedawn-0.2.1-source.tar.gz