What? Didn't CommPatch1 just get released?
Well yeah it did. And the intent for CommPatch1 was to have a standard patch in case people are interested in playing the game in a new way. And as I mentioned, I am continuing to work on it and it just so happened that today I had a lot of free time so I was in the mood to continue the work.
PLEASE NOTE: First download CommPatch1 and THEN download Beta0.35. This is not a cumulative package as I wanted to keep the download low for those that have already gotten CommPatch1 (which I assume is most of you).Changes in Beta 0.35 compared to CommPatch1
- Increased draw distance to 120 tiles! To put this into perspective, the original game had a max of 20. The CommPatch1 has a max of 50. This has a max of 120!!! Considering this setting is a radius (120 starting from the truck) it means that the diagram is 240. The game map is 256, so it basically loads about 95% of the map at any given time!
- The visual distance setting in the graphic option now displays exactly the number of tiles you want to set it at instead of percentage.
- Increased vertices and vertex limits to go with the increase in visual distance (certain tracks crashed because of it).
- Fixed the checkpoint finder!!!!!!!!! Now it works correctly on all resolutions! It turned out to be a much easier fix than anticipated. I had to look more carefully through the code as TRI implemented various lines of code that manipulated the finder bitmap (ultimately I believe for no good reason, it simply complicated things when it shouldn't have been).
- Fixed the instant replay page. I have no idea at which point I screwed this up or how but there was a problem in the way the .POD was built.
Known Issues
- ZooN Kitchen 2 crashes again
This time no amount of blimp removal fixes it. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that something somewhere bugs out in the game code. The game was never meant to have so many animated textures and something royally crashes. This fix will be part of my "long term plans" to get rid of this problem once and for all. Until then, if you play ZK2 you will most likely have to lower the visual distance.
Notes
- I have tried running other tracks and so far so good but I have not done extensive testing.
- Software Renderer hasn't been tested but I expect it to work (or crash) the same as in CommPatch1.
- Toys in the Attic is marvelous with 120. It basically loads the whole track and it's a real beaut.
- I have experienced an average loss of somewhere between 10-20fps using the maximum distance on Win10. On Win8 this is most likely unplayable. WinXP and Win7 I expect it to be fine. However this does increase the problem with tracks that have many 256x256 textures as it is likely to increase the drastic fps drops I mentioned previously (dropping to 10fps) but after playing yesterday I realized the majority of the tracks should be fine. Also I have tested this using complex scenery. Tracks like Fila's Adventure (which is a prime candidate for 10fps spikes) is fine if you play with sparse scenery. So it really depends on how well a track was built and how much the trackmaker decided to hide the more expensive models.
http://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.35.rar (rar file - 67mb)
http://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.35.zip (zip file - 72mb)
