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Please note for online play:

If the game is installed in Program Files or Program Files (x86) it will crash when specific tracks are selected. If it's installed somewhere else it's fine.

LOL!

How come that never happened before? Or did it and we just never noticed? Cause the x86 thing been since at least 2007 for most of us.

It only happens with the community patch (and the betas), only online and only with certain tracks.

I haven't really looked into the reason why but either way it's weird.

Could DOS names be messed up?
I remember seeing a property in the windows software compatibility tool that told windows to enable DOS names. It would auto enable them for whatever condition it used. Perhaps since you compiled in a new version, this compatibility mode with DOS 8.3 names isn't happening.

07/24/2016 02:41 PM <DIR> PROGRA~1 Program Files
07/23/2016 11:48 AM <DIR> PROGRA~2 Program Files (x86)

It's just a thought

That could be a possibility. I haven't had the time to look into this but I'll eventually have to get around to it as well.

:-\

Seems unhappy with the graveyard.

-Edit
Ok it's unhappy with everything, even the .35 version.

How odd.

Ok I recreated from backup.

Slightly better.

Got it, had to set to XP SP2 compatibility mode

-Edit
But I found a glitch, snow weather is unplayable. On my 4790k @ 4.7ghz and 970, I get 8fps if I turn on snow. I had distance set to 120.

A Thought.

Has the version checking been updated? So that someone without the community patch gets warned if they are racing against someone with the patch, or vice versa? The increased draw distance is a bit of an advantage.

I updated the number but it doesn't trigger the warning. I guess the check against the game version happens somewhere else.

To give an overall update: These past 2 months I've been extremely busy and haven't done any work on it at all. Whenever I had spare time I have been reading further about C++ in a bid to try and learn how to tackle the more difficult problems the game has (mainly the runtime crashes). I'm done with one book and now I moved on to the 2nd one. I have a total of 3 that I planned to read before I go back to modifying the code, so I don't expect to make any changes until February next year. (the 3rd book is a directX book as I look to try and see if I can learn to port the game to Dx9)

The game has a strange habit of sometimes refusing to work. It's like certain hidden values are stored somewhere. I had this issue as well, after I turned on Compatibility Settings it worked. When I turned the settings off it continued working.

Been thinking about the snow issue.
Is by chance the rendering limit of the snow, attached to the rendering limit of the ground? And the 120 update accidentally started rendering exponentially more flakes in the distance and all around the player?

Yep! Will look into this to tone it down (probably keep it it somewhere between 20-40, whatever works and doesn't break the illusion).

Ah brilliant then

Decided to always sticky the latest version. Should have thought of it by now.

OK I started looking into the snow issue. Will have to do a few more tests as it might not be the snowflakes that are the problem, rather the snow texture.

Hmmm, if true, that's a much harder problem to solve.

OK I can sadly confirm the problem is with the snow texture that is applied on top of the terrain. And I double checked the texture, it's 64x64 so I can only assume it must have something to do with the transparency logic within Directx5-7 (the texture starts out fully transparent and then gradually becomes visible). Probably something that can only be fixed with Dx9.

I took out the snow texture and I can add as many snowflakes as I want (can make the snow more dense, actually looks better) and it doesn't influence the fps.

Edit: Further tests. I have stopped the transparency from changing BUT the texture is still drawn yet invisible. Same fps hit. I completely deactivate the placement of the snow texture and it works fine.

Well I guess dump the snow texture, and bump up the snow flakes.
It won't be as challenging to race since you'll easily see the track, but not much we can do about that.

I will look into maybe creating an option button in settings so that people can manually deactivate the snow texture placement rather than disable it for everyone.

Good idea