Ok, this is another massive update which I hope fixes more than it breaks.
- OId menus are gone! Replaced by new actual ingame menus. You have two to chose from, the game starts off with a default but then in the option you have a Track Flyby Menu which changes from background images to a flyover for whatever tracks you have loaded. It refreshes every 90sec and during the refresh, based on your system, the menu will lag for 1-2seconds. In order to have this work, restart the game after selecting the option.
- I have touched all the bug notes from the .49 thread except for Rudee's last one.
- Cockpits are back!!! What? Crazy! They are still the original art upscaled but they work well for a temporary solution.
- Mirrors are back in the cockpits AND in the chase views, Ford Chan can rejoice. The new key to enable mirrors is M, both for cockpit view and outside.
- Blind work has been done on the sound side. Stuff needed fixing anyway even if it sounded fine. Hopefully by sheer luck this blind work fixed the elusive sound bug.
- More work has been done on the multiplayer side, hopefully ironing out the kinks. Please note, make sure people are on the same build when testing. Once I release the Comm Patch 3 (after we iron out the bugs in this version) I will make sure the multiplayer notifies you of version mismatch
- Added modern hardware controller input. My wheel works fine but I only have the single wheel as input. So hopefully the others work just because
- The game now does a mini upscale of the FMV clips. This is a fallback option as I will separately offer as download the upscaled HD version. I am still running doing the conversion. These will always be offered as a separate download because of their big size and the game knows to default to the additional download if it can find them, otherwise falling back on the own upscaling that it does
- Replays now have to be in the Saved Replays folder for them to be visible (this was the original game folder to begin with)
- If you make a change to the Max FPS option in the menu, make sure you restart for it to take effect. I forgot to make a note of it, will do for the bugfix.
- For the sound channels in the options menu, as a general rule you should keep it at 64. If you have any sound issues try going higher or lower and see if it makes a difference. If you go higher, in theory it uses more CPU resources but should be better if sounds overlap and don't trigger.
- Movie theater and manual pages use wrong background, will fix that later.
- Added a few requested features here and there.
- The game should no longer care if the files are lower or upper case or a mix.
- Fixed a bug regarding models with high vertex counts. They were being ignored and were being sent back to CPU rendering which is why it was tanking the FPS. This was a silent error and found it by mistake. Once I fixed this, my FPS shot up.
- There is actual parity between DX11 and Vulkan despite the fps looking different. Vulkan does some extra things behind the scenes to throttle itself when the fps is high whereas DX11 just goes wild. So what matters is how the game feels more than what the actual number is displayed. And for the record, I reached 2000fps with DX11
- This high FPS led to a number of issues, including sound. So I've been trying to fix those issues but I might have missed some.
- The old helper file are back, though not as F1. They get their own menu.
NOTE: Please make sure you save the UI.POD that you have now until we make sure everything works correctly.
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.50.zip

