Pokopia Recomp 0.13.8 (build Q: Quokka Hotfix a5)

Update: press Update in the launcher, then Set up again (it relinks the game; saves and shaders are kept, no shader is translated again).

Highlights

• Fixed the game closing (code 0xC0000409) soon after loading the world on PCs with 8 GB of RAM or less
• Fixed low frame rates on graphics cards with less than 8 GB of video memory (#693, #694)
• Added a Brightness setting and a Controller setting to pick the one controller that plays

Controls

• Added a Controller setting (in-game Settings > Controller, and the launcher's Settings > Controls): pick the one controller that plays, for PCs with other people's controllers connected (a shared streaming host). All, the default, keeps every controller playing.

Graphics

• Added a Brightness setting under Settings > Picture: it dims the whole picture, white menus included, for players who find a bright screen uncomfortable (#678)
• Fixed the Ditto loading screen and the fade to black around it covering only the 16:9 middle of a wider picture (ultrawide screens)
  • Before: what lay behind them showed on the left and right, the world itself during the fade; on 16:10 the fade left a thin strip of it at the top and bottom
  • Now: the loading screen's black areas and its strip of sky reach the picture's edges, and the fade covers the whole picture
  • Still not: the stars in the loading screen's sky end at the old 16:9 edges
• Fixed the game closing (code 0xC0000409) soon after loading the world on PCs with 8 GB of RAM or less, such as laptops with AMD Vega integrated graphics: the copies of the game's graphics memory kept in RAM are now limited to an eighth of the PC's RAM
• Fixed low frame rates on graphics cards with less than 8 GB of video memory, worst after visiting several areas (#693, #694)
  • Before: the game's copy of its data in video memory filled up with mostly empty blocks and was never cleared, so later areas read their data from system memory
  • Now: smaller blocks on those cards, blocks no area has drawn from for about 10 seconds are cleared for new ones, and 4 GB cards get a copy too
  • Cards with 8 GB or more keep what they had until their copy is full
  • Still not: on 4-core processors the console's cores can share a physical core (#694)

Performance

• Better use of processors with fewer than 6 cores, such as 4-core / 8-thread laptops (#694)
  • Before: the game's six console cores went in pairs onto three of the four cores, and the fourth core was left out
  • Now: every core gets one console core first, and the remaining two each share a core with one other
  • Still not: on a 4-core processor two cores still carry two console cores each

Launcher

• Fixed shader translation failing in Set up when the game folder's path has a non-ASCII character (such as an accented user name)

For developers

• [sched] pick = auto with fewer physical cores than console cores: one console core per physical core (fastest first, the core of processor 0 last), then the rest on second hardware threads (place_on_few_cores in src/kernel/sched.cpp); take_slot now says when there are too few processors for a slot instead of blaming other processes
• [nvn] pool_mirror_mb: device-local pool copies use 16 MiB chunks under a cap of 1792 MiB (64 MiB from it up), release chunks idle for 600 presents once the cap is used up (release_idle_chunks in nvn_gpu_pool.cpp), and start at 3.5 GiB of video memory instead of 4 GiB (nvn_mirror_cap.h)
• [pad] controller (all or 1 to 8, controls.ini): poll_pads reads only the pad whose SDL player index + 1 matches (on Windows the XInput slot + 1); input::GamepadInfo::player carries the index and pkp.log prints it when a pad is added
• [picture] brightness (0.25 to 1, controls.ini): multiplies the display-encoded signal after the gamma in the output pass; its value rides in the encode's p.w, which was the picture controls' on/off flag, so the 128-byte push block is unchanged
• runtime/games/pkp/render/pkp_loading_backdrop.cpp: the pane quad hook is also installed on a canvas wider than 1920 and grows the loading layout's sky and ground and the fade quad 000_prt_square_k (authored 2112x1188) with the canvas; play_ui_canvas_width() in input/pkp_play.h
• Modtopia: added a read-only selected title/account identity API so mods can scope their own data to the player's save account.