RawMetal v0.13.0

Download

• RawMetal-v0.13.0.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.13.0.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.13.0 - Chapter 1 complete, and a VR overhaul (2026-10-26)

Chapter 1 now runs end to end, from the Power Distribution black start to the
great door of Energy Research, with no placeholder rooms left. VR has been
rebuilt around proper hands and an Alyx-style interface.

• Chapter 1 finished. Water and Cooling (treatment hall, drainage gallery,
  sump works, cooling tower basin and shell, heat exchange); the Ventilation
  Works and the Air Handling crawlspaces; the Fabrication Shop shutter puzzle
  and the Aid Station; the Restricted Perimeter's gatehouse, Checkpoint Delta,
  Administrative Link and Personnel Transit; and the finale at the Energy
  Research forecourt and great door.
• Area titles instead of signs. The first time you enter a major area its
  name fades in across the top, Half-Life 2 style, with a sting. About 300
  room-name and equipment-label signs are gone, and doors no longer carry
  area-name plates. What signage remains warns of hazards, explains locked
  doors or tells part of the story.
• Darkness and power. Lamps switch with the plant's power state, and some
  areas are truly dark until you restore it.
• Fixes. Personnel Transit's entrance no longer needs a crouch, a
  subtitle no longer sticks on screen two rooms away, and dozens of floating
  or buried props are seated.
• VR: hands and shotgun. Hands sit where they really are on Quest, Index
  or Vive controllers, using SteamVR finger tracking. The shotgun sits in
  your fist and aims where its barrel points. With your left hand on the
  pump, slide it back and forward after each shot; one-handed it cycles
  itself. A reload chambers a round.
• VR: Alyx-style interface. No wrist tablet. Health shows on your left
  hand, the load and LOADING on the gun, and area titles, subtitles and new
  objectives float in front of you. Menus, inventory and terminals open on a
  floating panel you point at with the right controller.
• VR: controls and comfort. Jump right A, reload right B, crouch toggle
  left X, menu left Y, inventory right stick click. Walking speed follows how
  far you push the stick, and smooth turning is quicker with fine control
  near the centre.
• VR: frame rate roughly doubled. The second eye reuses the first eye's
  scene and shadows, and VR renders with 2x MSAA.
• Developer mode. Start with --dev (or type DEV in the console) for no
  damage, no creatures and every door open.

RawMetal v0.12.1

Download

• RawMetal-v0.12.1.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.12.1.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.12.1 - Graphics fix for PCs without Resizable BAR (2026-10-25)

• No more PS1-looking fallback. On graphics cards or PCs without
  Resizable BAR, the game ran out of a small (256 MB) region of video memory
  after a few levels and switched for good to its software renderer, which
  looks far blockier. It now keeps rendering on the GPU and moves the extra
  geometry into system memory instead.
• Everything else is as in v0.12.0.

RawMetal v0.12.0

Download

• RawMetal-v0.12.0.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.12.0.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.12.0 - The Descent, part 1 (playtest) (2026-10-25)

The main campaign continues past Deep Junction. The main-line blast door now
opens into the deep plant, and the route runs on to the Energy Research
Entrance. This is a playtest build: some areas are still placeholder rooms.

• Power Distribution. Black-start the plant: Substation A, the Cable
  Trench, Emergency Generation, the Switch Hall and Load Control, then the
  sealed gate to the Machine Hall. A message waits on the mail relay.
• The Machine Hall. A 48 m turbine hall spread over four stitched maps,
  then the Ventilation Works and the Air Handling crawlspaces.
• Maintenance District. Break rooms, Central Stores (a stealth patrol),
  the Fabrication Shop puzzle and an aid station with a survivor.
• The Restricted Perimeter. The Operations Corridor, the Security
  Perimeter and gatehouse, Checkpoint Delta, the Administrative Link and
  Personnel Transit, Restricted Utilities, Research Receiving,
  Decontamination and the Energy Research Entrance.
• Placeholders. Water and Cooling (chunks 47-52) and everything past the
  great door are walkable placeholder rooms marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
• Engine. 178 new purchased models named for the facility, room for
  179 campaign maps, and a 64 MiB size ceiling.

RawMetal v0.11.0

Download

• RawMetal-v0.11.0.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.11.0.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.11.0 - Ashfall Exclusion Zone update (2026-10-24)

The Ashfall Exclusion Zone custom campaign is rebuilt as an open,
STALKER-style testbed: twenty maps of woods, marsh, ruins and roads to roam.
It stays a separate custom campaign; the main campaign is unchanged.

• An open zone. Rookie camp, fuel station, military checkpoint,
  scrapyard, radio tower, pine forest, swamp, creek, anomaly field, old
  mine, industrial zone and village ruins, with a three-step quest from the
  camp elder to the radio tower.
• No walls. The zone is edged by dense forest and wasteland, and beyond
  it the land rolls into wooded hills out to the horizon.
• Sky and ground. A broken overcast sky with a low warm sun, god rays
  through trees and ruins, low steam over the ground and wet patches. PSX
  grass, clover, dirt, gravel, forest litter and mud painted over the
  terrain.
• Lush plants. Tall grass, goldenrod, aster, bracken, sumac, bushes,
  leafy trees, aspens and pines from the purchased nature packs.
• Painterly Horizon LOD (experimental). Distant trees and plants are
  drawn as shared multi-angle impostors with depth and lighting, handing
  over smoothly to the real models up close; distant grass folds into the
  ground colour.
• Sound. Wind, birds, crickets, frogs, a creek, crackling camp fires and
  humming anomalies; footsteps on dirt, grass and gravel.
• Voices. Every NPC line re-recorded with directed delivery, plus new
  voices for the checkpoint soldiers, the scrapyard bandits and the camp
  guide, who will follow you. Speech is now muffled by what each character
  wears: a sealed hazmat hood, a gas mask, a face plate or nothing, and
  squad callouts come over the radio.
• Performance. The zone holds the 60 fps frame cap; small ground plants
  no longer render into the sun shadow maps.
• Fixes. An NPC crossing into another map no longer crashes the game;
  crashes now leave RawMetal-crash.txt for diagnosis.

RawMetal v0.10.0

Download

• RawMetal-v0.10.0.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.10.0.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.10.0 - Rebuilt facility update (2026-10-24)

Every campaign map from the Foundry to the Deep Junction is rebuilt from
scratch. Each keeps its name, its purpose and its story beats; everything
else is new.

• The facility (maps 0-9). Foundry, Pressure Works, Turbine Gantry with
  its catwalks, the Reactor Complex stitched across three chunks, Service
  Gallery, Coolant Return, Cable Vaults, Pump Annex, Utility Junction and
  Waste Handling.
• The freight district (maps 10-31). Freight Access, the lift machinery
  and auxiliary lift, the receiving floor and lanes, the high-bay warehouse
  (A-B, C, D and upper racks), the manifest offices and routing wing, the
  transfer conveyors, sorting and rail yard, Platform 3, the rolling-stock
  depot, the maintenance bore and the deep junction.
• Purchased-library dressing. Shipping containers on flat wagons, drums,
  storage tanks, gas cylinders and road blocks, and a full subway car (Train
  27) with platform furniture, ticket machines and a vending machine.
• Offices built like offices. Glazed partitions, fabric cubicles with
  workstations that face their seats, suspended ceilings with troffers,
  meeting, records, archive and switch rooms.
• A continuous rail network from the platform through the depot and the
  bore to the junction, with no tracks into walls.
• Smarter Cleanup patrols. Guards walk real beats and scan from their
  posts instead of pacing.
• Rendering. Auto exposure, the AgX-free display curve, coloured blackbody
  lamps, wet reflections, combat effects, crater bullet holes and a visible
  autofocus rack on the cinematic lens.
• Neural textures, round 3. 45 more textures ship as x2 neural textures.
• 27,915,264-byte EXE / 26.62 MiB, 5.38 MiB free under the 32 MiB ceiling.
• All 27 test suites pass and every rebuilt map passes the placement audit.

RawMetal v0.9.1

Download

• RawMetal-v0.9.1.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.9.1.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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Patch release of v0.9.0; its notes follow.

v0.9.0 - Light update (2026-10-24)

A rendering update on top of v0.8.0's Night Shift content.

• Per-pixel lamps with cube shadow maps. Every lamp lights the static
  world per pixel with normal-mapped diffuse and GGX specular, and casts real
  shadows from a six-face shadow map (props, railings and grates all occlude).
• Sun and sky for Ashfall. A directional sun with three cascaded shadow
  maps, sky-hemisphere ambient, and a procedural overcast sky with a sun disc
  and drifting cloud deck.
• Temporal anti-aliasing. Stable edges and texture detail in motion, on top
  of 4x MSAA. r_taa off returns to MSAA only.
• Close-up quality. Walking up to a wall no longer collapses it into flat
  blocks: a detail layer keeps relief and lighting at any distance, parallax and
  texel snapping fade with magnification, and the ghost copies the occlusion
  pass painted on near walls are gone.
• Volumetric light. Lamp shafts are shadow-mapped, so light pours through
  gaps and stops at walls; haze is continuous from the eye.
• Mailbox presentation (no tearing), per-frame shadow budgeting for streamed
  chunks, and the renderer survives walking into every Security Office wall at
  1080p in the new windowed-path harness.
• 27,827,712-byte EXE / 26.54 MiB, 5.46 MiB free under the 32 MiB ceiling.
• Vulkan, performance, prologue, Exclusion and world isolation tests pass.

Console switches for A/B: r_pixel, r_taa, r_post, r_texels.

SHA-256: E4A465B463B12D3ECEB6E6CC92136FEF8AE1178A53B65C1568957167CC9D2FD2

RawMetal v0.9.0

Download

• RawMetal-v0.9.0.zip: the game and these notes
• RawMetal.exe: the game on its own (one file, all assets inside)
• RawMetal-v0.9.0.sha256: SHA-256 checksums of both

Windows 10/11 x64 with a Vulkan 1.0 GPU driver and the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 Redistributable. Unzip anywhere and run RawMetal.exe; nothing is installed.

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v0.9.0 - Light update (2026-10-24)

A rendering update on top of v0.8.0's Night Shift content.

• Per-pixel lamps with cube shadow maps. Every lamp lights the static
  world per pixel with normal-mapped diffuse and GGX specular, and casts real
  shadows from a six-face shadow map (props, railings and grates all occlude).
• Sun and sky for Ashfall. A directional sun with three cascaded shadow
  maps, sky-hemisphere ambient, and a procedural overcast sky with a sun disc
  and drifting cloud deck.
• Temporal anti-aliasing. Stable edges and texture detail in motion, on top
  of 4x MSAA. r_taa off returns to MSAA only.
• Close-up quality. Walking up to a wall no longer collapses it into flat
  blocks: a detail layer keeps relief and lighting at any distance, parallax and
  texel snapping fade with magnification, and the ghost copies the occlusion
  pass painted on near walls are gone.
• Volumetric light. Lamp shafts are shadow-mapped, so light pours through
  gaps and stops at walls; haze is continuous from the eye.
• Mailbox presentation (no tearing), per-frame shadow budgeting for streamed
  chunks, and the renderer survives walking into every Security Office wall at
  1080p in the new windowed-path harness.
• 27,827,712-byte EXE / 26.54 MiB, 5.46 MiB free under the 32 MiB ceiling.
• Vulkan, performance, prologue, Exclusion and world isolation tests pass.

Console switches for A/B: r_pixel, r_taa, r_post, r_texels.

SHA-256: E4A465B463B12D3ECEB6E6CC92136FEF8AE1178A53B65C1568957167CC9D2FD2

RawMetal v0.7.2-preview.13 - Spatial audio patch

Approved spatial audio first pass, integrated with all sixteen reduced textures.

• Walls now smoothly muffle treble as well as volume using existing geometry checks.
• Positional stereo recordings resolve to a single emitter; music and listener-centered cues retain stereo.
• All 80 NPC takes, voice triggers, cue ordering and lift transitions remain intact.
• 24,171,008-byte EXE / 23.05 MiB, 8.95 MiB free below the unchanged 32 MiB ceiling. Native trained-PGO shipping build, no new dependencies or sound assets.
• Full Vulkan smoke, audio regression, live Windows device playback and 231 packaged-resource checks passed.
• Initial candidate mixer stress: 48 spatial loops in 0.25-0.28 ms per 11.61 ms output block. Final PGO shipping validation measured 0.537 ms/block. These short runs vary, exclude game-thread geometry and are not a gameplay FPS comparison.

This first slice adds spectral occlusion and point-source mixing; HRTF, room reflections and audio-thread contention work remain for later passes.

SHA-256: 1092F66712970439633C65925E0418B692FC86C9457A97ADBB79B6D12F65967F

Audio validation and remaining work

RawMetal v0.7.2-preview.12 - Neural texture reduction patch

Nine more textures reduced, sixteen total, using the existing shared decoder and weights. Textures reconstruct once at load time and remain cached at their authored dimensions. Scissors is the largest new saving; human textures, hands, weapons, UI, normal maps, animations and AI code are unchanged. Fine grain is slightly softer.

• 23.05 MiB EXE (24,173,568 bytes): 1.235 MiB / 5.08% smaller than preview.11.
• 2.156 MiB / 8.55% smaller than procedural preview.10.
• 8.95 MiB free under the unchanged 32 MiB ceiling.
• Exclusion lab: 309.6 aggregate FPS, 3.23 ms average frame time, 4.77 ms p99, 196.7 FPS 1% low, across 14,400 patch frames on RTX 5060 Ti at 640x360 Vulkan HDR/4x MSAA. Run averages ranged 292-321 FPS. Baseline variability was substantial; these measurements do not establish a speed gain or a stable low-FPS improvement.
• 750 decoder checks, 231 resource checks, full Vulkan smoke, 28 visibility views, twelve Exclusion and 23 freight-detail captures passed/inspected.
• Zero reconstruction during gameplay in the 240-frame cache test or atlas scale changes.

The release asset matches the tested root executable.

SHA-256: 54E771DF0DBE6F3F08584B01B6BC4CC5D9E1A6BE01E341D51245BE9E7DC7509B

Full statistics and methodology
Screening and visual comparisons

v0.7.2-preview.9 - Performance hotfix (round 10)

Exact SIMD animation decoding with unchanged samples, aiming, hands, graphics and AI cadence. Promotes the fully tested round-ten winner.

Same-batch preview.8 comparison: 308.4 to 314.2 FPS (+1.86%). 1% lows 187.8 to 199.9 FPS (+6.48%). Native 640x360 Vulkan HDR / 4x MSAA; three runs per build. 330 FPS remains unmet, and this is not a minimum-FPS guarantee.

All 25 regression checks PASS, including full smoke, saves, squad roles, Medic/Engineer, navigation, terrain, GPU/Vulkan, visibility and presentation resize. All 230 packaged resources unchanged. Final gameplay fingerprints match. Twelve fresh captures match the repeated baseline, accounting for existing baseline variation.

Download RawMetal.exe and choose Custom Maps -> ASHFALL EXCLUSION ZONE, or run RawMetal.exe --pc --exclusion-zone.

Size: 27,236,352 bytes / 25.975 MiB; 6.025 MiB free under the unchanged 32 MiB ceiling. 7 KiB smaller than preview.8. Existing icon preserved.
SHA256: 75774028EE7F71F6F1C94775ABDDA08CE83A50723F4936013DEDF9249735B812.