0.3.0

Until Dawn PC Recompilation — v0.3.0

Released: 2 November 2026

This update introduces major improvements to the Vulkan renderer, fixing graphical issues in later chapters, improving stability and significantly expanding shader preparation. It also brings back the original Halloween Hunt 2015 event.

Added

• Added Halloween Hunt 2015 event, adds back the Halloween screen and hidden pumpkins. The event is off by default but can be enabled anytime in Config\settings.ini by setting halloween_hunt = 1.

Fixed

• Fixed character geometry stretching across the screen in Chapter 10.
• Fixed lake water disappearing or flickering during longer gameplay sessions.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when loading chapters.
• Fixed cinematic letterbox bars not extending to the edges of the screen during character introductions.
• Fixed some textures displaying outdated contents after being updated by the game.
• Fixed a race condition where multiple game threads could initialise the same object simultaneously.
• Fixed several memory synchronisation issues that could cause graphical corruption, lost memory updates or freezes.

Improvements

• Added GPU memory coherence, enabled by default, to keep CPU and GPU memory synchronised and prevent graphical corruption.
• Added the gpu_coherence setting, allowing players to disable the feature for troubleshooting.
• Improved error handling and diagnostics for GPU coherence failures.
• Expanded the shader list from 1,594 to 4,440 recorded pipelines, covering the Prologue, Chapter 1, the opening of every chapter and parts of Chapter 10.
• Added an optional background shader preparation mode using shader_preparation = 2, disabled by default.
• Updated the executable and logging to identify the release as v0.3.0.

Performance

• Increased shader coverage during tested chapter starts from 78.7% to 98.9%.
• Reduced shader compilation during those tests from approximately 135 seconds to 3.5 seconds.
• Reduced the longest recorded frame during chapter starts from 3.3 seconds to 1.2 seconds.
• Significantly reduced shader compilation stutters across tested scenes, particularly at the beginning of chapters.
• Optimised GPU memory coherence with no measurable overall performance regression in testing.
• Initial shader preparation takes approximately 2½ minutes on the development PC with an empty cache, with subsequent launches generally taking less than a second.

Known Issues

• Intermittent memory corruption and crashes are still being investigated.
• Some Chapter 10 graphical issues remain unverified, including occasional black screens, colour corruption and stretched character geometry in other scenes.
• Scenes further into chapters may still experience shader compilation stutters when first encountered.
• Some demanding scenes still run below 30 FPS.
• Various graphical issues remain, including lighting problems in Chapter 1, disappearing snow in the Prologue and missing gloss on character models.
• GPU coherence has only been tested on NVIDIA hardware. AMD and Intel GPU testing is still needed.