Dragon Rage 0.9.0

Dragon Rage 0.9.0

The PC port's 0.1.38.7, Budokai Tenkaichi 4 drawn by ARMSX2's renderer, and lighter fights on Mali GPUs. Everything
measured on an RG Cube (Mali-G57) and a Retroid Pocket 5 (Adreno 650), with a recorded fight and pixel-by-pixel picture
comparison.

Faster

• Internal resolution 2x and above: drawing passes that never use depth run without it, flat shadows share a single
  clear, and the characters' glow is drawn at the PlayStation 2's resolution (from the PC). On the RG Cube a Vulkan 2x
  fight went from about 76% to 95% of full speed (OpenGL 2x: 92% to 98%); on the Retroid Pocket 5, Vulkan 4x went
  from 71% to 84%.
• OpenGL on Adreno: persistent buffers on Adreno too. On the Retroid Pocket 5, OpenGL 2x took about 4 seconds a
  frame and now runs at a steady 30.
• Adreno: the flat shadows' stencil is off by default, faster on these chips.
• GPU profiles measured for the Mali-G57 MC4 and the Adreno 650: the launcher suggests the resolution that keeps
  fights at 30.
• Lite mode (Settings > Performance; offered by the GPU profile on Mali-G52-class GPUs): the renderer on its own
  thread and the glow and the sky's glare left out entirely. On a simulated Mali-G52 MC1, fights at 1x went from 53% to
  77% of full speed.
• From the PC: fewer hitches the first time a special or a transformation appears (new textures are prepared much
  faster, on several cores), drawing buffers made ready before a fight's first big effect, and the characters' outline
  drawn only where there is a line.
• Texture packs: files are read in the background and kept in memory, and a frame takes in at most 4 MB of them.
  Fewer hitches with large packs (from the PC).

Picture (from the PC)

• Super Saiyan glow right at every internal resolution: it used to come out as a sharp, shifted copy of the
  character.
• Distance blur as on the console at high resolutions (leaves no longer show up as squares).
• Outlines the same thickness at every aspect ratio.
• The back of Videl's shirt without the dashed line.
• White screen with teen Gohan's third costume on Namek fixed.
• A texture written in a 24-bit or 4/8-bit format no longer keeps old content in its last rows.

New: Budokai Tenkaichi 4

• Team BT4's mod in the same app, next to BT3: new characters, forms and stages. The launcher's opening screen
  picks the game; each has its own image, saves and settings. It needs your image of the mod Beta 14 Rev2
  (SLUS-219.78): the game is recompiled for that version (the engine is the mod recompiled, from BT3-Recomp).
• ARMSX2's renderer by default: the PlayStation 2 emulator's (PCSX2's, with ARMSX2's fixes for Mali and Adreno),
  the most faithful picture of the mod. Dragon Rage's stays as an experimental option (Settings and the in-game
  menu, with one line explaining the difference). With it, far-off scenery can still come out as blocks of
  coloured noise; ARMSX2's draws it right.
• Shaders compiled in advance: the APK carries ARMSX2's shaders compiled on a Mali and an Adreno. The first picture
  appears in ~2.5 s instead of ~4.5 s, without the small compile hitches in menus and fights.
• 16:9 (as Team BT4 made it), 4:3 or full screen; custom drivers for BT4 too; an FPS meter.
• 60 fps fights (experimental): where the device cannot hold them (under 57 updates a second for 3 s in a fight),
  the game goes back to 30 by itself and says so: "This device could not hold 60 fps in BT4's fights; back to 30". On
  the devices measured it cannot yet: the RG Cube does 30 and the Retroid Pocket 5 about 36 to 41.
• The image can be picked from Downloads and still opens after the device restarts.

Texture packs

• They now work on Android: the game looked for packs in an internal folder of the app, so an imported pack was
  never used ("it installed and nothing changed"). They are now used in BT3 and BT4 (with both renderers).
  Measured with the SLUS-21678 HD pack (18,704 textures, 10.3 GB): about 3,000 textures replaced in the recorded
  fight, at a steady 30 fps on the RG Cube and the Retroid Pocket 5.
• More zips open: ones made in 7-Zip with Deflate64 or BZip2 and ones written as a stream (stored, with a data
  descriptor) gave "a compression the app cannot read".
• Space: a pack that does not fit is refused before unpacking, with its size and the free space ("Not enough
  space: this pack takes 10.3 GB unpacked and the device has 7.8 GB free"), instead of unpacking for over a minute
  and failing with a system error. What an interrupted import left behind is removed.
• The file picker also shows .rar and .7z, and the app explains how to turn them into a .zip.

Online

• Server busy: when the free server reaches its daily limit (HTTP 429, Cloudflare's error 1027), the game stops
  asking for a while (30 s, doubling up to 10 min) instead of insisting, moves to the backup server, and the launcher
  says "Server busy (daily limit), try again later". Offline play is not affected.
• Fewer requests: the Ranked queue is only asked while its screen is open; a search asks every 4 s for its first
  half minute, then every 8 s, and after two minutes every 15 s; a result the rival has not confirmed yet is sent again
  in 5 s, doubling up to a minute (before: every round).
• From the PC (for Dragon Net and against PC): the rival's sounds that went missing with rollback (Z-counter,
  vanish, teleport), the ki charge sound that stayed the whole fight, Solar Flare blinding as offline, Japanese voices
  replaced by English lines, and a desync is a warning instead of the end of the match. Two games with different data
  (a modified ISO against the original) are no longer matched.
• The app's log says why when the launcher cannot reach the online service.

Controls and launcher

• Full screen: on the Retroid Pocket 5 (and devices with a navigation bar) the game sometimes started in a smaller
  area (1920x972) that the system stretched to the screen, everything 11% taller and black bars at the sides in 16:9.
  The picture now fills the screen from the start, in BT3 and BT4 (10 of 10 starts right; before, 3 of 8 wrong).
• Classic pad on a square screen (RG Cube 720x720): L1/L2 and R1/R2 no longer overlap, and the face buttons and the
  d-pad stay on screen. Nothing changes on 16:9.
• START + SELECT also closes the in-game menu, not only opens it.
• The touch pad is hidden at start when a controller with a stick is connected.
• In the Drivers tab, the whole row picks the driver.
• The launcher's side rail scrolls (BT3's nine pages on 1080p screens).
• When Vulkan cannot start (for example with the MaliSX2 driver on the Mali-G57), the game falls back to OpenGL
  instead of a black screen.
• ADPF and sustained performance mode on the devices that have them, so the system does not lower the clock in the
  middle of a fight.

Update notes

• Installs over 0.8.x and keeps saves, settings and the imported ISOs.
• Online: PC mode talks to the official server of release 0.1.38; Dragon Net still plays with the Switch (DBT-NX).