HookLink 1.4

An engine update for smoother play in the busy areas, from a 31-minute run from Kokiri Forest to Castle Town on an iPhone 18 Pro Max.

Fixed: freezes of 1–4 seconds the first time you reach new areas (Hyrule Field, Castle Town).
The game draws its foliage, shadows and enemies with mesh shaders. The engine wasn't counting, saving or preparing those shaders, so each new one was built at the moment it was first drawn, freezing the game. They are now prepared during "Preparing shaders", saved, and loaded from the save on later starts. The built-in list covers Kokiri Forest, Hyrule Field, Castle Town and Hyrule Castle. (From nxnative, by seedds and nanotchec, with rows from several players; one more row from our own test.)

Improved: Hyrule Field and the road to the castle dropping to 35–55 fps.
iOS decides which CPU cores each thread runs on from its class. The thread that sends each frame to the GPU was in a lower class, which tells iOS its work can wait, so iOS kept it on the phone's slower efficiency cores, at about 1.6 GHz instead of 3.7. Hyrule Field draws about 4× as much per frame as Kokiri Forest, so it fell behind even though the GPU had time to spare. That thread now always runs in the top class. The cause is confirmed in the logs; how close this brings Hyrule Field to 60 fps hasn't been measured on a phone yet, so please share your log if it still drops.

Changed: memory for the game's render targets.
Tested on the phone: about 4 GB to spare in Hyrule Field, more than 1.3. The shared memory layout for render targets (from an nxnative pull request) is replaced by nxnative's own render-target recycling. nxnative found the old layout can corrupt the picture. The new one reuses a freed target's memory for the next one that fits, so dynamic resolution changes no longer pile up memory.

Also from nxnative: dynamic resolution climbs back to full size based on the measured load, the bundled pipeline archive is mapped instead of read into memory, and fixes for paused threads and exclusive memory access.

To update: open HookLink and click Update and rebuild on the update banner, then install the new app over the old one. Your saves and game files stay on the phone. This update changes the shaders, so the rebuild takes longer than usual (about an hour on an M-series Mac), and the first "Preparing shaders" on the phone takes a few minutes. If the first session after that feels slow, close the game fully and reopen it.

Engine: dsi-hub/nxnative hooklink at 0afdbb76. The release holds only the HookLink app: you build the game from your own dump.