HiFi XI v0.65

Unzip into your Ashita folder. HiFi XI brings its own d3d8.dll: if your launcher puts dgVoodoo in bootloader itself, switch that off (Phoenix's launcher: Settings -> Graphics -> My own wrapper).

Fixes

• Zoning: after a zone change, World FX now waits until the game has said which zone you're in before it draws grass, water and the sea. It could draw the last zone's for a few seconds in the new one, and on some PCs that stopped the GPU: a dark screen with the music still playing.
• Frame generation: two freezes are fixed. They happened with frame generation on while Direct3D's debug layer was on as well, and the picture froze until the game was closed.

Frame rate

• The six speed-ups on the Frame rate tab are now off by default, and no preset turns them on. If your settings had them on, this update turns them off once; you can turn any of them back on there.
• Batch text and interface quads and Drop repeated device calls now run inside HiFi XI's own d3d8.dll.
• Hide characters by walls without waiting and SSE character skinning on any CPU are gone. The no-wait visibility tests now answer the characters' test too, and HiFi XI draws the characters itself.

For reports

• If the GPU stops while World FX is drawing, worldfx-gpu-crash.txt now names the part it stopped in (grass, water, the sea, shadows, the air, and so on).
• hifixi.log says which frame rate speed-ups are on at start and whenever that changes, and why one was refused.

Known issue

• Some players' games hang now and then: the picture freezes and the game has to be closed. The reports so far show the GPU stopping while HiFi XI sets up its scenery pass. Updating your graphics driver is worth a try. If it happens to you, please send bootloader\worldfx-gpu-crash.txt and bootloader\hifixi.log.