Surfaces the game shades by hand
A fault that had every hand shaded surface lit as though it faced the wrong way, and the lighting given the game's own answers rather than its own guesses.
Added
- Added an Indoor light row to the Lighting menu (Off, 25, 50, 75, 100 percent), which gives a place with no sky a light of its own overhead so that what stands there has a shadow. It adds no brightness and takes nothing off a room except where something is in the way.
- Added two wider steps to Shadow softness, Very soft and Hazy. A sun is half a degree across, so its shadow near whatever casts it was about a pixel of softness at the old widest.
- Added a Camera drift row (Off, On), where On is the game's own easing of the camera's distance as Link runs and stops, and Off holds one distance.
- Added a Medium step to Camera distance, between Original and Far.
- Added a Normals step to Inspect one pass, which shows the direction each surface is shaded about.
Changed
- Changed Camera distance so that Near is the game's own distance, with Original, Medium and Far standing further back. The step closer than the game's own is gone.
Fixed
- Fixed every surface the game shades by hand being lit as though it faced some other direction. The console keeps a vertex's facing and its colour in the same place, and uses one or the other depending on how the surface is drawn; the lighting was reading the colour as a facing. Floors read as bands of flat shade with hard edges, and nothing near such a surface lit it the way it should.
- Fixed the lighting deciding for itself whether a place has a sun, which it got wrong in both directions: a cavern with a lit floor was treated as open sky, so its walls threw hard shadows the length of the room, and outdoors the answer could change as the camera turned and put every shadow in the picture out at once. The game is now asked instead.
- Fixed a fairy's light passing through whatever it hovers over, so Navi above Link now casts his shadow on the ground beneath him.
- Fixed the lighting seeing only the first sixteen lights of a scene when the game can hold thirty two, which is why a fairy in a place that already had torches lit nothing at all.
- Fixed the Camera distance row reaching only the free camera. It now moves the game's own camera and the one Z targeting hands back to.
- Fixed the free camera measuring its distance from the point it looks at rather than from Link, so it backed away as he ran.
Shadows keep their casters
A fix for shadows vanishing when whatever cast them left the top or the bottom of the view.
Fixed
- Fixed shadows disappearing as the camera moved, even with Shadow casters set to Everything: a torch on a wall above the view, or anything under a ledge, was still being dropped by the game's own up and down limits, and its light and its shadow went with it. Those limits now follow the row, exactly as the sideways one already did.
- Fixed trees and bushes behind the camera not existing to cast their shadows forward into the picture when the row asks for them.
Torches that cast shadows, and the camera everywhere
A torch or a fairy now throws a real shadow, rooms have their own shading, and the free camera reaches first person, aiming and the horse.
Added
- Added shadows from the game's own lights: a torch, a fairy or any light in a scene now throws a shadow of whatever stands in it, rather than only adding light. Indoors the room's own light gives soft shading under things and steps aside wherever a torch reaches.
- Added a Darkness row to the Lighting menu (Off, Light, Deep), which takes the game's own flat brightness away wherever no traced light falls, so a room is dark but for its torches and what they light.
- Added a Shadow casters row (Game's own, Near, Far, Everything), which decides how much of the world behind and beside the camera stays in the lighting, so a shadow's caster is not dropped as you turn away from it.
- Added a Glow size row beside the renamed Glow density, so a light's visible halo is set apart from how far its light reaches.
- Added the right stick to first person and to aiming with the bow, the slingshot, the hookshot and the boomerang, with an Aiming axes row that inverts those on their own.
- Added the free camera to the horse.
Changed
- Changed the Light reach and Light strength rows to be measured against the game's own light, with 100 percent as the game's own and the rows reaching three times that. A strong light on a sunlit wall now reads as a glow rather than blowing out to white.
- Changed the menu as a side panel to fill the window's height, with its title at the top, its foot at the bottom, and only the rows scrolling between them.
Fixed
- Fixed a saved moment losing the area it was taken in: chests you had opened, switches you had pressed and rooms you had cleared came back when you resumed. A moment now keeps them.
- Fixed the menus scrolling back to the top when a value was changed on a row you had scrolled down to.
- Fixed a fairy's glow and other effects going grey when they sat in a shadow, instead of lighting the dark as they should.
- Fixed there being no shadow at all under anything indoors, where the sun does not reach.
- Fixed the free camera stopping its turn when it was pointed down into the ground, instead of sliding along it.
Ray traced lighting, saved moments, and a free camera
The renderer now traces light through the frame the game hands it, the game can be saved and resumed at any moment, and the right stick turns the camera.
Added
- Added ray traced lighting, drawn from the same frame the game hands the renderer: soft shadows from the sun, darkening where surfaces meet, the game's own lights (a fairy, a torch) falling on the ground and the walls around them with a natural falloff, light bounced from lit surfaces, reflections on water, and the sun's haze in the air. Each part switches on its own in a new Lighting menu, with rows for the reach and the strength of the lights, the range of the bounce and of the reflections, and an Inspect row that shows one pass in place of the picture.
- Added a free camera on the right stick, off until switched on in Settings: the stick turns the camera around Link wherever the game's own camera is free to turn, Z recentres it, and a Camera axes row inverts either direction. Fixed and scripted cameras never see it. While it holds the stick the C buttons on the stick stand aside, so C down and C left have the right trigger and the left bumper as well.
- Added saved moments: F6 saves the game as it stands and F9 resumes the newest, a Moments document lists every saved moment with a picture, an Autosave row keeps one every five, ten or fifteen minutes, Save on quit keeps one as the program closes, and Resume on start opens straight into the newest one, skipping the title and the file select.
- Added fixed picture heights to the Resolution row (720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K) and fixed ratios to the Aspect row (16:9, 16:10, 21:9, 32:9), so the picture can be drawn at a chosen size whatever the window is.
- Added a Menu placement row: the settings and lighting menus can sit as a panel on the right or the left with the picture scaled beside them, ratio kept, so a lighting change is seen as it is made.
- Added the installer window in the program's own look, and an Open button on every row of Your files.
Changed
- Changed the menus so a change to a row lower down no longer moves the list, and every press lands on the row it was aimed at.
Fixed
- Fixed the traced lighting stopping at a straight edge across the picture during a fast camera swing, most often when backing away from an enemy at night with Z held: the rays and the picture were aimed by two different cameras once the interpolated camera carried a roll. They agree by construction now.
- Fixed a fixed picture height with 4x downsampling asking the graphics card for a picture taller than it can draw, which stalled the program at a frame a second and showed coloured squares in the recorder's plate. The picture is capped and the downsampling steps down to fit.
- Fixed fences, ladders, vines and tree lines cutting holes in the fog and the lighting where their textures are transparent.
- Fixed a startup crash and a graphics device hang that the first lighting builds could hit.
Your Menu key works, and the controls screen says what it sees
A patch for the controls screen.
Added
- Added a note on the controls screen when a pad is seen as an Xbox 360 controller, which is what a PlayStation pad looks like behind DS4Windows or Steam Input: the touchpad and the PS button then arrive only as the buttons that layer maps them to.
Changed
- Changed the rebind prompt to stack its title, its instruction and its countdown on their own lines instead of running them together.
Fixed
- Fixed a keyboard key bound to Menu on the controls screen doing nothing: it was saved and shown but only F1 ever opened the menu. The bound key opens it now, and F1 still does.
Updates that install themselves, and two corrections
The first release an installed copy can update to on its own. Also corrects the first run question and the frame recorder.
Added
- Added the update plate: once Check for updates is on and a newer version exists, the setup file downloads in the background, a small plate at the bottom left of the picture says so, and the plate then says the update installs the next time the program opens. A click on the plate, or F5, installs it straight away. The downloaded file is verified twice (against the release manifest and by its signature) before it is ever run. Portable copies are told a version exists and download nothing.
- Added a repeat of the update check every four hours while the program is open, and an immediate first check when Check for updates is switched on in the settings, so a long session is not left behind.
Fixed
- Fixed the first run question "Should this check for updates?" not taking effect: Yes was switching on the frame recorder instead, and Check for updates stayed off in the settings. The answer now lands on the Updates row and is remembered either way.
- Fixed the frame recorder's plate and the frame rate counter staying switched on from one launch to the next. Both are overlays for one session: they start off every time, whatever the settings file says.
- Fixed the in-game menu having no Quit button: it sits in the same bar the launcher uses, at the end of the keyboard and controller order, so the program can be closed with the title bar off.
One file to install, and a place for your things
The program now installs itself from a single download, keeps your saves and settings somewhere they cannot be lost with it, and can tell you when a newer version exists. Busy scenes no longer make the game skip ahead.
Added
- Added the centre touchpad of a PlayStation 4 or 5 controller as a second way to open the menu in play, beside Share. It can be rebound like any other input, and the startup hint names every button that opens the menu.
- Added a single setup file as the main download: it installs the program into your own application data, adds it to the Start menu and to Windows' installed apps list, and starts it. It asks for no administrator rights and writes nothing outside your own profile.
- Added a portable download alongside it, which installs nothing and keeps its saves, settings and mods in its own folder.
- Added Your files, a surface listing exactly where the program keeps everything, with a click on any row opening that folder. It carries the uninstall as well.
- Added an uninstall that removes the program, the shortcut and the listing, and moves any copy of the game it was holding to your Downloads folder rather than deleting it.
- Added an update check, off until you say otherwise, which asks once on first open. It reports a newer version in the launcher's foot, and F5 fetches and installs it after checking both its digest and its signature.
- Added an offer, on first run, to keep a copy of your own game file with the program, with its size stated before you answer. Your original is never moved or changed either way.
- Added a step either side of every setting value, so a setting can be changed in both directions with the mouse rather than only forwards.
Changed
- Changed where saves, settings, controls and mods live for an installed copy: they sit beside the program's own files rather than among them, so an update replaces one and never the other.
- Changed Play and Quit to sit half and half under the list with the same gap above them as between them, reached with left and right rather than up and down on the keyboard and on every pad, with Play selected first.
Fixed
- Fixed the game skipping ahead in busy scenes, Kakariko Village by day above all: Link teleported, the camera jumped, the time of day raced when leaving, and the sound broke, all at once. The game was dropping frames whose drawing lists had overflowed and running on without waiting; it now has room for everything the wider, farther picture asks it to draw, and a dropped frame can no longer become a runaway.
- Fixed a setting reaching the end of its range and becoming a dead end for anyone using the mouse: the frame rate could be raised to 240 with no way back down.
- Fixed the launcher's foot being cut off by a window that did not grow with its list.
The first playable build
The game runs natively from your own copy of the ROM, with a launcher, settings, controllers, and a picture drawn between the game's own frames.
Added
- Added the launcher: your ROM found beside the program by what it is rather than its name, or picked in a browser; every setting chosen before Play with defaults from your machine; a controller set up first.
- Added the settings document in play: window mode, resolution, downsampling, aspect, interface placement, antialiasing, frame rate and volume, with the version in its foot.
- Added fixed frame rates to the frame rate row (30 to 240) after the game's own rate and the display's.
- Added a frame rate counter, off by default: a small plate at the top right of the picture with the frames shown each second.
- Added the controls document: every game input bound by pressing, for the keyboard and for each pad, with rumble and a deadzone per pad.
- Added keyboard defaults for play without a pad: WASD moves, Space is A, Left Shift is B, Q targets, E and R are the shoulders, I, J, K and L are the C buttons, Enter is Start and the arrows are the D-pad.
- Added a startup hint naming the key and the pad button that open the menu.
- Added frames drawn between the game's own at the display's rate, and a wide picture with the interface anchored to its edges.
- Added the game window's own chrome: a title bar with the mark and the window buttons, and a brass edge.
- Added the About surface with the exact commits the build was made from, the build's signature and this list.
- Added a crash report, written to the log beside the program, that names the function and the address and never the game's data.
Fixed
- Fixed a double click on the program doing nothing and leaving an empty log: the log is written from the first line now, and the crash report also covers the endings the C runtime used to keep to itself.
