This update took a long time because of revamps in the underlying technology, and several experimental features (e.g. gameplay-related) are still disabled. Some will be enabled progressively in the next (smaller) updates. Change log:
- Fixed compatibility with Windows 11.
- New full-featured text-rendering engine:
- Custom representation for better edge sharpness at low font sizes.
- Real-time grid-fitting with optional monospace-font specific improvements.
- Specialized CPU/GPU compression to reduce file/memory size requirements.
- User adjustment of the base text-weight.
- Outlining and LCD sub-pixel rendering support (currently unused).
- It is configured to support quality rendering of arbitrary sizes and effects up to 8K resolutions, with either linear or exponential color blending, using a small block of GPU memory. If you need smaller or larger sizes send a message.
- Comprehensive optimizations of common operations based on a new general-purpose parallel/vector-processing framework.
- Added automatic scaling of the UI based on active resolution, allowing further customization via a user Zoom level.
- Added information about the swap-effect (present mode for Vulkan), to make it easy to determine when a game benefits from the display manager of recent Windows versions. Suggested by Jerry Segler.
- Modified DirectX 9 rendering to use the programmable pipeline in order to support current features, and possibly others in the future (e.g. increased color gamut and HDR).
- Fixed DirectX 10 compatibility with recent drivers that don't support BGRA colors. Appears to be a bug since it was supported in older drivers and DirectX 11 is fine.
- Tweaked the themes to take advantage of the new features. If someone is interested in creating new themes let me know.
- Modified Step chart and line-rendering to reduce the number of vertices.
- Changed activation of the Desktop Test to avoid depending on the reliability of Windows notifications.
Thanks to everyone who keeps sending feedback, in particular lately soyoker, Jerry and Ellis.