Graphics
Fixed a critical issue that prevented all Windows 11 users from playing the game due to videos not working at all.
Details:
A recent Microsoft update to all Windows 11 systems seems to have rendered the AV1 Video Extension component useless. The legacy Windows Media Player is no longer able to play AV1-encoded videos with that package installed. My game is built on WPF and was using MediaElement to render AV1 videos through the WMP, which required the AV1 Video Extension to be installed. After the Microsoft update, videos were no longer working at all in the game on Windows 11 systems.
To resolve the issue, I've rewritten the entire video component in the game from scratch to no longer depend on MediaElement. Instead, it now relies on the Edge WebView2 runtime's WPF component and a new control that I made to render and manage the state for an HTML5 video element. My testing shows that this not only works on Windows 10 and 11 without installing the AV1 Video Extension, but it also appears to be a lot more stable. Apparently it still uses GPU acceleration for AV1 video plackback as well.
The cost to this new approach is that Windows 10 does not come with the Edge WebView2 runtime pre-installed, although Windows 11 does. However, using the [i]winget[/i] tool I was able to update the game's installer to simply check if the OS is Windows 10 and, if so, it installs the runtime package automatically. This works similarly to how the installer already uses [i]winget[/i] to install .NET 8, which is the platform on which the game runs.
If you run into any issues with the installation, then please let me know!
[i]Note that Windows 10 systems with all of the latest Microsoft updates should already have Edge WebView2 runtime installed, but I've included the installation anyway just to be on the safe side.[/i]
If you wish to uninstall these components, I've provided an uninstallation script that you can run manually. Note that it does not run automatically when uninstalling Lambda Enigma, because .NET 8 and the Edge WebView2 runtime are global system components that other applications likely depend on, and as such uninstalling them may cause other applications to stop functioning. So uninstall these at your own risk!
{SteamLibrary}\\steamapps\\common\\LambdaEnigma\\Install\\Uninstall.bat
[i]Special thanks to the player that reported it...[/i]
getting COMExceptions in the log when starting the game :: Lambda Enigma General Discussions