>= 1.28.0 Update Discussion Thread

[Sewer56]

1.28.0: .NET 9 and Miscellaneous Improvements

Upgraded to .NET 9

Reloaded-II now ships with .NET 9 (currently RC2) as its runtime; given that no major issues have been reported thus far. This should give modders access to new APIs as well as performance improvements.

Improved: Running protontricks with certain Flatpak installs.

Many people running Protontricks via Flatpak rely on setting an alias to protontricks-launch via ~/.bashrc. In fact, the install guide recommends this.

However, the .desktop shortcuts generated by the installer previously did not account for this.

Exec=protontricks-launch --appid 3847140856 "/home/sewer/Desktop/Reloaded-II - Sonic Heroes/Reloaded-II.exe"

Because the command was not ran in a shell, ~/.bashrc was not being sourced; so the alias would not work for Flatpak users. Installs from the updated installer now create a shortcut that uses bash to invoke the command:

Exec=bash -ic 'protontricks-launch --appid 3847140856 "/home/sewer/Desktop/Reloaded-II - Sonic Heroes/Reloaded-II.exe"'

This should cause ~/.bashrc to be sourced; and hopefully the alias to work.

Note: Normally running a specific shell is not the best practice, however the whole installer itself is a hack and bash is ubiquitous enough that I can't name a distro that doesn't ship it out of the box.

Improved: Flickering on xwayland

Client side decorations (window glow) has been disabled by default on Linux; this reduces the amount of flicker encountered when running the application via Wine on Xwayland.

It also helps maximize screen real estate, the invisible border should no longer look 'weird' in tiling window managers.

Fixed: Auto Update Working Directory

Previously if you moved a game, you would need to move both the EXE Path and Working Directory in the Edit Application menu. This caused a lot of issues as users would not notice, and then get non-bootable games.

In this update, I've made the Working Directory adjust alongside the EXE Path. This preserves the relative path, in other words, if your working directory is 2 folders up, then the new working directory will also be 2 folders up.

[Silhygames]

It seems like updating within the client fails 100% of the time, NET 9 installed or not. Did something happened between testing and deployment?

[Sewer56]

Not to my awareness, an update error that's not related to failure to install runtime is highly unusual.
I'm guessing the error is in the inner, AggregateException

[Sewer56]

1.28.4: Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

• @dreamsyntax added a confirmation dialog for mod deletes
• @dreamsyntax sanitized the Application name when creating a shortcut, which should fix making shortcuts for Metaphor.
• And just in case I (Sewer) sanitized the path for Proton shortcuts.
• If the installer fails to create a shortcut on Linux, it will hint to the user that their protontricks permissions may be incorrect.

[Sewer56]

1.28.5: More Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

• @dreamsyntax added a fallback to C:/Reloaded if the user uses OneDrive for their desktop.
• @dreamsyntax updated the code to download Visual C++ 2022 instead of 2019, if missing.
• I (Sewer) extended the fallback to C:/Reloaded to also apply if the user has non-ASCII characters as that causes problems with some games.
• Fixed an accidental breaking change from yesterday that caused Proton shortcuts to not be correctly placed.

[Sewer56]

1.28.6: Path/Location Warnings & Minor Theme Adjustment

• @dreamsyntax added warnings for when Reloaded and/or the Mods folder are placed in OneDrive, or are placed in a special path.

OneDrive you want to avoid for performance reasons.
Special paths you want to avoid because some games don't support them well. Some games may fail to load custom assets out of the mod folders; Reloaded now warns about this indiscriminately.

• @dreamsyntax added a warning for when a game is places in a path with a special folder.

Same as above. Sometimes people download old games through 'mysterious ways', place them in a special location and try to mod them before trying even an unmodded game. This way they'll hopefully know that the path may be a problem.

• @dreamsyntax made a small adjustment on the UI colours.

Before:

After:

In the interest of accessibility, and people using monitors with interesting contrast ratios; the following adjustment above was made.
The Reloaded theme was originally made on a cheap TN panel; however for some IPS displays and beyond, this change makes a lot of sense.