Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 6

Please remember that matchmaking will take a bit longer as users need to update before they can play.

Troubleshooting

Head over to our discord for more help: https://slippi.gg/discord in the #dolphin-beta-support channel

Changes

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fixes minor bugs with match reporting

Contributors

@JLaferri

Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 5

Please remember that matchmaking will take a bit longer as users need to update before they can play.

Troubleshooting

Head over to our discord for more help: https://slippi.gg/discord in the #dolphin-beta-support channel

Changes

New Features ✨

• Ledge Grab Limit of 45 now applies during timeouts
  • If the game goes to time and exactly one player has exceeded 45 ledge grabs, the player over the limit loses and is shown a FAILURE game end screen. The winning player will see a SUCCESS game end screen.
  • If both or neither player exceed the ledge grab limit, normal timeout rules will apply and both players will see TIME game end screen.
  • This screen will display in Ranked, Unranked, and Direct. If you are using Direct to play a tournament that doesn't use LGL or uses a different value, simply ignore the game end screen and/or check ledge grabs in the launcher replay stats.

Contributors

@JLaferri

Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 4

Troubleshooting

Head over to our discord for more help: https://slippi.gg/discord in the #dolphin-beta-support channel

Changes

New Features ✨

The following changes are not our own but rather from upstream Dolphin (#16). You can read more at the excellent Dolphin Blog Posts: Aug, Sept, Oct 2023 and Nov, Dec 2023, and Jan 2024

• Dark Mode on Windows
• Custom Aspect Ratios
• SDL Controller API support on Linux

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fix launching AppImage on non-Ubuntu 22.04 distros (#16)
• Hopefully that one bug for standard controllers nope

Notices

• As mentioned in the latest Dolphin Blog, NVIDIA users may want to avoid the Direct3D 11 video backend when using the latest drivers.
• I forgot about a little reordering in the Dolphin Aspect Ratio settings. you will need to revert that setting to 73:60 manually. sorry

Contributors

The Dolphin Dev Team <3
@NikhilNarayana
@ryanmcgrath
@vladfi1

Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 3

Troubleshooting

For further help, head over to our discord: https://slippi.gg/discord in the #dolphin-beta-support channel

Known Issues (no change since beta 2)

• Using standard controller will sometimes cause FPS to drop considerably. We have reproduced this and are working on debugging
• The Linux AppImage doesn't work on other distros or newer versions of Ubuntu due to packaging issues. Users will need to compile themselves for now
• Audio latency might be higher

Changes

New Features ✨

• Update to UCF 0.84 (d463645)

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Possible fix for rare failed match reports (project-slippi/slippi-rust-extensions#16)

Contributors

@JLaferri
@ryanmcgrath

Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 2

Troubleshooting

For further help, head over to our discord: https://slippi.gg/discord in the #dolphin-beta-support channel

Known Issues

• Using standard controller will sometimes cause FPS to drop considerably. We have reproduced this and are working on debugging
• The Linux AppImage doesn't work on other distros or newer versions of Ubuntu due to packaging issues. Users will need to compile themselves for now
• Audio latency might be higher, hopefully this release brings us closer in line to Ishiiruka but there might still be some discrepancy

Changes

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fix replay writing and rare netplay stalls (6907106)

Other changes 🛠

• Bring timing variance down to 8 to match Ishiiruka (5c7502f)
  • This should improve audio latency

Version 4.0.0 - Mainline Beta 1

Welcome to the first release of the Mainline Slippi Dolphin client. This has been in the works for...far too long, but we're excited to finally provide a netplay beta to all of you.

I'd like to start this off with a huge shout out to @r2dliu for his incredible effort to make this a reality, we would not be here without him and I'm ever grateful.

This beta is opt-in via the Slippi Launcher for now. Head to the Launcher Settings > Netplay to opt-in. Eventually we will likely want to migrate everyone to the new version but we want to take some time to hammer out issues. Please try it and report any problems in the Slippi Discord's dolphin-beta-support forum.

We are currently only releasing a netplay beta because playback requires a lot more work before it is ready.

Updated OS Requirements

• Windows 10 or newer
• macOS Catalina (10.15) Big Sur (11.0) or newer
• Ubuntu 22.04 or newer and the following packages
  • libfuse2
  • qt6-qpa-plugins

Motivations (TL;DR)

Migrating to base our fork of Dolphin off Mainline Dolphin is a major change that has taken over 3 years, so why are we doing this?
Faster Melee's fork of Ishiiruka (a fork of Dolphin) is based off a very old version of Dolphin so we'll be gaining a lot of improvements. Below is a short list of just some of the improvements.

• Improved shader generation with Ubershaders
• Improved controller support on all platforms
• Better support for newer hardware
• Faster frame presentation with Hybrid XFB and Immediate Presentation
• Improved performance metrics
• 6+ years of improvements to the core of the emulator
• Easier to keep up with the changes made to Dolphin upstream

Motivations (but longer)

The Melee community has been using the Ishiiruka fork of Dolphin as our basis since the Faster Melee 5.4 days. Ishiiruka was created by Tino with the goal of ensuring legacy devices were still supported and with a focus [on] gaming experience and speed. One of the biggest features that only Ishiiruka provided was asynchronous shader compilation, which we have greatly benefited from over the years since it almost entirely eliminates stalls due to shader compilation. At the time these were very beneficial to the community, but we've lagged behind Mainline Dolphin for too long now and are seeing the age of this build take its toll.

With this migration to Mainline, we are bringing in every change Dolphin has had since ~2017. That's a lot of changes including a new UI, new/updated Video Backends, Improved Shader Generation, and more! In terms of performance on a known good setup, we expect the input lag to be similar or better than Ishiiruka and performance should be notably better for macOS and Linux users.

If you'd like to know what's new with the version of Dolphin this is based on, check out the Dolphin blog posts since ~2017, though some things did get merged into Ishiiruka every so often and we backported a few changes when needed. I had a fun time re-reading all of them to remind myself of what has changed so I'll link posts i found particularly interesting or notable below.

Ubershaders (shader generation improvements)

Removing Fractional Internal Resolutions

Hybrid XFB (for those interested in input latency changes)

Legend of Dolphin (Qt UI Announcement)

Deflicker Fix

Discord Rich Presence

MoltenVK Support (we did backport this one, thanks to knux)

Netplay Code Syncing (i'm sure those of you that play other games on Dolphin appreciate this one; this was also done by our very own UnclePunch!)

Standard Controller Configuration Revamp

Video Backend Unification

RVZ Support (this won't be supported in the Slippi Launcher until we are fully on Mainline)

Removing Windows 7 Support (Slippi has not officially supported Windows 7 in any capacity since 2021, but this blog post is a nice reminder of how resilient the OS and its users are)

Graphics Mods

macOS Metal Backend (one of the biggest performance gains for all macOS users)

SDL2 Input Support (this greatly improves input support for odd controllers)

Improved FPS display

FrameTime/VBlank Analyzer + Graph (this has been very helpful when testing performance)

thanks for reading