Forza Horizon 1: ReImagined

Online

• Community servers, and a Servers page in the launcher (#587): the launcher has a new Servers page. It lists the public server, the community servers it vouches for, This PC and any address you add, each with its players and ping, and picking one sets Settings > Online for you. The first community server is US East (reimagined-us-east.playit.plus:1819), run by a volunteer for players in the Americas. Community servers keep their own friends lists and leaderboards; the official leaderboards stay on the public server. To get your own server listed, see Getting listed.
• Volunteer relays (#516): when two players can’t reach each other directly, the game can now send their traffic through a volunteer relay the server offers, closer to them than the public server.
• A Club channel in chat (#145): if you’re in a car club, Up/Down in the Chat tab also stops at “Club TAG”, for the club members online. Answers to commands such as /club stay in the chat log.
• Online photo, to try (#576): Online photo (Online > Horizon World, off by default) adds ONLINE PHOTO to the pause menu in Horizon World free roam and online lobbies, with the game’s own photo mode camera.

Smoother

• Fewer stutters on your first drives (#614, #276): the shader prebuild now covers the whole map, more cars, races, the paint shop and online play, plus the game’s own D3D library shaders. In our test drive, the pipelines built during play went from 57 to 6. Run Prebuild shaders again after updating to get the new list.
• Hitches when cars come into view or a race starts (#536): their first resolve readbacks no longer wait for the GPU, and the buffers those readbacks use are reused instead of being made and freed mid-frame. If you still see pairs of slow frames on an AMD card, vulkan_readback_reuse_buffers = false in forza.toml brings back the old behaviour, so you can compare and tell us on #536.

Fixes

• The engine sound no longer breaks up (thanks to zer0ducksgiven): a short silence at almost every join of the engine sound’s waves made the note stutter.
• Benchmark and 1000 Club crashes after the title screen (#540, #543), on Title Update 4.
• A line down the bonnet’s centre on dirty cars is gone (#164).
• The first paint job’s preview is no longer black on a new install (#632): the picture the storefront and Load Design show was taken before the car had been drawn.
• Setup > Build on Windows without Visual Studio no longer stops while downloading the Windows SDK when Developer Mode is off (“A required privilege is not held by the client”).
• DLC car packs with deep folders no longer stop Play and the shader prebuild on Windows (#586).
• A crash when closing the game (#598), from the focus-loss pause below.
• forza.log keeps one session per file, as forza.log and forza.previous.log, and stops at 50 MB (#609). Logs of almost 500 MB were too big to attach.
• Cars your game doesn’t have show as the placeholder car as before, and forza.log now names them (#567).

New settings

• Motion blur (Display > Picture, and the pause menu’s Graphics screen; on by default) (#588).
• Pause when the window loses focus and Pause when the controller disconnects (Controls; both off by default) (#328).
• Xbox trigger vibration (Controls) now follows the engine, ABS and tire slip, not only how hard you press the triggers.
• Add to Steam (About, Linux): adds the launcher to Steam with its artwork.

If you are on 0.1.9 or newer, the launcher offers this update by itself (About > Launcher updates). Then rebuild the game once with Setup > Build (a few minutes) to get the game-side changes. Help: Discord.