There is a new game in Marvel Realm with this update. Rush Fare has joined the Breakless Ride category. Rushfare is available through early access to Sonorous Pro members at this time.
Alongside it, we have added a new way to communicate in online game rooms, expanded the suite's speech settings, and made a number of changes to navigation, settings, online sessions, and the updater.
Rush Fare Joins Breakless Ride
Rush Fare is the newest game in the Breakless Ride category and is available with this update.
We will leave the rest for you to discover in the game rather than explain everything here. If you are already familiar with Breakless Ride, you now have something new to try.
Send Voice Snippets in Online Rooms
Online game rooms now support short voice messages.
The feature is push-to-talk and completely optional. Select the microphone you want Marvel Realm to use from Sound settings, then hold F8 while you speak and release it when you are finished. A recording can be anywhere from half a second to 15 seconds long.
You can also choose whether your own voice messages should play back to you after you send them.
There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes to make this work without getting in the way of the game. Recording, uploading, downloading, and decoding voice messages are handled in the background so that gameplay can continue normally while a message is being processed.
Voice snippets from the same person will play in the order they were sent, and the recording feedback has been cleaned up as well. You should now get clearer indications when recording starts and stops, or when you need to wait before sending another message.
Muting somebody applies to voice messages too. Once a player is muted, both their text and voice messages are silenced immediately. If one of their recordings happens to be playing at the time, it will stop as well.
More Control Over Speech
Marvel Realm now has a dedicated Speech section in settings.
By default, you can let the suite use your currently active screen reader automatically. If you would rather use SAPI 5, you can select it directly and configure the voice, rate, volume, and pitch from within Marvel Realm.
There is also a new suite-wide way to quickly silence speech. Press either Control key to stop whatever Marvel Realm is currently speaking. If a menu hint is playing, that will be stopped too.
It is a small change, but one that should make moving quickly through menus considerably less annoying.
Community and Social Return You Where They Should
F5 and F6 have had some navigation problems when Community or Social were opened from deeper menus or during a game.
Those paths have been reworked.
Closing Community or Social should now reliably return you to the menu or game you came from, even when you have moved through several screens inside them. We have also fixed cases where an old pause menu could be left hanging around after returning to the game.
Games Can Now Have Their Own Settings
Marvel Realm's settings system can now properly support preferences belonging to individual games.
This means a game can have its own configurable options without those options becoming part of the suite's global settings. Game settings can also be restored independently, so resetting one game's preferences does not mean resetting everything else.
Likewise, restoring Marvel Realm's global defaults will leave important data alone, including your sign-in information, current session, installation identity, and settings belonging to individual games.
This gives us considerably more room to add game-specific options in the future without crowding the main settings system.
Better Recovery When a Session Expires
We have also changed what happens when Marvel Realm discovers that your online session is no longer valid.
If this happens while a game is running, the suite will safely close the active game and take you directly to sign-in rather than allowing different parts of the client to start asking you to log in separately.
A race condition affecting simultaneous online requests has also been fixed. Under the wrong circumstances, responses from multiple requests could previously become associated with the wrong operation.
Client verification has received significant work in this update as well.
Early ARM Compatibility Work
This release includes a test implementation for running Marvel Realm on ARM-based Windows systems using Windows 11's x64 application emulation.
This is experimental compatibility work rather than a native ARM version of Marvel Realm, so we are treating it accordingly for now.
A More Reliable Updater
Finally, several problems in the central updater have been fixed.
The process of staging a downloaded update, applying it, and starting Marvel Realm again afterward should now behave more reliably, particularly in cases where the previous update process could fail during its final stages.
As always, if you run into something that does not behave as expected after updating, let us know.