Upgrade from Pure Faction to Dash Faction
Thanks for using Pure Faction!
- Pure Faction is no longer being developed, and no further updates are planned.
Why did you get a notice than a Pure Faction update was available?
- The Pure Faction development team highly recommends you upgrade to using Dash Faction.
- Additional information explaining the benefits of using Dash Faction is listed below, but if you're ready to upgrade now, you can find the installation instructions for Dash Faction here:
- Dash Faction Installation Guide
Why Dash Faction?
Dash Faction is an open source Red Faction patch developed by rafalh. It's been in active development since 2016, and is all around the most fully featured Red Faction patch ever made.
Why should you switch to Dash Faction instead of continue using Pure Faction?
In addition to receiving active updates, Dash Faction offers far more bug fixes and useful features than Pure Faction, and just generally provides a better experience.
The key benefits of Dash Faction as opposed to Pure Faction are as follows:
In general:
- Dash Faction offers many additional graphics options such as anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, true color textures, high resolution and sharp HUD elements, and a higher FPS cap. - Dash Faction has countless additional performance optimizations and fixes for bugs that cause performance issues with the game. - Dash Faction offers fixes for countless other miscellaneous bugs and security issues. - Dash Faction runs properly on all known modern hardware/Operating System configurations, while Pure Faction is known to be incompatible with some versions of Windows 10. - Dash Faction offers additional features such as configurable camera FOV, enhanced lighting, enhanced mouse input, and EAX sound. - Aside from some minor items (listed in the section below), Dash Faction maintains all important functionality Pure Faction has - such as the level autodownloader, widescreen support, hardware compatibility fixes, and multiplayer anticheat.
For single player:
- Some sequences in the RF official single player campaign won't work properly unless you're using Dash Faction - for example, on Pure Faction (and official versions of the game), the submarine after the Geothermal Power Plant is likely to explode when you try to release it from the crane. - Cutscenes don't play properly unless you're using Dash Faction. On Pure Faction (and official versions of the game), audio often becomes out of sync with animations, resulting in ugly behaviour in cutscenes. Additionally, Dash Faction gives you the option to press a button to skip cutscenes you don't wish to watch. - While Pure Faction does support widescreen resolutions, it was designed strictly for multiplayer. This means single player-specific HUD elements like radio messages don't work properly when using widescreen resolutions. Dash Faction has no such issues - both single player and multiplayer are fully supported at any resolution.
For multiplayer:
- Many newer multiplayer maps won't function correctly on Pure Faction, but have no such problems on Dash Faction. If you're using Pure Faction, you may encounter game crashes or other strange behaviour.
For server hosts:
- Dash Faction servers by default run at an update rate (tick rate) almost 3x higher than Pure Faction, plus the option to go even higher if you choose. - Dash Faction offers numerous additional configurable options for servers such as hitsounds, MOTD, map voting, setting player spawn weapon, and allowing players to use quicksave/quickload (for run map servers).
For level designers:
- Dash Faction's level editor fixes countless bugs that result in crashes and unpredictible behaviour. - Dash Faction's level editor is fully compatible with all screen resolutions and aspect ratios, plus features additional useful hotkeys and options to make level design more streamlined.
For players, Dash Faction does not have a visual in-game menu like PF's F1 menu as of now. All of the important functions in PF's F1 menu are accessible by other means, however. For dedicated server hosts, Dash Faction's launcher does not have a visual server configuration tool like PF's launcher. Dash Faction dedicated servers do offer far more customization options than PF, but they must be configured in the dedicated_server.txt file rather than via a visual interface in the launcher.