Release Message
Yeah, it's that time of the year again which trees in the forest fear so much. Santa is coming and he is bringing a new version of Spring, equipped with a tougher christmas tree stand and shiny new bells and whistles.
And perhaps, if you have been a really good boy this year, it might even be less buggy for you than 84.0.

Kudos
Again, thanks everyone for your contributions!
This time, very big kudos go to B. Turner (the original author of the ROAM implementation) and Beherith (for integrating it into Spring).

Download links:

• Windows installer
• Windows portable
• Source (tar.lzma)
• Source (tar.gz)
• MacOSX

Major changes:

• ROAM \o/ - new much faster terrain rendering
• QTPFS (disabled by default) - new pathfinding system

Full changelog here.

Wow awesome changes, can't wait to try it!

Looks like a great release, will do some testing this weekend. I'm really curious to see how the rendering changes affect the open-source radeon driver.

P.S. How do you enable QTPFS ?

I look forward to seing the changes. Good work and thanks for the christmas gift.

However, one question:


Why? There are many gadgets and widgets that use that tag, as well as selectkeys. I'm just curious as to why it was necessary to remove that tag.

mods need to do it in http://springrts.com/wiki/Modrules.lua

iscommander:
Dont know excactly why it was removed but since for the engine, the commander has no special meaning (game ends, com ends, start unit spawning is all done by game lua) I guess that was the reason to remove it.
For widgets you can do something like isCommander == canManualFire and isBuilder
(I would guess only ba & xta really use that anyway?)

http://i44.tinypic.com/wrbp.png
Sweet, I don't think there will be pathing complaints if it is as good as it seems from the little I have tested it.
(Taken with pathFinderSystem = 1(true/enabled?))

Edit: Seems like performance on low end ATI graphics(only tested in windows so far) improved, hard to say definitely without a benchmark or playing real games though.

From what I read the old system got improved as well(especially getting stuck at corners)

/edit
some pathing test:
http://www.abload.de/img/amazeing_largef8r4q.gif (1,4 mb)
36 yellow-head dudes going one direction, 18 red-head dudes going other direction. (tested with 84.0 too and it kind of worked there too, so does not really prove an improvement. still found it impressive that it did not clog up, tbh did not expect that.)
/edit2
ok, in ba it does not always work that nicely.

Wouldn't that also select the decoy?

Awesome!

This release needs a subtitle!
I propose: The Wayfarer!

...or That Weirdo in the Red Suit works too, I guess

Use custom params

Super! Thanks to all devs! My big kudos are going to zerver! Thank you for MT bugfixes! I like MT so much, but it was unplayable on linux in 84 version. I hope this time it will be much stable!

I am tested already 85 spring under windows and I always got 60 FPS. Is FPS restricted to 60 now? Values bigger than 60 does not give any benefits? Previously I got 218 FPS and I like to see how much FPS my computer can rich)))

Thanks devs! This should be epic :D

Jamerlan: disable vsync in spring.

great! Thanks to the devs!

... but please a mac app soon!

it would be to painful to go back to virtualization after few weeks of intense joy with the .84 mac app.

It sounds like only one sound can be played at a time through the voice channel in Spring.PlaySoundFile, the new sound cuts off any currently playing one. Is this intentional? If it intentional I'll have to change the channel because I think it sounds worse than it did previously.

the new pathfinding system is enabled by games ? or anyone can use the pathfinding he wants ?

By games in modrules.lua afaik

nice work

Great work devs, good to see another release :D

wooo just got my new PC setup today, time to check my FPS :)

Oh dear god the fps. IT IS AMAZING!
Thanks jK for making the roam bit so awesome.