I'm announcing hereby the first (and hopefully last) release candidate for Spring 0.81.

Changes since the 0.80.5.2 bugfix release include:

Engine / Simulation:

• Builders are now smart enough to to reclaim features that block their buildsite, which weren't there when they started moving to it
• Fixed issues with features with 0 metal and 0 energy
• Fixed crashes / desyncs when using area orders with a large radius
• Hold position doesn't imply "don't turn" anymore, and units with small firing arcs in general behave a lot better in this case.
• Units on hold position now don't get confused by nearby invalid targets
• Smooth ground mesh for better aircraft behaviour (unit tag: useSmoothMesh)
• Wind fixed to stay in between map boundaries
• Momentum isn't conserved anymore in unit-unit collisions
• Impulses decay every frame instead of every slow update
• Kamikaze units now do a visibility and 3d distance check
• Fixed ships were able to 'climb' cliffs
• Fixed multiple issues with pathmap updates after terraforms

Engine / Rendering, UI:

• Changed default binds of forcestart, singlestep, debug to Alt+f, Alt+o, Alt+b
• Non-reclaimable features show up as red squares now when placing a building
• Out-of-LOS features don't show up anymore when placing a building
• Fixed icons not rendering properly when distance-to-ground method was used
• Better mipmap handling on SMF maps
• Fixed specular lighting calculation on SM3 maps
• Fixed "/shadows" command on SM3 maps
• Fixed SM3 map holes
• Fixed "/wiremap 0|1" (argument was inversed)
• Lots of other drawing fixes
• Far-textures fixed
• Load-screens preserve aspect ratio
• Added checks for insufficent gfx cards
• Added new shadow rendering option ("/shadows 2"): it disables terrain rendering in the shadow pass, which gives a huge performance increase
• Changed BumpWaterReflection values: 0 = disable; 1 = enable (no terrain); 2 = enable (with terrain - was '1' before)
• Fixed occasional hang when word wrapping text
• S3O transparency is now supported even with AdvUnitShading disabled

Engine / Lua:

• Added AllowFeatureBuildStep call-in to included gadget handler
• Fixed typos in certain featuredefs.lua, weapondefs.lua that mutilated error messages
• Spring.Rehost fixed on Win32 when spaces in install path
• Added support for modifying CTAAirMoveType (gunships)
• Add GetUnitMoveTypeData(unitID) call-in, returns a table
• Fixed Spring.SetFeatureDirection

Engine / System:

• Fixed incorrect startpositions in skirmish games
• Proper handling of mod dependencies
• MAN pages support (Linux)
• Support for external debug symbols (Linux)
• Fixed an issue with using the root of a drive as data directory
• Use less memory when reading from 7z archives
• Improved handling of spectators in case of sim slowdown and desync

AIs:

• E323AI: CPU performance improvements & bug fixes
• KAIK: better D-Gun handling

Thanks everyone for their contributions.


Download links:

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

We will put these links on the download page once the release is live on the lobby server.


Please, test this release candidate and report any bugs you may find (in particular regressions since 0.80.5.2!) on mantis. If no blocking issues are reported, we will officially release this sometime next week. (after the 25th of January)

To test this release on the main/official lobby server, refer to the instructions in this post.


Have fun!

Figured this was coming with all the recent updates to changelog. Great work everyone.

OMG I LOVE THE WAY BUILDINGS CONSTRUCT NOW!

Was this on purpose or accident? I want this as an option over the old green nano frame!

I don't have a capable machine to test, what changed about buildings construction?

http://www.smoth.net/home/spring/spring.SWF

take a gander.

That's awesome!

Nice job, engine peoples!

@Cool build gfx: That is, indeed, very cool. Kudos again, engine team! Being able to choose between different methods for individual units would be even more awesome, as would being able to define a CEG to appear along the edges where the unit is building.

I declare thsi an effective alternative to youtube videos to avoid epic codec self pwnage

Added support for modifying CTAAirMoveType (gunships)

can u elaborate on this?

if you want to test this version on the main/official lobby server, you have to make your lobby ignore the servers required version:

For SpringLobby, make sure springlobby is not running and then edit the config file:
linux: ~/.springlobby/springlobby.conf
Windows (in general): %appdata\.springlobby\springlobby.conf
Windows XP: c:\docs & Settings\username\app data\springlobby\springlobby.conf
Windows vista/win7: c:\users\username\app data\roaming\.springlobby\springlobby.conf
from this:

to this:


For TASClient: Ctrl+Shift+F6

@Gota:
check git commit logs of baczek

edit: added SL win cfg paths
edit2: added TASClient description
edit3: fixed typo

not in the changelog so it's probably a bug :)

I would guess the bottommost of these three commands is meant (I was pointed to them recently).

I have absolutely no idea though, and this is just wild speculation on my side (I'm probably misunderstanding).

Edit: um - totally forgot to say cool to see things continue to move forwards! Totally giving this a spin :).

2nd Edit: add quote to clarify what I'm referring to...

Not conserving momentum on the collision?

Isnt it possible to simply do the conservation of momentum + conservation of energy calculation? IMHO its not all that hard and CPU intensive.

Realistically, momentum should not be conserved in this case, since the ground below the units would provide a big momentum-sink. These units have their feet grounded. This probably works better for the intended goal of reducing the number of collisions in a big chain than depleting the energy instead of the momentum - inelastic collisions would probably just result in a big unit Katamari.

Issues in this release

-placing a building near buildings often fails
-wind is 20% more efficient
-pathfinder still rarely causes desyncs(at least when called from lua)

Neither is the loading pic aspect ratio fix but it is there... neither was my fireplatform stuff... and so on.

Changelog tends to get updated all at once in multiple commits just before release. Obviously its only a brief summary of all of the preceding git log, plenty of changes are not in it, especially minor ones.

this one is not minor it changes the default TA style building

I made packages available for this release candidate to ease testing on my usual testing repository:

http://alioth.debian.org/~mammadori-gue ... /s/spring/

or
deb http://alioth.debian.org/~mammadori-guest/ sid main