Spring 93.x "high five"

[SpliFF]

So many complaints around here I feel some praise is in order.

Whatever it is that jK and others did recently with the low-end mesa/intel support it worked.

I've just tested Spring 93.0 on my laptop (intel i3 gfx, archlinux, mesa 9.1). I'm getting clear graphics, good fps, blob shadows and grass without any of the historic issues of texture corruption, floating units, disappearing UI, crashes and other bugs that have plagued Spring since forever.

I need to get some bigger games going to be 100% sure but on first impressions I'd say playable Spring on open-source drivers and low-end laptops has finally arrived.

Perhaps some of the credit is due to Mesa stabilising the new KMS (kernel mode setting) interface and improvements in xf86-video-intel and the i3 chip itself or a combination of everthing but however it happened I couldn't be happier!

Of all the improvements made to Spring in the last 3 years this one is king. It lets Spring games really go into spaces that commercial RTS don't, namely low-end laptops and really free systems without proprietry drivers (ie, Debian).

GG.

[Silentwings]

Agreed, lots of of good stuff has come in with 92&93!

[Jools]

A lot of small things (probably from developer point of view) have actually meant big improvements for the mods. For XTA I can think of the possibility to use different sounds for water and land explosions as one huge improvement. Maybe that came already in spring 91, but still.

Another big improvement in 93 is the UI improvement of showing a no-attack possible cursor when you cannot attack. I think the UI is one area where users want most to see improvement (after pathfinding of course, but as someone told me, it's not actually pathfinding that's the issue in 93, it's the fact that units get stuck on corners).

[Anarchid]

but as someone told me, it's not actually pathfinding that's the issue in 93, it's the fact that units get stuck on corners).

Actually 94 shows a lot of promise for that. I've run a test build two days ago and sent a hundred zk ravagers going in circles around TitanDuel.

I initially wanted to just have them cross the damn map, but then that wasn't enough so i sent them on circles as well.

Only two stucked during the whole ordeal. (they locked into a push-each-other pitfight where each one prevented the other from untangling).

[Silentwings]

Yeah 94.0 is massive improvement in terms of units getting stuck & the resulting pathing.

The other major bug from 93.0, of units not firing when clumped, is also fixed in 94.0 but you have to make sure your collision volumes are the right size. (The engine changed the way it calculates them and the default ones seem much larger now, meaning units aren't firing because of friendly fire worries when they are clumped.)

[Jools]

Yes, and also set avoidfriendly and avoidground to false (especially for D-Gun type weapons).