Hello everyone.
First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of maintenance on this game in the past few months. I had personal problems and couldn't get the right amount of time and energy to do much productive work. I hope it's all settled now and I can resume my usual activity.I have received lots of bug reports lately but didn't respond to any. Again, I'm sorry for this.
I said on the last update that some compatibilities may break, and they indeed broke. From what I could gather, the game isn't working anymore on older generations of Intel HD Graphics processors. Even though HD4000 and below are not oficially supported, as per the minimum requirements page, the game did run on those previously and stopped with the last update. I'd like to restore that, if possible.
However, it isn't possible. At least not in the current state of the game.
Slipstream was programmed in Java, and that has always been kind of a liability for the game. When I started the project, it was intended to be a mobile game (where using java makes more sense), and as it transformed into a PC game I never had a chance or really needed to rewrite it. LibGDX performs very well on PC, is cross-platform and had everything I needed to complete the project.
However, after release, the weaknesses of the Java dependency became more apparent. It is very portable across PC platforms, but it's PC-only (that's why Slipstream was never released on consoles), it requires a huge runtime package to be shipped with the game and has an gigantic dependency chain: my code uses libgdx, libgdx uses lwjgl, lwjgl uses glfw and a bunch of other C/C++ libs. If any of those parts breaks compatibility, all the others break too.
For all those reasons, I've decided to port Slipstream to a new software platform. This will give me more control over the code, hopefully less problems and more stability. I haven't made a definitive choice yet, but the more likely candidate is FNA. It's been used in lots of succesful games, proven its quality and stability, and is similar enough to the current Slipstream code to make the job of porting not too hard.
That will hopefully fix the current issues and maybe other bugs along the way. But it will also take a while, a couple of months at least. If the game doesn't run on your PC after the last update, there isn't much I can do in the short-term, but I will work on a definitive long term solution.
Finally, if you have issues with the game on officially supported hardware (Intel HD 5000 and above, any Nvidia/AMD GPU with OpenGL 3.3+ support), please send me an email detailing the problem. If you sent me an email in the last 3 or 4 months and I didn't reply, please send another.
TL; DR:
Thanks, see you soon.
PS: I'm sorry for not being very active on the forums. I have a slight anxiety problem and reading too much stuff about this game makes me very nervous. I'm always available to talk on twitter or e-mail.