This update contains fixes and enhancements since the 2.3.1 release.
Major changes:
- Added a native OpenGL ES rendering backend.
- Fixed a crash triggered by entering/leaving levels several times.
- Fixed a bug where radar dishes would forget how to rotate if the renderer was restarted (e.g. if the Screen settings were changed while in a level).
- Fixed a bug where cutscenes did not correctly preserve the world state, and could cause some buildings to change team ownership. (e.g. on Temple, the Spam cubes could be assigned the wrong team and be attacked by the red Darwinians)
- Now supports a new NVIDIA driver feature, the DXGI present path for Vulkan/OpenGL. Should greatly improve frame smoothness and eliminate stutters.
- Reduced stutter caused by one-off long frames.
- Reworked some of the water avoidance behavior. There were some bugs in how the water avoidance decisions were made, which caused Darwinians to sometimes become confused and just stand still after leaving water.
- When Darwinians or Squads are in water, instead of dying immediately after 10 consecutive seconds, they start to take damage over time.
- Fixed a bug where Darwinians would clip through the landscape when coming out of water, and then suddenly pop up above ground after several seconds.
- Fixed the floating-on-water animation to update every frame instead of every game tick.
- Worked around a bug in NVIDIA drivers older than 530, which caused some rendering glitches with VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library.
- Fixed some cases where AMD FSR 1.0 shaders would not compile correctly when targeting AMD GPUs.
Minor changes:
- Introduced timed expiration for cached pipelines and shaders.
- Fixed a failure to initialize OpenGL core renderer on Zink.
- Fixed a bug in the mouse cursor render using 16-bit float RGBA framebuffers.
- Fixed targeting reticles being shown for units behind the camera.
- Minimized clipping of game cursor below the landscape.
- Fixed input handling bugs when running at very low framerates.
- Many code cleanups to modernize the code base a bit.
- Tuned thread priorities for audio and worker threads.
- Improved performance of MiniAudio mixing.
- Several minor performance improvements.
- Updated contributing libraries (MoltenVK, ANGLE, SDL, MiniAudio, etc)
Known issues:
- macOS: On MacBook Pro 14"/16" with 120Hz displays (or in fact any Mac with > 60Hz displays) there is stuttering in full screen mode. This is caused by the "Direct-to-Display" feature in Metal, which cannot be opted out of. We have implemented a partial workaround to this problem, but there is still occasional render stuttering. Players can work around this by running the game in Windowed mode. We have an open bug with Apple about this problem and will continue to look for a better solution. You can work around this by running an application that keeps a hidden always-on-top window running (such as the gag app Notchmeister).
- Windows: Some applications (e.g. ReShade, Bandicam, Overwolf, RivaTuner Statistics Server, etc) may inject Vulkan layers into the game process, even if those applications are installed but not actually running. Some of these layers are known to cause occasional crashes when using the Vulkan renderer. To work around this, either uninstall those applications or use a different renderer in the Screen preferences (OpenGL or Direct3D 11).
- Windows: You may experience crashes on Intel graphics drivers with the Vulkan renderer. The cause of these crashes isn't known yet.
- Windows: There is a bug in the AMD graphics drivers that causes the Vulkan extension VK_EXT_full_screen_exclusive to be enabled in "application controlled" mode when not requested. This causes unexpected Vulkan error codes to be reported when alt-tabbing out of full screen mode. AMD fixed this issue in driver version 23.5.2.