We’re proud of this one – enjoy!
We have figured out how to keep the entire engine at 8 bits per pixel internally (for manageable memory footprint), while rendering the last step of each frame in 32 bits per pixel to your screen. This allows us to do some nice glow effects in-game, and will eliminate any “crazy color” palette problems that some have experienced with the old 8bpp video mode builds.
You will still be able to turn off the effects and even go back to 8bpp mode in the next build, in case this slows down the game on your machine. We haven’t noticed a huge hit to performance though, so I think it’s well worth it for the extra eye candy.
Also, we’ve been profiling the memory allocations and have managed to plug the vast majority of the memory leaks present in previous builds. This should make longer games more feasible without CC slowly eating all your RAM.
Just wait for the rocket gib/explosion effects coming soon!
… at least not collision map-related ones 😉
After reworking the way movable objects clean up the map, we ran several hours of stress testing of the engine on all the available machines here at DRL HQ:
No crashes or hiccups.
Also threw in a frag counter due to popular demand!
As Linus Torvalds used to say:
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”
Yes, B15 may have been a little rushed out the door. But we listened to the issues, and here is the fix to most many of them (plus more):
Enjoy!