• 32-bit rendering effects! Shiny gold, glowing fireballs and tracers, etc.
• Much-improved player interface with adaptable pie menus. All relevant commands just two buttonpresses away!
• 32-bit video mode – no more palette corruption problems.
• Enemy spawns are now data driven… Modders: fight against your own creations, just look in Activities.ini
• Memory leaks massively reduced, can play long games without RAM being eaten, and overall memory footprint reduced.
• Several crash bugs gone and other glitchfixes

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):

• No more crashes due to corrupt collision map Nope, still have these.. were introduced with the new optimizations.. sorry. Will work on them.
• No more crashes due to out of bounds of the scene (digging off the bottom etc)
• No more crashes due to unknown materials… defaults gracefully to a safe material instead
• Far more optimized version which runs much faster. We profiled the code and nailed a few hotspots which were slowing down things, especially on larger maps. This is what took a bit longer to do than the other fixes.
• Mouse jerkyness completely fixed.. silly bug
• Mouse interface improved.. no more tedious double clicking!
• Many more small fixes and improvements

Enjoy!