Spring is in the air, warm winds are blowing in, and a new release of Unvanquished has arrived. What’s new in this release? Plenty!

For our renderer, we now have auto-softening for all sprites, so that all particles now take advantage of the soft particle feature without having to explicitly call it. In addition to further refactoring of vertex shaders and deforms, as well as the removal of a load of old, non-functional renderer code, we now have a new building effect for human structures, showing them assembling piece by piece. We’ve updated our version of libRocket, and have fixed several bugs from our issue tracker, including a fix that should hopefully help those that can’t get server lists on Windows.

Gameplay-wise, we’ve totally reworked the radar system we inherited, removing the old 2D sprites and substituting it with our beacon system. Objects of interest, such as detected enemies, are marked with beacons that will fade in and out of view as appropriate. Hovering your crosshairs over the beacon will highlight it and provide some useful information, such as the distance to the target (in meters) and what sort of equipment or alien form it has. Beyond that, dretches can no longer attack turrets, momentum gains now depend on the number of players present, and spiker trigger conditions have improved.

Here’s the list of commits: