Planetary Annihilation Inc continue to make big improvements to Planetary Annihilation: TITANS, the massive-scale RTS that has Linux support.

The short version of what's new in 112882-pte:

First pass of new and improved translations

SEA servers planned

Improved AI

Balance changes

Improved stability and Coherent UI update

The Coherent UI update is one Linux users have been waiting on for some time, which the PA devs say "may improve rendering on Linux". Historically, the UI system has had some major issues for Intel and AMD GPU users on Linux (NVIDIA has been great).

I tested the update, which now has a bit of an issue with it spawning a ton of extra windows behind the game, which I assume are supposed to be hidden (I've reported this to them). Testing on an Intel notebook too with Mesa 13.3.3, sadly the UI is still quite buggy so they have improvements left to do. I don't have an AMD GPU to test if it's any better there yet.

Speaking about the UI issues with Coherent, the PA devs said this to me:

Hope to have a fix for the extra windows soon (otherwise may have to keep Linux on the Coherent UI 2.5.8 release for a while longer).



Those are the historically hidden CoherentUI_Host windows for every UI panel / view in game (there are 28+ in live game!). Being based on Chromium, Coherent UI is a multi-process architecture using shared memory for communication between views and the engine (unlike Coherent GT).



There is one major issue with the Coherent UI 2.6.2 / Chromium 40 based release and once resolved we will be upgrading modern to 2.6.x (legacy will stay pinned to 2.5.x). We do lose software rendering and some web audio functionality (replaced by audio modding) with the 2.6.x release. At that point we'll take another pass at Mesa.



The Coherent UI updates are a stop gap while we continue the engine, UI, modding and web framework changes required for Coherent GT and eventually GameFace: https://coherent-labs.com/products/coherent-gameface/

For those who don't play online, the upgraded AI is always nice to see. With their changes it will now be better at naval and air attacks, along with making it more efficient at processing info and so it should be quite menacing.

The latest PTE (Public Test Environment) build can be tested out by anyone who owns the game. To do so, right click on the game in your Steam library, go to Properties and select it from the dropdown:

Don't own it yet? Find it on Humble Store and Steam.