We recently released another public alpha snapshot of 5.3, Alpha 4.1. A major highlight of this snapshot is work on new graphics rendering pipelines, including one based on the OpenGL library GLFW, and experimental support for OpenGL ES 2.0.

If you are upgrading to this build from a previous version, you must delete the Cache folder in your installation directory. There are changes to the format that will cause the game to crash unless it is regenerated. If you want to use the new renderer, go to Save/Preferences.ini in your installation directory and delete the VideoRenderers line. If you do this, or are performing a new installation, it should automatically default to GLFW if supported.

There is no macOS build of alpha 4.1, as we still need to fix a few bugs to use the new renderers on Catalina.

Changelog

  • New GLFW renderer pipeline.
  • 🐉Added Xwindow SDL2 support.
  • 🐉Tweak to remove dependency on ancient colour handling that actually slowed the game down, instead of giving it the intended performance.
  • Re-purposed GL Entrypoints to re-support ancient GL<1.5 Hardware, for native arcade hardware support.
  • 🐉Fix LLW to allow for set contexts.
  • 🐉Experimental GLES2 support from Dragons.
  • Add new Lua hook for GetRenderer now we have a choice.
  • 🐉Experimental HiDPI support.
  • Add the mascot art to the title screen menu on Soundwaves.
  • Soundwaves options menu includes a default timings menu with a numerical display of the timing values in each preset.
  • Tweaked lifebar in Soundwaves, including changing the "hot" (filled) color to a green/yellow due to concerns the previous "fire" color looked too close to red on certain displays.
  • Fix missing external SDL code.
  • Fix NaN crash on Actors.
  • Fix GLHandleARB mismatch.
  • Add better OpenGL handling for contexts on different systems.
  • 🐉Fix ImageCache forcing a D3D format causing unnecessary conversions in RageSurface.
  • Remove float based textures as they were unused.
  • Remove RageFormat PAL from the game as it’s been unsupported since 2007.
  • Fix Apple compiling with new pipeline.
  • Fix float errors in Gameloop.