The changelog since release 105-1544 until release 105-1775, which happened in June 2023.

Caveats

  • Spring.GetSelectedUnits{Sorted,Counts} no longer returns the n inside the table, it’s now the 2nd return value from the function
  • LuaUI can receive attacker info in UnitDamaged and similar, when appropriate. Set them to nil in the widget handler (or just don’t pass them to widgets) if you don’t want this behaviour.
  • remove the deprecated Game.allowTeamColors entry that was always true.
  • PNG is now the default /screenshot format.
  • new Recoil icons and loadscreens.
  • Due to the introduction of skinning/bones (see below), the maximum number of pieces per model is limited by 254 pieces
  • unit shader changes required related to skinning and bones. This requires updates of code that calls vbo:ModelsVBO() such that you’d replace:
     layout (location = 5) in uint pieceIndex;

    with

    layout (location = 5) in uvec2 bonesInfo; // boneIDs, boneWeights
#define pieceIndex (bonesInfo.x & 0x000000FFu)

Features and fixes

Catching up performance

  • CPU usage reserved for drawing and minimum frames draw by second are now configurable via springsettings: MinSimDrawBalance which controls the minimum CPU fraction dedicated to drawing; more means more FPS but slower catch-up (defaults to 0.15) and MinDrawFPS which controls the minimum desired FPS below which it won’t go (defaults to 2).
  • fixed how this drawing/simulating proportion interacts with the “slow the game for laggers” feature.

Modelling

  • added skinning and bones. Not supported for .s3o or .3do, supported by .dae (the other formats supported by the engine are fairly uncommon and untested, but those that can carry bone information should work as well). No extra work needed, bones created by an industry standard tool (for example Blender) should work out of the box.
  • shader change is needed, see above in the caveats section.
  • allow instanced rendering without instance VBO attached. gl_InstanceID can be used to index into an SSBO or used to produce instance attributes algorithmically.
  • bump model pool from 2560 to 3840 and log when it gets exhausted
  • bump up 3do atlas size (4k^2)
  • change default MaxTextureAtlasSize{X,Y} springsettings from 2048 to 4096.
  • fix 3do shattered pieces rendering (no texture)
  • fix AMD / Windows issues with invalid “under-construction” model rendering
  • fix invalid asset checksum calculations

Terrain rendering

  • add the wupget:DrawShadowPassTransparent() → nil and wupget:DrawWaterPost() → nil callins
  • infotexture shaders (F1, F2 etc) are more tolerant to potato drivers
  • improved terrain shadow quality and visibility checks.
  • add /debugVisibility for debugging the visible quadfield quads (for engine devs, mostly useless otherwise)
  • add /debugShadowFrustum to draw the shadow frustum on the minimap (ditto; also beware, doesn’t exactly correspond to the actual camera frustum so probably doesn’t have much use outside shadows specifically due to minor bugs)
  • fix the overview camera not being centered in 2nd and subsequent games if the terrain is different
  • fix bump water and terrain rendering on Intel

Selecting units

  • add InGroup_N filter for selections, to select given control group. For example: Visible+_InGroup_1+_ClearSelection_SelectAll
  • add group select and group focus group subactions. Note that the previous bind X group N is equivalent to bind X group select N + bind X,X group focus N. The old group N still works.

Unit defs: weapon

  • add weaponAimAdjustPriority numerical tag to weapon (note, NOT weapon def! This is the table inside a unit def, where e.g. target categories are). This is a multiplier for the importance of picking targets in the direction the weapon is already aiming at. Defaults to 1.
  • and fastAutoRetargeting boolean tag to weapon. Makes the unit acquire a new target if its current ones dies (the tradeoff is the perf cost, and a buff if applies to existing units). Defaults to false (target acquisition check every 0.5s).

Unit heading

  • changed how unit rotation works. This should make cases like spiders pathing across near-vertical peaks preserve heading better
  • add Spring.Set{Unit,Feature}HeadingAndUpDir(thingID, heading, x, y, z) → nil, note that the previously existing Spring.SetUnitDirection only receives one vector so does not allow setting an object’s rotation unambiguously.

Pathing

  • TKPFS merged into the default HAPFS.
  • add a new modrule, system.pathFinderUpdateRateScale (default 1.0), to control pathfinder update rate. Note that it gets removed sometime after 1775.
  • the pathing overlay (F2) update rate increased x4.
  • engine line-move now tries to maintain relative unit position to some extent (so equivalent units don’t cross each other).
  • fix various pathing quality issues and improve performance.

Miscellaneous API changes

  • allow shallow recursion in Spring.TransferUnit (16 levels deep, same as for other callouts)
  • add Game.footprintScale, the footprint multiplier compared to defs
  • add Game.buildSquareSize, the building alignment grid size
  • add system.LuaAllocLimit modrule to control global Lua alloc limit, default 1536 (in megabytes)
  • Spring.GetPlayerInfo returns a 12th value, boolean isDesynced. Keep in mind the 11th will be nil if you opt out of the customkeys table (i.e. the new 12th value does NOT get “pushed back” to fill the “missing” spot)
  • add Spring.GetFeaturesInScreenRectangle(x1, y1, x2, z2) → {featureID, featureID, ...}, similar to the existing one for units
  • Spring.SetProjectileCEG now accepts numerical cegID in addition to CEG name
  • add Game.demoPlayName to get the filename of the running replay.
  • add 7th boolean param to Spring.MarkerErasePosition, which makes the command erase any marker when localOnly and the current player is spectating. This allows spectators to erase players markers which otherwise they can’t do outside of /clearmapmarks.
  • Spring.SetActiveCommand(nil) now cancels the command (previous method of -1 still works)
  • add StoreDefaultSettings springsetting, default false. If enabled, settings equal to their defaults will still be saved. This means that Spring.GetConfigInt et al does not need to do a nil check for the defaults, but also the defaults won’t get automatically updated if they change since they already have a concrete value.
  • reimplement Lua mem pools, controlled by the UseLuaMemPools springsettings.

Miscellaneous

  • added Tracy support for debugging.
  • default minimum sim speed changed from 0.3 to 0.1
  • add --list-[un]synced-commands flag to dump the command list when running the exe directly
  • fixed /iconsAsUI 1 leaking information about dead ghosted buildings.
  • fixed piece projectiles (debris flying off from exploding units), and weapon projectiles with collideFireBase set to true and no other collisionX set to false, failing to collide with units.

pr-downloader

  • improved performance of verifying if there is an update needed: it now takes ~0.25s on all OSes
  • introduce custom X-Prd-Retry-Num to inform server at which retry are we when fetching files
  • fixed sdp downloading behavior when all files are already present
  • fixed progress bar in presence of redirects and when total download size is >2GiB
  • fixed --disable-all-logging to actually do that
  • fixed the handling of Unicode env vars on Windows

Written by: sprunk

sprunk