Jaka Kranjc

Jaka Kranjc

Specialization is for insects. — Heinlein

GemRB 0.9.0 released! (A view to the future edition)

The GemRB team is proud to announce a new major release.

Over six years in the making, growing in scope with time, the subviews branch was a true monster. But the quest to lay it to rest has now been successfully completed, among other things modernizing the GUI, drawing and input handling. For most use cases, there is no need for the Widescreen mod any more (see screenshot or video explainer).

The SDL2 backend is now mature and default, OpenGL support is not experimental any more, most benefiting Mac users. Additionally, in the last minutes between the merge and this release, Python 3 support was added and our demo received an ending.

If you don’t believe that this is a big upgrade, consider just the changes from the branch. It included 3527 commits, 668 changed files, and over 30,000 changed lines of code. That’s about every fifth line!

You can get the new GemRB from here.

Full changelog digest:

GemRB v0.9.0 (2021-06-18):
  New features:
    - basic resolution independence
    - python3 support
    - arbitrary window dragging support
    - improved debug console
    - subtitle support for BIK videos

  Improved features:
    - window management, drawing and input handling
    - performance: SDL2 video playback, general and text rendering
    - smoother movement animations, demo
    - bugfixes

Thanks to everyone that contributed their time and wit, including:

Bernd Schmidt, Brad Allred (main author), Diego J., fizzet, FrElvire, Jaka Kranjc, Laurie Chilvers, m7600, MarcelHB, Northfear, Rodrigo Santellan.

If you want to be notified of GemRB releases via email, subscribe to the gemrb-release mailing list.

Notes to packagers:

Python 3 support has been added.

SDL2 is now the default backend and anyone still on SDL1 is encouraged to switch.

If you are packaging from git sources, not the archive, either run make fetch-demo-data first or manually include the files. These are (currently two) bigger assets kept in a separate repository.

Configuration notes (details):

  • key TooltipDelay was deprecated (was unused, there is an ingame option)
  • key ScriptDebugMode was renamed to DebugMode and received more values
  • key FogOfWar was deprecated for GCDebug
  • new key GCDebug can be used to draw various debug features of maps
  • new key TouchInput for force disabling or enabling …

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