Changes since Oolite 1.68:
- New materials model and more flexibility for shaders.
- Lasers can now be any colour, with the limitation that they must be reasonably bright. The new colour spec syntax introduced for lasers is also supported for sky colours, but not planets in this release.
- Raised vertex and face counts for meshes, while reducing memory usage.
- Reformatted keyconfig.plist to be more legible and easier to edit.
- Advanced Navigation Array default key changed to ^ (shift-6 on UK keyboards) to avoid surprise launches.
- Save/load screens now show more information, and show the correct ship type even if it isn’t currently installed (only applies to games saved with 1.69 or later). Also, a question mark is now shown in place of unknown ships (but looks bad due to bugs in setting up smoothed models).
Under Mac OS X, this only applies in full-screen mode as standard system dialogs are used in windowed mode. - The commander status screen now shows damaged equipment in orange.
- The appearance of interstellar space is now set in planetinfo.plist.
- (Mac OS X only) Support for a new Debug menu added. It is enabled by a special OXP, Debug Menu.oxp.
- New debugging key, key_dump_target_state, which dumps a lot of information about the player’s target (or the player, if there is no target) to the log. Not bound to anything by default.
- New requires.plist key added: max_version. This is not expected to be useful very often, except for Debug Menu.oxp. Any unknown keys in required.plist will now cause an OXP not to load.
- Improved robustness in various ways, especially with regards to property list parsing.
- Various redundant bits of code removed; code cleanup; some optimization.
- Cache is no longer pruned at all. Since it’s rebuilt when OXPs are changed, the maximum size of the cache is limited by the installed OXPs. In practice, sizes of a few MB can be expected. Under GNUstep, cache read/write should be more efficient and the folder the cache lives in will be created if needed.
- Under Mac OS X and Windows, you can force a cache rebuild by holding down shift during start-up. This probably sort of works on Linux other systems if you press it just at the right moment.
- Fixed various issues under Linux (catching up with changes since pre 1.67).
- (Mac OS X only) Spotlight indexer indexes name of ship for games saved with 1.69 or later.
- Several OXP/scripting bugs have been reported and not fixed.
- Greyscale textures with alpha channels are not loaded correctly.
- Some textures still break when swapping between full-screen and windowed mode or resizing window (except under Mac OS X).
- Need to analyze memory usage; there seem to be significant leaks.
- equipment_price_factor only affecting station’s sell price not addressed.
- Civilian ships spawning in interstellar space not addressed.
- Ability to scoop more cargo than you have space for under some circumstances not addressed.
There are three new JavaScript classes in 1.69 – Entity, Vector and Quaternion, but they can’t be used for much.
As of 1.69, image formats other than PNG are not supported for textures (under any OS).
Bugger!
