Aleph One 1.0b1

This is the first beta for the 1.0 release of Aleph One. Highlights for this release include many improvements to interface polish, Marathon 2 film support, OpenGL (Shader) improvements, and additional Lua accessors.

This beta release is network compatible with the previous stable release, with the exception of new Lua features and fixes.

Requirements

• 500 Mhz processor with 128 MB RAM; 1 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM recommended
• Mac OS X 10.4 or higher
• Windows XP or higher
• Linux with SDL 1.2.14 and gcc 3.4 or higher
• OpenGL (Classic) renderer
  • ATI or nVidia graphics recommended
• OpenGL (Shader) renderer
  • ATI Radeon 9600 or nVidia GeForce FX 5200 or newer graphics
  • Mac OS X 10.5 or higher recommended

Features

• Added Marathon 2 film playback support
  • To play back a Marathon 2 film, choose "Marathon 2" film playback in Environment Preferences.
  • To play back a modern Aleph One film, choose "Aleph One" film playback.
• Interface improvements
  • OpenGL is now the default on Windows, in addition to Mac OS X. The OpenGL (Classic) renderer is now the prefered renderer.
  • When either OpenGL renderer is enabled, all menus, dialogs, and chapter screens are drawn using OpenGL. This should provide for smoother transitions into and out of games, and fix numerous bugs with entering and leaving games
  • The screen resolution is now changed only when necessary
  • Chapter screens now use the in-game resolution rather than the menu resolution
  • When OpenGL is enabled, use it to fade in menu screen, rather than hardware gamma
• A "Choose Aleph One Scenario" dialog is displayed if Map/Shapes/Sounds are not found, allowing the user to choose a scenario directory
• 3D Model improvements from Glen Ditchfield
  • More import types for 3D models MML
  • Model debug logging now uses the standard Aleph One log
  • Rotate 3DS and OBJ models to face east
• OpenGL (Shader) Improvements
  • Numerous speed optimizations
  • Fix vertically stretched landscapes (at a cost of more potential blurring at top/bottom)
  • Fog depth now matches that in OpenGL (Classic)
  • Miner's light and weapons flashes now match OpenGL (Classic)
  • Made lighting more closely match OpenGL (Classic) when bump maps are disabled
• General OpenGL improvements
  • If video card supports mirrored repeat, use that instead of blurring top and bottom of landscapes
  • Use non-power-of-two textures if video card supports them. This should greatly reduce VRAM usage on machine with NPOT texture support
  • Allow disabling near and far texture filters, in case you want OpenGL renderers to look more like software
• Default Theme
  • Use Tim Larson's awesome new OFL licensed Squarish Sans CT Medium font for buttons
• Added ability to view overhead map as a translucent overlay in single player games
• Lua updates
  • Solo scripts now have access to the io library
  • accessor for goals
  • accessors for player, monster, and item starting positions
  • added Game.monsters_replenish
  • (HUD) added Player.velocity, so HUDs can react to the player's movement
  • accessors for monster and item respawn parameters
  • accessors for sound objects
  • (HUD) accessors for weapon-panel labels
• Major version number update
  • After more than 11 years, Aleph One will reach its 1.0 release after beta testing is complete.

Other Changes

• So-called "single player net game" support has been removed
• The 8-bit software renderer has been removed, and the true color software renderers have been optimized for accuracy over speed. Aleph One is designed to play the original Marathon trilogy on modern operating systems, which no longer offer the kind of direct access to hardware necessary to render efficiently in software

Bug Fixes

• File save dialogs now allow directory navigation (SF 1780604)
• Aleph One now runs on case sensitive HFS+ filesystems
• Fixed crash when calling Scenery.new() when scenery limit is reached
• Fixed reading values in the Lua texture palette
• numerous gamma corrected blending fixes, including SF 3090718, fog looks wrong with gamma corrected blending
• Fix a crash when saving invalid Lua custom fields
• Lua cameras are updated each world tick, now, instead of each FPS as before. Fixes SF 1344287 and should allow cameras to be used safely in net scripts
• Fix Lua Effects accessors, which were mostly broken before
• Fix #static sections in terminals (SF 2942859)
• Fix SF 3057146, cannot use strings for Lua HUD Shapes.new