And once more, it is Antipodes time.
For those who are not used to this, Antipodes is a special development branch we are maintaining to test features and additions that are either too big or too fundamental to just be stuffed into trunk.
This time around, the topic is "SDL Everywhere". What does this mean?
Well, here's the issue: On Linux and MacOS (and FreeBSD), we are using the
SDL middleware library to manage the hairy bits of setting up windows, getting an OpenGL context, and handling control input. This has worked pretty well for us, but had one big drawback: SDL 1.2 did not have any support for force feedback effects.
Now, after several years of development, SDL2 has been released. This allows us to do force feedback on all platforms, and this means that it is about time we started using SDL on Windows too, cutting down on the amount of platform-specific code we have to write and maintain.
Given that this changes the behaviour of one of the biggest things in any game engine, namely player input handling, we need this tested thoroughly. Keyboard/Mouse/KB+Mouse/Joystick/Joypad input all has to be checked, because we want the engine to behave very much the same for obvious reasons.
Here then are the builds for Windows (Built in Visual Studio 2013)
fs2_open_Ant9_20150716_2777459.7zfs2_open_Ant9_20150716_2777459_SSE.7zfs2_open_Ant9_20150716_2777459_SSE2.7zfs2_open_Ant9_20150716_2777459_AVX.7zAll builds are based on git hash 2777459.
You must have SDL2.dll present for the builds to run. You can get it from
libsdl.org. Make sure the SDL2.dll is in your FS2 folder alongside the downloaded executables.
And here are the builds for other supported platforms (late to the party)
OS X:
FS2_Open_Ant9_20150716_2777459.zip Built on OS X 10.10.4, Xcode 6.4
FreeBSD x64:
fs2_open_ant9_20150716_2777459.tar.bz2 Built on PC-BSD 10.1, clang 3.4.1
Ubuntu x86:
fs2_open_ant9_20150716_2777459.tar.bz2 Built on Ubuntu Server 14.04.2 LTS, GCC 4.8.4
Big thanks go to taylor, for providing the force feedback code, and m|m and Echelon9 for various fixes and enhancements.
EDIT:
Update posted on 15/12/2013
Changelog:
-Updated to trunk revision 10223
-Made a few housekeeping changes (A few defines removed)
-Fixed bug involving crash when Force Feedback is activated.
Updates posted 18 July 2015
-All new builds for every platform based on latest Git hash
-Many new SDL-only optimizations have been merged including dialog cleanup, dead code removal, etc.