It's finally here!With this release we decided to drop the "3.Major_revision.Minor_revision" versioning scheme in favor of a year based scheme since the Major and Minor versions did not have much meaning anymore. Instead the scheme will now be "<year>.<number that is incremented every release>.0". The last 0 is still there because some of our systems expect that. It will be gone at some point.
Previous 3.8.0 Release ThreadChange log: (chronologically ordered)
- Various OpenGL optimizations for better graphics performance:
- Animations now use texture arrays
- Model uniforms get sent to the GPU using uniform buffers for less overhead
- Various other, minor changes/li]
- After just 17 years, full Unicode text support! You can finally use non-ASCII characters without having to worry about special fonts and special characters. This is an opt-in mod flag.
- Added various translation features for making it easier to only distribute one version of a mod which includes all languages.
- OpenAL Soft is included by default in binary distributions of FSO now.
- Added system for dynamically adding new SEXPs. With this a Lua script can expose functionality to the mission which can be used exactly the same as a standard SEXP with all the usual editing features in FRED.
- Replaced Blinn-Phong BRDF with GGX BRDF
- Added support for displaying decals on the surface of an object.
- Refactored bitmap slot handling and removed the fixed upper limit on the number of bitmaps. No more bmpman corruption!
- Exposed the movie player to the scripting API for advanced display features
- Integrated support for the Discord Rich Presence API
- Added new, markup based user interface system using libRocket.
- Converted pilot files from custom binary format to JSON
Launchers, if you don't have one already:
All platforms: For every day use, we recommend
Knossos, an integrated solution for downloading and launching mods.
Hidden Text: Alternative Launchers • Show Cross-platform:
wxLauncher 0.12.x Test Build (ongoing project for a unified launcher, you should upgrade to the latest RC/test build if you have not yet)
Important: For best compatibility with FSO 3.8 and later you should use at least wxLauncher 0.12.
Windows:
Launcher 5.5g (
Mirror) (
Mirror) Not compatible with Windows 8+, use wxLauncher above
OS X: Soulstorm's
OS X Launcher 3.0Linux:
YAL or
by hand or whatever you can figure out.
Windows (32/64-bit)Compiled by Appveyor on Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit, Visual Studio Community 2015 with Update 364-bit: fs2_open_19_0_0-builds-Win64.zip32-bit: fs2_open_19_0_0-builds-Win32.zipThis one is based on the SSE2 Optimizations from the MSVC Compiler.Hidden Text: Alternative builds • Show 
OS X Universal (32/64-bit Intel)Compiled on OS X 10.11.4, Xcode 7.3 (Apple LLVM version cross-reference)fs2_open_19_0_0-builds-MacOSX.tar.gz
Linux 64-bitCompiled on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS 64-bit, GCC 5fs2_open_19_0_0-builds-Linux.tar.gzThese builds use a mechanism called
AppImage which should allow these builds to run on most Linux distributions. However, we recommend that you compile your own builds which will result in less issues.
Alternatively, if there is a package in your software repository then you should use that. If you are the maintainer of such a package for a distribution then let us know and we will include that here.
Hidden Text: Other Platforms, Source Code • Show Hidden Text: TrackIR Users • Show Important!!An external DLL is required for FSO to use TrackIR functions. The following DLL is simply unpacked in to your main FreeSpace2 root dir.
TrackIR is only supported on Windows.
TrackIR SCP DLL (
Mirror) (
Mirror)
Known issues:
