What's new in 2.0.0
Co-op fixes, by Volverine-Dude (PRs #16 and #17)
Player 2's own character: his own stats, damage and turning, his own combo meter and Perfect; his health upgrades, sword segments and upgraded arrows count. His heavy blows break shields.
Player 2's aim: his lock holds and no longer blinks, he turns to it while aiming, and he can lock the cave troll.
Enemies share their attention between both players. The extra enemy copies on some levels stay asleep until their originals come, and their blows spare the villagers (Plains of Rohan).
Expert in co-op.
P2 Bot: Off or On (When Idle is gone; it cut in on a controller). A gentle stick push counts as player 2 playing.
Show Upgrades Player 2 on the pause menu. Player 2's controller works on both upgrade pages, his shop and his stats screen after a level, and his Start pauses the game.
Button prompts follow whichever controller was used last, on any port.
Gimli as player 2 holds his throwing axe in his left hand while aiming; player 2 is hidden at a cutscene's very start.
Fixes: the Weathertop freeze, the cutscenes' casts, the max health's scaling.
Languages
Adds Welsh (Cymraeg), Old English (Ænglisc), Old English in the Anglo-Saxon runes, Old Norse (Norrœnt mál) and Latin (Latina):
Every language: the Versus and co-op menus, the notes, the ECTS HUD's labels and the achievements are translated.
Ultra textures: every language's text is upscaled, all session long. It used to go blurry later in a session, or stay blurry in a language first played before the pack was made ready.
Launcher (Linux and macOS)
F5 on the main menu opens the launcher (mods, language, settings): on Linux the AppImage and TwoTowers.sh go straight to the game, so the mods were out of reach. (Windows has its own launcher, which starts the game.)
Linux launcher window (zenity or kdialog, else the terminal menu): TwoTowers.sh --launcher, the AppImage with --launcher, or the menu entry's right-click Launcher action. It also opens once after the first install.
Versus
Westfold is a Versus arena: the whole map to fight over, with random starts, some of its orcs and Uruk-hai about, their own sounds and the level's own music, and the health and ammo pickups.
Exploding bomb stacks and carts on Westfold: a few of them (not every one the level has), set off by either player with a blow or a shot (aim at one and the bow locks onto it). The blast hurts whoever stands near, the enemies too, and sets off the ones beside it. A blast you set off that catches the other player counts as your hit.
Plains of Rohan: the players are drawn at their starts (their markers showed, but not them).
The Ent now hurts the enemies on the Versus maps, light and heavy blows too, and breaks their shields; the enemies he fells fall and die as by any other blow (his blows hit nothing before).
Enemy sounds in Versus: their grunts, cries, blows and deaths, and the sound of being hit, play as in the campaign (they were silent).
Orthanc Summit: players no longer get stuck running on the spot at their starts (it happened after playing another arena first; only restarting the game cleared it). A player pushing the stick who still cannot move for 2.5 s is released, and put back on his last safe ground if need be.
Other fixes/Linux fixes
Load Game with no saves: Enter on "No saved games" takes you back to the main menu (it kept showing the message again).
The level 5 and level 10 achievements require a real level-up (finishing the prologue as Isildur earned both).
Linux, laptops with an NVIDIA card beside the built-in graphics: the game runs on the NVIDIA card (it ran slowly on the built-in chip). TT_NO_PRIME=1 leaves the choice to the system.
Linux with an NVIDIA card: no more flickering. Surfaces flickered grey and broke into flat patches, in the menus and in game and most when paused: the OpenGL renderer kept reading shader settings from graphics memory the NVIDIA driver had already handed back. Also: the characters' shadows repaired as on Windows, and graphics driver errors, if any, written to the log.
Linux: no more stutter every second with the keyboard's button prompts (a search for the hints' words ran on the game's own thread).
Linux: the More page's Colour grading, Grading amount, Movie sharpness and Distant texture detail now work properly (they did only on Windows).
Tested (2.0.0)
Linux: Campaign coop and Versus modes. Versus bot runs on Westfold (the arena, the bomb stacks by blows and shots from both players), the Plains of Rohan and the Orthanc Summit (Restart Match); co-op bot runs on Balin's Tomb and the Plains of Rohan; the F5 launcher and the Linux launcher window; every language's upscaled fonts at the main menu.
Windows: the co-op changes were tested by their author with bots.
Windows, Linux and macOS builds compile.
Not tested: co-op with two real controllers; the macOS build on a Mac; both co-op players as Gimli.
2.0.0 Credits music: 2.00 adds the ability for new music to be added to the games credits. for copyright reasons, the new credits songs are not included in this release. There is a new music folder added in the 2.0.0 release where two extra .wav files can be added, so the credits don't just loop one song ("Concerning Hobbits"). The two files must be named credits2.wav and credits3.wav, in lowercase (Linux and macOS go by case), as 16-bit PCM .wav. The author designed them to work best with two songs composed by Howard Shore:
credits2.wav: "The Road Goes Ever On..., Pt. 2 / In Dreams" (feat. Edward Ross), the last 3 minutes 11 seconds (skipping the first 30 seconds)
credits3.wav: "Rivendell", the first 1 minute 45 seconds
For copyright reasons, these are not included with 2.0.0 or any earlier or later release. For the complete experience, it is recommended to purchase copies of these two songs and edit them intocredits2.wav and credits3.wav. Without them, the original credits song plays and loops as it always did.