This release focuses on improving how the game world is simulated in order to more closely match the original game. There is now a set of active chunks that are added and removed as the player moves around. Textures are now loaded into a renderer-independent format before being passed to engine systems that need them, and with the addition of texture asset references, textures are only loaded from the hard drive once they are needed (and are kept in memory afterwards). Future support for formats like PNG should also be easier to add now.
New features and changes in 0.13.0:
- Chunk system
- Interiors "go forever" with default empty chunk
- Cities "go forever" with floor wrapping
- The wilderness loads by chunk IDs and can "go forever" by falling back to a default chunk when outside of the original game's 64x64 chunk area
- Texture system redesign (renderer-independent TextureBuilderID, and TextureAssetReference for deferred loading)
- Support for Raspberry Pi 4 (no release build yet since performance is very poor)
- Fixed citizen animation RAM usage issue (no longer ~2.5 GB)
- Fixed software renderer deadlock (@Alucowie)
- Fixed streetlight activation updating (wilderness streetlights intentionally do not change activation state)
- Citizens now only idle if the player is not moving and their weapon is sheathed, to more closely match the original AI
- Revised sun and moon positions (not sure if they exactly match the original game yet, though)
Known issues:
- Some intro screens might be using an incorrect palette
- Wilderness building names don't match original game
- The game world is empty for one frame after fast travelling, especially when arriving at a city with an arrival pop-up message
- The game will crash during the Ria Silmane cinematic in the CD version if it reaches the end without being skipped (related to chunk system)
- Sometimes lights will not be counted as being visible to the camera (related to chunk system)
- The automap colors voxels outside of city bounds that should not be considered part of the automap
- The chasm wall texture of a deleted floor voxel might not match the original game
- Translucent entities exhibit vertical line artifacts (related to multi-threading)
- Tavern names in Imperial City don't match original game
- Diagonal walls have same collision as walls
For details on how to get OpenTESArena running, see the Installation section in the Readme.