This release adds a Vulkan renderer for significantly improved performance over the software renderer.
Voxels now combine into larger meshes to reduce the number of draw calls and collision shapes required.
The lighting system has been changed from forward to tiled forward which removes the lights-per-mesh limit. This is necessary for some scenes where a single mesh might be affected by 16 or more lights.
Thanks to incredible work done by @Allofich, the mystery surrounding Arena's heavy fog has finally been solved. This effect appears randomly based on weather and is supported in both renderers.
Release video is here.
New features and additions
- Vulkan renderer
- Must enable manually in options menu by setting Graphics API to Vulkan
- Mesh combining
- Changed forward lighting to tiled forward
- Added classic heavy fog effect
- Added floating origin to reduce Z-fighting and shimmering
- Added tavern patron dialogue
- Increased physics updates per frame to reduce bumpy feeling when moving
- Added baseline .OBJ file format support, used with voxels
- Added inverted mouselook option
- Added Enable Validation Layers option (must have Vulkan validation layers installed)
- Improved frame pacing
- Improved high DPI support
- Reduced sky mesh vertices
- Slightly reduced player and citizen move speed
- Updated SDL to 2.0.12
Fixes
- Fixed swimming camera height
- Fixed chasm texture bug outside city bounds
- Fixed puddle rendering performance
- Fixed puddles not reflecting entities in adjacent chunk
Known issues
- Ghost-behind-ghost transparency is not supported in Vulkan renderer
- Walking onto raised platforms like stairsteps is unsolved
- Item stacking is not implemented, bags of gold can only hold 1 gold
- Shopkeeper interactions not implemented
- Bow weapons don't fire projectiles yet
- Outside textures and sky don't update to match weather after entering and exiting an interior
- Building names for wilderness temples and in Imperial City don't match original game
For details on how to get OpenTESArena running, follow these instructions. To see what's next, check out the roadmap.