This release, two months in the making, is a little more wide-ranging than some other recent releases. Here are the highlights:
- Tons of third-party extension updates.
- These were what delayed the release, because many of a certain developer's libraries (that is to say, my libraries) shared a common bug that affected GWT projects, and all of them needed updating at about the same time.
- The packaging is now a .zip file, containing the normal .jar file, and also two .bat files if needed on Windows.
- gdx-liftoff-1.11.0.6.bat just launches the JAR normally, but will work even if double-clicking JARs doesn't normally function on a particular Windows machine.
- gdx-liftoff-non-a-z-name-1.11.0.6.bat is meant for the not-uncommon case where a user has a character in their username that isn't A-Z, 0-9, or a few other allowed chars. This is most common with names that have non-English letters in them. It does some extra steps to ensure necessary files are extracted properly to
C:\gdx-liftoff\, which avoids an encoding problem with such a username. - This is hopefully clear, but you need to extract the files out of the .zip before you can run any of them.
- TeaVM! You can now enable (experimental) TeaVM support like any other platform, as a checkbox on the first tab.
- TeaVM compiles for the web like GWT, but doesn't need Java source code, and can compile Kotlin, Scala, or probably other languages as well.
- There's lots of promise for future developments in TeaVM, such as using Emscripten to compile and use native libraries in the browser. This is already done for Bullet in TeaVM, which GWT cannot use.
- You may want to read about TeaVM on its homepage, or the libGDX-specific TeaVM changes on its homepage.
- Numerous Android-related updates, such as Android Gradle Plugin 7.3.0 by default, default SDK of 32, and better auto-selection of core library desugaring based on other versions.
Thanks to, among others, czyzby, LandoSystem, fourlastor, SheerSt, and everyone who reported or helped track down bugs in this release. The whole TeaVM team did a lot of work that made the new platform possible, so thanks to all of them, too. Thanks to the GWT gitter and its helpful developers for tracking down the strange bug in (my) libraries that needed all of them to update. And thanks to all of the gdx-liftoff users, for choosing a tool that does things differently!