This release has some new fixes and safeguards when creating projects, updates lots of third-party dependencies, and includes a new template. Android has gotten some attention from @obigu and @Frosty-J , and the fork of libgdx-oboe we depend on (because the official repo is unpublished to Maven Central or JitPack) has also been updated. The Android Gradle Plugin version is now 8.9.3, which is about as new as IDEA can go currently. Because creating projects in OneDrive paths is a consistent issue with Gradle projects, we now warn if you create a project in a folder controlled by OneDrive -- put your code anywhere except there if you want to build it! The Maven Central snapshot repository changed, and that's been updated; the s01 and oss repositories have been nothing but trouble lately, and shouldn't be needed anymore, so they are removed. When creating a Kotlin launcher for an MOE project, the old launcher was broken, and the new one should work -- I don't have a Mac, so you may need to test it yourself and report back with an issue if something is still wrong. Various third-party extensions have been updated, from gdx-gltf to jdkgdxds to some other projects that have vowels in the names. There's a Kryo support library for libGDX itself now, which had been missing for a while because the last Kryo+libGDX library was for Kryo 4.x, which is quite old now. SquidSquad has finally finished its 4.0.0 stable release, and there are many modules from it available as checkboxes; sorry about scrolling through all of them!
The new template was a lot of work done as an independent project and brought into Liftoff to try to fill the need for a well-documented, more-than-one-file project to see how things can be structured. In particular, pixel art and isometric views have been a problem for more than a few people on the Discord, so the new Isometric Voxel template tries to show one way of handling depth sorting for an isometric map, even with the map able to rotate. Nearly every line of code is commented in the important files, so it should be a pretty good starter resource. Notably, the template demo doesn't use Tiled, and procedurally generates a new map every time (this is also something people sometimes want help with). It uses only freely-available assets with compatible licenses, and the licenses are all provided in the template. There's even a happy little public domain song that plays!
As before, this ships with a cross-platform JAR that should work if you already have Java 17 installed, and alternatively as Windows and Linux native executables, which are larger but don't need a JDK installed to run. You will still need a JDK if you want to test JARs you release, so getting one is always a good idea! For Windows users, BellSoft's Liberica JDK sets up the defaults correctly and reliably, so it is a good choice, and Zulu has also proven itself to be good. On Linux or MacOS, Adoptium can be good, too. In general, the prevailing opinion seems to be to avoid Oracle releases (whether they are Oracle OpenJDK or the commercial kind) because of past actions Oracle has taken. There have also been some strange bugs with Amazon Corretto, and though they may have been fixed over time, there isn't much reason to prefer it; most OpenJDK releases are rather similar in feature sets.
I hope this release works well for you; it's been 3 months since the last Liftoff release, but hopefully we can see a new libGDX release soon, and another Liftoff release with it!
What's Changed
- Updates to match min API 21 by @obigu in #234
- libgdx-oboe: Remove erroneous reference to Android 16 by @Frosty-J in #235
Full Changelog: v1.13.5.1...v1.13.5.2