Principia 2024.06.28

Hello, Principia 2024.06.28 has been released. It fixes some bugs and regressions found in the previous version, as well as adding new features.

As usual, you can find downloads on the Download page. F-Droid and various Linux distribution packages should receive the update within due time.

This release contains various improvements all across the board made during the 4 months since the last release. Most notably the Android version has finally has its SDL2 version updated to 2.30.3, being previously stuck on an old beta version of SDL2 from 2012. This was certainly a non-trivial endeavour as Principia made use of various internal SDL functions on the Android version that have drastically changed since then. Nontheless everything seems to be working fine with the latest version, and some issues like delayed sound playback are now fixed as a result, but if there are any regressions found then please report these at our issue tracker.

The default community site used by the game is also configurable at runtime by creating a file called community_host.txt in your Principia user folder with a domain name to connect to (just the domain name, e.g. principia-web.se). This is a win in general for further reducing lock-in, being able to set up your own community site and pointing the game to it without needing to recompile the game, but should also remove the Non-Free Network Service antifeature for Principia on F-Droid.

Three new Lua functions have been added (entity:set_fixed_rotation, entity:is_fixed_rotation and entity:apply_force), a keybind to toggle fullscreen on all desktop platforms have been introduced (F11) as well as some resize-related issues being fixed. As a result of refactoring code that was previously duplicated across platforms, various things previously exclusive to Windows such as writing game logs to a file or storing user data portably is now available for all desktop platforms.

If you have tried to build the previous stable release with the new GCC 14 you might have noticed it fails to build due to certain compiler warnings now being errors. This has now been fixed and essentially all compiler warnings previously emitted during compilation should also have been fixed. If you would like to get Principia running on a Linux phone or anywhere else on Linux where only OpenGL ES is available you may also be interested in the new USE_GLES compile-time option.

For a full list of changes in this release see the Changelog.