Principia 2024.07.12

Posted on Jul 12, 2024 by ROllerozxa

Hello, Principia 2024.07.12 has been released. It fixes some bugs and regressions found in the previous version.

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 is a relatively minor one for fixing issues that were uncovered in the previous release. Most notably it fixes VSync being accidentally disabled on Android in the last release as a result of the SDL2 upgrade, which likely caused significant battery drain if you push enough frames.

FPS graph showing a lot of frames being pushed (way above the phone's refresh rate)
That's a lot of frames!

The Android build available for download on the download page was hotfixed a couple hours later when this was discovered, but the unfixed version of 2024.06.28 had already made its way to F-Droid and was already in their build pipeline. So for people using the F-Droid version, this issue should finally be fixed once this version is live on F-Droid.

In addition to that there are other fixes for different platforms, such as Principia now working with SDL2's Wayland video driver on Linux (try passing SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland when running the AppImage!) and fixing an issue for compiling the full game on Alpine Linux. Latter was discovered by kittynunu when trying to compile the game on the Alpine-based postmarketOS distribution mainly targetting mobile devices.

With the fix applied and when building the game with OpenGL ES enabled (USE_GLES=1) Principia now runs on postmarketOS! The full story about getting Principia to run on kittynunu's postmarketOS phone can be read on Mastodon but here is an image showing Principia running on it:

Picture of a phone lying on the table, the screen shows Principia's adventure mode
Principia on a Samsung Galaxy S3 running postmarketOS (kittynunu)

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


Cover image: Bee Smasher Mini Game by rom1k