- Ported to Vulkan 1.3
- Ported to SDL2
- Renderer rebuilt from scratch on a modern rendering library, all legacy rendering code removed
- Fixed point math replaced by floating point throughout
- Consistent multithreading with load thresholds
- Shader precompilation and caching
- Linear and sRGB color pipelines
- Crash reports with call stack and minidump
- Massive code cleanup, obsolete features removed
- Level geometry and robots rendered in batches using texture arrays
- Portal based visibility
- Unified render model for all 3D objects
- Improved transparency rendering
- Texture displacement mapping (SILPOM)
- Hardware tessellation (customizable)
- Improved cartoon renderer
- Fast GPU based lightmap bake with indirect light
- Dynamic lighting
- Full per pixel lighting
- Light portals: light falls through open doors
- Ambient light per segment
- Object shadows using shadow maps
- Hardware raytracing (light visibility, lightmap bake, shadows)
- All textures reworked: upscaled, with normal, height and specular maps
- Hand made relief masks for robots, doors, lamps and walls
- Robot models reworked (joints, animations)
- PNG and DDS texture support
- New spawn effect
- Reworked explosions (shockwaves, heat waves, shrapnel)
- Improved missile smoke trails
- Volumetric light coronas
- Reworked lightning, light trails and shield effects
- New target and missile lock indicators, new HUD icons
- Improved fog, water and lava rendering
- Skybox rendering with weather
- OpenAL integration with automatic reverb calculation
- Sound propagation along the way through the mine, damped by doors, walls and fog
- Random sound objects
- Robot AI overhauled: robots have to see or hear you, and they talk to each other
- New difficulty level Insane++
- Improved hitbox collisions and physics fixes
- Homing and smart weapon targeting reworked
- Trigger, door and reactor handling consolidated
- Hub level and save game fixes
- Public matches via game tracker without entering IP addresses or ports
- Simplified private matches, LAN and internet players can be mixed
- Faster and more compact network protocol
- Improved automatic mission download
- New D2X-XL menu style with new wallpapers
- Screen resolution menu
- Improved menu navigation
- 3D robots in briefings when the movies are missing
- Improved mod handling with texture assignment files
- 64 bit build with modern renderer
- New geometry tools (split segments in 7, 8 or 27, perturb sides, round structures, add structural detail)
- Up to 65500 segments per level
- Ambient light per segment
- Improved texture alignment
Cheers,
Dietfrid