There are two reasons for this: the first is that we are excited that these changes fix one of the oldest and worst usability issues with OpenRA and want to share it as soon as possible, and the second is that the underlying code changes they are built on may have serious implications for game performance and compatibility on some hardware/software configurations. We would therefore like some early testing so we have time to fix issues and understand whether we will be excluding a significant number of players with older systems (unfortunately our system information database does not capture enough information to test this).
New Features / Changes:
- OpenGL 3.2 or OpenGL ES 3 are now required. Moving away from OpenGL 2 allows us to remove legacy code and workarounds, and is a first step towards supporting modern rendering APIs (Vulkan/Metal). This does unfortunately mean dropping support for some older systems (typically 10+ years old) that currently can run OpenRA.
- Smooth Zooming. The previous "pixel doubling" feature has been replaced with the ability to smoothly zoom the battlefield using the mouse wheel or new hotkeys ([ and ] by default). The default zoom level (Medium) has been chosen to increase the size of the units on screen at larger resolutions (~1080p or greater), but can be changed using the new Battlefield Camera option in the settings menu and new introduction screen.
- UI Scaling. The size of the menus, sidebar, and other UI elements can be increased by up to a factor of 2 using the new UI Scale option in the settings menu and new introduction screen.
- Overhauled settings menu. In addition to the new Battlefield Zoom and UI Scale options, the Display settings layout has been refreshed and now also includes a VSync option. The Input settings has been completely overhauled, and now explains the differences between the Modern and Classic (previously "Left Click Orders") control schemes.
- New introduction screen. A new screen is displayed when launching the game for the first time to introduce the most important display and control options.
- Improved HiDPI support. OpenRA can now detect HiDPI rendering modes on Windows and Linux, which means that rendering should be noticeably less blurry for Windows players who have their desktop configured to use >=125% scaling, and Linux players no longer need to override environment variables. Many UI elements use high resolution artwork, so will remain crisp when drawn at larger sizes.
- Profile badges still use the standard resolution artwork. A future update will add support for rendering these at higher resolution.
- The RivaTuner application will make OpenRA crash at startup. This is caused by RivaTuner inserting invalid legacy OpenGL calls into OpenRA, and is not something that we can fix on our side. Make sure that RivaTuner is disabled before launching OpenRA.
- We have seen two cases where OpenRA freezes on startup on Linux with an AMD graphics card. We don't yet know whether these were unlucky isolated issues, or represent a more general problem that impacts all AMD systems. If you are running Linux with AMD, we would appreciate if you could comment below or in this GitHub issue to say whether or not the game freezes and with the output of the glxinfo -B. If it does freeze, launching OpenRA from the terminal with the command line argument Graphics.DisableGLDebugMessageCallback=true should resolve the issue.
Download release-20200202-rendertest5:
Download for Windows (64 bit)
Download for Windows (32 bit)
Download for macOS
Download for Linux: Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Dune 2000
If you discover a bugs or have any other feedback, please comment below and we will try to resolve them before the first official playtest that includes these features.