This is the first maintenance patch in four years! SphereFACE was first released in 2015, and a lot has happened since that time. We're excited to take a trip down memory lane with you.
While VoxelStorm no longer exists in its present guise, its spirit lives on in Armchair Software, started by the same founder. Most of VoxelStorm's old code has been released as open source (check out https://github.com/voxelStorm-Ltd/) and modernisations of these older projects are under way. The aim is to eventually release all VoxelStorm work as open source code for the benefit of the community!
The changes to sphereFACE since the last patch have been fairly minimal; as time has passed, bit-rot has set in to a small extent, so it's taken some work to get the game building and running with more modern systems. We've dropped support for 32bit linux (keeping it 64bit only), and likewise for obsolete MacOS versions. A 32bit Windows build is still available.
Various shared libraries used by sphereFACE have had many updates over the years, most notably VectorStorm - VoxelStorm's awesome vector maths library, now also open source! This release benefits from those improvements - bugfixes and performance boosts. There are also a couple of minor bug fixes, mostly around gamepad / joystick control.
While sphereFACE was always intended to be un-demanding to run on low-end hardware, ten years later, it can safely be said to be able to run with full performance on pretty much every computer still out there. A testament to the foresight and longevity of the unique original custom-built graphics engine designed specifically for this game!
Behind the scenes, the game is now built with a modern CMake pipeline, cross-compiling Windows builds on Linux. With continuous integration implemented on our back-end, future releases and incremental improvements should now be easier.
To chat about these changes and the future of sphereFACE, and other VoxelStorm games, why not join the developers on Telegram: t.me/ArmchairSoftwareChat