Sauerbraten Updates. Again.

One of my favorites, Sauerbraten, had a new release Sunday, and a patch for that new release yesterday. Naturally, I took a look.

The first thing I noticed when I started the newest release of Sauerbraten is that performance was really choppy. I wondered for a moment, then realized that shaders are now used by default. No problem for some people, but with my now-dated system the first thing I did was turn shaders off.

The "new" menu system (not that new anymore) is much more usable than the last time I encountered it. During map selection, there are now thumbnail images of the maps, so there's no more (or at least less) wondering which weirdly named map is the one you're looking for.

For the past year or so, every new release of Sauerbraten has had a "flagship" feature, a feature so prominent that it made it into the release name. Physics edition, water edition, etc... This is the first release of Sauerbraten in a long time that has more in common with what new releases of Cube had, improvments all around.

New maps, bugfixes, improved menu system, gameplay tweaks - it's quite a list, although some of the excitement previous releases carried with them is lost as a result. Not that we could expect that forever, and this is a great new release of a an already-great game, so whatever traces of disappointment there may be, they evaporate quickly.

I'd provide a link for those of you who'd like to see the entire list of new things/changes, but unfortunately the Sauerbraten/Cube forums seem to be a bit temperamental right now, so instead I'll toss you a link to the LinuxGames post that originally drew my attention to the new release. There is a link there to the announcement in the forums which may or may not work for you.