Alternate Reality X - Release 0.61 Status

Release 0.61 of ARX will be released as soon as I fix a bug when entering guilds which leads to a crash.

The main change in this release is that at least on a temporary basis I've switched to the CodeBlocks development environment using the MinGW C++ compiler. There were 2 main reasons for this - firstly compile times increased significantly with Visual Studio 2010 from a few seconds for a change to about a minute which was really making small changes very tedious, and secondly CodeBlocks is available on Linux and Mac making native versions of ARX much easier to produce as the same environment can be used across all platforms. The switch of environment has raised a few new compile bugs though which I need to deal with before releasing 0.61.

From a player perspective the other major change I've made is that I've almost 100% dropped the use of "RenderTextures" in the SFML media library. My use of these created lots of problems for players with Intel onboard graphics and a few issues on newer machines I had access to. My code was also messier and harder to debug when I had these in. My new 0.61 version works much better on old harder which I'm much happier with. I don't see why a player shouldn't be able to use an old laptop to play something based on a 25 year old game series just because it has intel graphics.

I've also added code to better handle monster vulnerabilities and invulnerabilies to various damage types. Bit more work to do there though to make it complete.

There are a few new encounter images which I've been sent as well which are included for players playing ARX in a full window. These will hopefully gradually replace the handful of placeholder MM6 images I've used currently.

Hopefully I can have this release wrapped up fairly soon.

All the best,
Acrin1