Darwinia 2.4.0 release

Gameplay

• Grenades and Triffid Eggs now bounce off buildings (with sound effects)

• Anthills: smarter about objectives. Ants are sent to clusters of spirits rather than individual distant spirits, and ants on attack orders focus on the enemy first instead of getting distracted by spirits along the way

• Army Ants: resume previous orders if interrupted, increased search radius

• Virii: no longer target Darwinians carried by ants, restored slowdown when approaching Engineers

• Soul Destroyer: brightened spirit render, fixed devoured souls render

• Spore Generator: explodes on death, with tail triangles included in the shape explosion

• Triffids: now properly explode when destroyed

• Engineers: improved building collision avoidance, reprogramming animation when adding spirits

• Darwinians: fixed upside-down shadows, fixed LOD jumpiness while mid-air, spectacle-watching Darwinians are now always visible

• Centipede: smoother trailing segment movement

Bugfixes

• Fixed Insertion Squad movement to perpendicular teleport

• Fixed jumpy Generator power surges

• Fixed Darwinians being unable to find Gun Turret targets

• Fixed Laser Fence collision for grenades

• Fixed Yard animation snap on first power surge

• Fixed crash on credits screen

• Fixed crash when MasterVolume is set to 0

• Fixed incorrect music identification

• Fixed crash when looking up missing language phrase

• Fixed pixel effect sizing and render conditions

• Fixed miscellaneous rendering bugs

Performance

• Major explosion system rework: better LOD, depth-sorting, reduced memory usage

• Landscape and water rendering: chunked rendering with frustum culling for significant draw call reduction

• Cloud rendering: switched to instanced rendering, dramatically reducing memory usage

• Improved frustum culling with capsule-based tests and better vectorization

• Faster nearby spirit searches

• Transparent GPU texture compression for reduced VRAM usage

• Reduced memory usage across many systems (sprites, fonts, shapes, explosions, strings, sounds)

• Faster GPU discovery at startup

• Reduced background rendering cost on lower-end GPUs

Graphics & Rendering

• Improved frame pacing and reduced input latency

• Faster shader loading on subsequent launches via shader caching

• Improved FOV calculation for ultrawide displays

• SMAA anti-aliasing now defaults to 'ultra' quality preset

• Added supersampling (SSAA) render option for render scales above 100%

• Increased pixel effect render distance with more subtle distance fade

• Improved rendering of power lines, internet links, mine tracks, and other line-based effects

• Reduced first-frame stutters with expanded pipeline warmup

• Improved DPI scaling

Sound

• Fixed crash when master volume is set to 0

• Improved volume calculation

• Improved reverb filter performance

• Added bounce sounds for grenades and triffid eggs hitting buildings

UI & Settings

• "Open Website" now uses Steam overlay and minimizes the game

• GPU device list always visible in screen preferences

• Irrelevant GPU drivers hidden when D3D11 is selected

• Auto-select 'Auto' GPU if previously selected device is no longer available

• VSync changes no longer require restart in some configurations

• Fixed gesture scaling for ultrawide screens

• Fixed incorrect resolution list

Platform & Compatibility

• Wine/Proton: improved default settings for better out-of-box experience

• macOS: fixed mouse handling, improved VSync support

• Improved compatibility with Intel Macs, Parallels Desktop, Qualcomm GPUs

• Gamescope: fixed window size and rendering issues

• Wayland: fixed OpenGL initialization

• Improved GPU device selection

• Various Mesa driver workaround improvements

Other

• Updated third-party libraries to latest versions