Darwinia Beta Update Announcement

We would like to announce that, thanks to the hard effort of Darwinia fan, volunteer and skilled developer, Steven Noonan, we have a new build of Darwinia to test!

The core experience remains pure Darwinia, but under the hood much has changed. There is a new graphics and sound subsystem, hundreds of performance enhancements and bug fixes, and not least, support for running on Apple's M1 ARM64 architecture.

We have put up a build for testing on the "beta" branch. You can switch to it by right clicking Darwinia in your GOG Library, Manage Installation, Configure, and then selecting the "Beta" branch from the Beta channels drop down..

Please try it out and post any issues you have here. Please include the word 'BETA' in your topic subject.

More detailed technical notes:

- Compatibility
Darwinia now requires hardware and drivers that support a minimum of at least one of these graphics APIs:

. OpenGL 3.3
. Vulkan 1.1
. Direct3D 11
. Metal

On Intel and AMD CPUs, the minimum instruction set requirement has been raised to SSE4.2, for higher performance 3D graphics math (matrices and vectors).

- Apple Silicon Support on macOS
macOS builds now have support for both Intel and Apple Silicon.

- Graphics
The entire graphics engine has been rewritten from scratch for compatibility with modern graphics APIs and better performance. Darwinia is currently compatible with systems with support for OpenGL 3.3 core, Direct3D 11, Metal, or Vulkan. Support for non-OpenGL graphics APIs is made possible by ANGLE.

- Other high-level changes include:
. All the in-game UI now scales more appropriately with the size and DPI of the monitor it's running on
. Support for anti-aliasing modes including MSAA, SSAA, SMAA, and FXAA
. Support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR)
. Support for anisotropic texture filtering
. Higher fidelity colors and tonemapping

- Sound
The sound engine now supports up to 7.1-channel surround sound and uses 3D spatialization (i.e. directional audio and doppler effect), using MiniAudio. The sound engine supports any of the backends that MiniAudio does, including but not limited to WASAPI (Windows), PulseAudio (Linux), and CoreAudio (macOS).


- Performance
Outside of architecture-specific changes, numerous performance improvements have been made throughout the entire game engine. One nice side effect of the heavy emphasis on performance is that Darwinia now requires far less energy to run, increasing battery life and playtime on laptops and other portable devices like the Steam Deck.

- Bugfixes
There have been many bugfixes on numerous axes, including scripting, level editing, input handling, graphics, sound, stability, and game AI.

Hello. Are you around?

Can you release a retail patch? Why did you take down the websites for the games and replace them with a single page with mostly links to other places?

Can you unban me from Introversion Forums (AFAIK the ban was set for my activity elsewhere which happened during a few days) and perhaps archive (LOCK, NOT DELETE) them for good, since there is much more spam than meaningful activity?

My username there is SomeHacker.

Okay, and now will the old version be back?

On Linux (which is no longer listed on the catalogue page) it still is the old version, even though the installer name suggests otherwise. See discussion at https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_what_did_just_update_thread/post27867

Is the old version available for other platforms as well?

I only see one installer for each. It's just that GOG seems to have silently dropped Linux support but renamed the legacy Linux installer as though it hadn't.

Edit: actually I may have been wrong about the renaming part. Comparing Darwinia's installer names to Multiwinia's, I think the Linux Darwinia downloader is an old one that follows the practice of having a name based on the installer version, not the game version, while the Win/Mac downloaders seem to be following a newer naming scheme.

Shame. Last time Steam was getting more attention from Introversion Software than anything else, though Warchild demos were released on SendOwl only. However, a fragmentation was created between platforms:

- Retail box delivery and the old websites were simply dropped at some point. No patches or demos anymore, only a single-page website with links to elsewhere. The forums were abandoned with adminship transferred to unrelated people. There may be something behind SendOwl paywalls, but people who did purchase physical copies at physical stores were left with no support.
- Ambrosia Software players were left with no support after the company died. Its authentication keys for DEFCON and Multiwinia are not accepted on newer Mac versions.
- Darwinia has both editions on Steam, but only the 10000th Anniversary Edition on GOG, while GNU/Linux update missing. I don't know about other platforms. GNU/Linux version was not updated to 1.5.11.
- Uplink has version 1.6 on Humble Store and on GOG, though GOG GNU/Linux one is marked as 1.55 (while still having code card check removed and the default world map set to the original one). On Steam it is 1.55. There was no retail 1.6 patch either.
- DEFCON on Steam has its authentication keys reissued once per month, while non-Steam versions have permanent ones. This gives advantage in revoking leaked keys and evading bans on DedCon servers. I think it is the same for Multiwinia.
- Prison Architect players who paid for it on SendOwl were forced to either move to Steam or to give up on updates and further downloads, after the rights were sold to Paradox Interactive.
- DEFCON VR only available on Steam, and only for Windows. Scanner Sombre was not released for GNU/Linux.
- IIUC game demos only available for Windows on Steam. Uplink demo not available there.
- Bonus differences. Things like soundtracks missing (Uplink)/separate purchase (Darwinia, DEFCON) on Steam, different formats (Uplink soundtrack, GOG (MP3 only) and Humble Bundle (MP3+FLAC); Humble Bundle lacks bonus tracks not included in the game).

Update on Multiwinia: it turned out its keys are not reissued like on DEFCON on Steam.

Posting my topic here too:

When I run Darwinia 10K edition, none of the ingame text shows up as readable characters.
It seems I get a bunch of unicode picto glyphs in place of english text. Like it's configured to use the WingDings font for example. This is on Win7.

The offline installer of the game version that ran well on my system was REPLACED by a non working version. Without consent or notice! The old version (legacy) is only provided via Galaxy, which I don't want to and cannot use.

After the latest update, apparently Linux support is back! The new Linux installer name is darwinia_2_2_0_107_ga89766c6_gnu_linux_full_55262.sh

New update today (2.2.0.107) doesn't work...says "You have macOS 10.14.6. The application requires 10.13 or later"...wut. Running from the shell has a reference to a non-existent CoreHaptics framework. Previous version (2.2.0.48) is fine.

Actually not quite fine...this is obviously a minor issue, but the raytraced spheres intro crashes the app after a few seconds with this:

[mvk-error] VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST: Command buffer 0x7fd14952ebd0 "vkQueueSubmit CommandBuffer on Queue 0-0" execution failed (code 9): Invalid Resource (IOAF code 9)
[error] [GL] OpenGL Message | 0x00000502 source = API (0x8246), type = Error (0x824c), severity = High (0x9146), message = Internal Vulkan error (-4): The logical or physical device has been lost.
[critical] [default] Graphics context has been lost!

Did you report this to GOG support and if so, what did they say?

Installers for the legacy version of the game are again available (in the Extras).

Except for Linux, apparently. Round and round we go...