Allegro 5.2.1 Released

 

Allegro is a C/C++ game library with a found place in my memory.  It was one of the very first, freely available open source 2D C/C++ frameworks and it continues to be developed to this very day.  In fact, Allegro 5.2.1 was just released.

 

From the change logs.

Core:

  • Optimize bitmap holding a bit (Bruce Pascoe).

  • Add al_get/set_depth/samples (OpenGL only for now).

  • Optimize destruction performance when you have thousands of objects (e.g. sub-bitmaps).

  • Use low floating point precision for the OpenGL fragment shaders, which helps performance a lot on mobile platforms.

  • Don’t stop and join the timer thread when stopping the last timer (prevents unnecessary delay in this situation on some platforms).

  • Add al_backup_dirty_bitmap and al_backup_dirty_bitmaps to more finely control when bitmap context backup is performed.

Android port:

  • Fix Android app issues when woken up during sleep.

  • Specify the Android toolchain file on the command line now. ANDROID_NDK_TOOLCHAIN_ROOT now has to be specified in an environment variable.

OSX port:

  • Improve joystick enumeration (Todd Cope).

  • Make al_set_new_window_title work correctly.

  • Don’t send duplicate mouse move events.

  • Fix mouse warping behavior.

  • Exit fullscreen mode if ALLEGRO_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW is set when destroying a display (otherwise if you destroy and recreate display without terminating the program, a white window kicks around).

iOS port:

  • Make it compile again.

  • Don’t backup textures as it is unnecessary.

  • Update minimum iOS to version to 6.1.

  • Disable the native png loader in favor of libpng, as it is broken on Apple’s end.

  • Create library when creating the archive.

Windows port:

  • Fix the D3D target bitmap bug.

  • Clear display to black right away to avoid an ugly white flash.

Raspberry Pi port:

  • Fix system cursor support.

Linux port:

  • Make al_set_new_window_title work correctly.

Build system:

  • Use PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR and PROJECT_BINARY_DIR instead of CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR and CMAKE_BINARY_DIR. This lets you use Allegro as a sub-project in your CMake project.

  • Fix GDIPlus finding in cmake-gui (Bruce Pascoe).

  • Add .gitignore and ignore build/ dir (Mark Oates).

  • Fix building examples with non-Allegro dependencies with the monolith build.

Documentation:

  • Various documentation updates (Daniel Johnson and others).

Other:

  • Add more #include statements in Allegro headers, so it’s easier to use them in isolation (Jordan Woehr).

  • Allow marking tests as being hardware only.

  • Prefix some private Allegro macros and types to not pollute the namespace.

  • Make set_shader_uniform api const-correct (Bruce Pascoe).

Audio addon:

  • Adjust loop end position when calling al_set_sample_instance_length.

Acodec addon:

  • Allow file-backed audio streams to be restarted after they finish.

  • Add Opus codec support.

Image addon:

  • Fail gracefully if not built with PNG/JPG loaders.

Native dialog addon:

Font addon:

  • Make al_get_text_dimensions and al_get_glyph_dimensions return exact bounding boxes (koro).

  • Add ALLEGRO_GLYPH structure and al_get_glyph, allowing for some additional optimization when drawing fonts.

Examples:

  • Add more controls to ex_audio_props.

  • Add an example of using Enet with Allegro.

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