Darwinia now requires hardware and drivers that support a minimum of at least one of these graphics APIs:
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.
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 (https://angleproject.org).
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 (https://github.com/mackron/miniaudio). The sound engine supports any of the backends that MiniAudio does, including but not limited to WASAPI (Windows), PulseAudio (Linux), and CoreAudio (macOS).
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.
There have been many bugfixes on numerous axes, including scripting, level editing, input handling, graphics, sound, stability, and game AI.
