Sprintathon 20261015 - Enemy AI and Rendering performance optimizations

This update focuses on smoother rendering and more forgiving character collisions.

Enhanced enemy AI:

Springy character collisions: collision footprints can compress by up to 20% under crowd pressure, helping characters squeeze past each other. Added forward pressure to help crowded passages clear.

Improved overlap handling: further work on separating characters and reducing erratic turning when they collide.

Performance:

Cheaper light shafts: a dedicated sky-and-occlusion pass replaces the full material redraw, using simpler shaders and a smaller source buffer.

Smoother gameplay startup: expanded shader and sprite preloading, with fixes to texture-cache behavior that caused repeated uploads during gameplay.

Lighting optimizations: surfaces skip scenery lights that cannot reach them, and shader setup avoids repeated lookups of unused uniforms.

Sprite optimizations: motion blur skips out-of-bounds sampling iterations, while fully transparent pixels bypass unnecessary lighting and fog calculations.

Stability: fixed a renderer cleanup issue that could cause a crash when quitting.

Diagnostics: expanded CPU and GPU profiling to help track down remaining performance spikes.

Sprintathon -20261013- Enhanced Enemy AI

Enhanced Enemy AI

This release expands the optional Enhanced Enemy AI setting with new movement and combat behavior:

• More fluid flying movement, with banking dodges for small flyers.
• Improved friendly-fire avoidance and sidestepping to find clearer firing lanes.
• Ground enemies spread out and slide around nearby characters.
• Ranged enemies maintain combat distance and favor nearby reachable higher ground.
• Melee enemies hold position within striking range, reducing stop/start movement.
• Players can gradually push characters aside and gently slide around them.
• Fixed a pathfinding failure that could make ranged enemies repeatedly play activation sounds instead of engaging.

Sprintathon - Visual texturing mode.

Adds a built in fully featured visual texturing mode

Instructions:

Start a single-player game and press Shift+F8, or your assigned Visual Mode key.

• Tab: switch between flying around and using the cursor.
• WASD + mouse: move and look. Use Jump/Crouch to move up/down.
• Textures and lighting: select a texture or light swatch on the left, then click a surface. The Texture and Lighting checkboxes control what gets applied.
• Ctrl+drag: slide a texture.
• Shift+drag: adjust floor/ceiling height in 0.1 increments.
• Map light: choose an existing map light by ID, including animated or switch-controlled lights.
• Edit panels: enable the checkbox, then click a wall to configure a switch or panel.
• Surface: Transparent: edit grates and decorative wall textures.
• Items: select scenery on the right and click to place it. Use the eraser to remove scenery.
• E: open doors for texturing.
• Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z: undo/redo.
• Save / Save As: save your map. Use Save As to keep the original.
• Esc: leave Visual Mode.

Click a panel’s header to collapse it.

Sprintathon — Liquid Lighting & Caustics

Liquid lighting and caustics

• Animated wall caustics from lava and brightly shaded liquids.
• Separate Liquid Caustics, Caustic Strength, and Liquid Fluorescence controls under Graphics → Light FX.

These lighting effects remain experimental and depend on scenario artwork and lighting.

Sprintathon — 20261004-1439

Dynamic Lighting Update

This release introduces experimental dynamic colored lighting, alongside expanded graphics options, new gameplay features, richer sound, and rendering optimizations.

Dynamic lighting

Projectiles, explosions, flares, and bright parts of textures and scenery can now cast colored light onto the surrounding environment. Lighting also tints sprites and your weapon.
The feature remains experimental. Its appearance depends on the scenario’s artwork, and higher light counts can be demanding.

More atmospheric graphics

• Blended sector shading softens transitions between differently lit areas, including adjoining liquid surfaces.
• Improved transparent, rippling liquids with fixes for visible polygon seams.
• Transparent flamethrower effects with heat distortion.
• Projectile motion-blur trails, with longer, denser trails during bullet time.
• Drop red, flickering flares with smoke and positional burning sounds.

Gameplay and sound

• Checkpoint save system creates saves during quiet, safe moments, with a Load last checkpoint option in the pause menu.
• Much faster checkpoint reloads within the same level by retaining unchanged sprite resources.
• Optional physics corpses and bullet ricochets.
• Cavern echo adds atmosphere to enclosed spaces while leaving outdoor areas unaffected.
• Wet footsteps when wading through liquids.
• Optional No oxygen drain in vacuum levels, available under Stamina.

Performance

This release includes improvements to lighting calculations, shader work, draw order, portal visibility, and sprite loading.

Sprintathon 20260924-0031

A substantial graphical upgrade for Sprintathon.

Highlights:

• Light shafts with configurable sun direction and elevation
• Screen-space ambient occlusion
• Anamorphic lens flares
• Dynamic sprite shadows
• Animated and drifting fog effects
• Deep-fog haze and distance darkening
• Refractive invisibility effect
• 2xSaI sprite and texture upscaling
• Low, Medium and High graphics presets
• Reorganized Graphics preferences
• Optional level timer with stored best times
• Numerous rendering, HUD and gameplay fixes

Linux:
Install or replace an existing installation with:

flatpak install --user ./Sprintathon-20260924-0031-x86_64.flatpak

If Flatpak reports that the same application branch is already installed, uninstall the existing application first:

flatpak uninstall --user io.github.visageeee.Sprintathon

This does not remove saved application data unless --delete-data is explicitly used.

Sprintathon 20260920-1704

Highlights:

• Optional single-pistol scope
• Updated liquid rendering and underwater refraction
• Sprintathon HUD and movement improvements

Linux Install:

flatpak install --user --reinstall ./Sprintathon-20260920-1704-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run --branch=stable io.github.visageeee.Sprintathon

Sprintathon 20260917-2352

New Sprintathon Flatpak build.

Highlights:

• First macOS and Windows builds
• Animated media ripples and wet-texture effects
• Separate liquid rendering preferences
• Configurable liquid opacity and per-media animation speeds
• Bullet-time-aware liquid animation
• Wavy underwater view distortion
• Screen-space refraction and magnification through transparent liquids
• Expanded fog rendering and preferences

Sprintathon Flatpak 20260915-2343

Cartwheel dodges, automatic dodge bullet time, and updated movement effects.

Sprintathon 20260914-1458

Full Changelog: flatpak-20260914-0237...flatpak-20260914-1458