Read on for what’s new! 

For this release, we’re including new alpha versions of two new maps, Forlorn and Antares. The maps are currently works in progress, and as usual we’d like to solicit community feedback with regards to how they play. You can play them locally through the /devmap command in console, or you can play against bots or other players on one of our servers. As their designs solidify, they’ll continue to receive updates over successive releases. By the time they’re done, these two new maps will raise our stock map count to ten!

We’ve also had some work done on particles for this release. Most importantly, we now have support for soft particles, which you can currently see demonstrated by the acid tube, booster, and grenade particle effects. These are currently added via a shader keyword, but we are working on having all particles automatically softened. In addition, we now have effects oriented towards the view center instead of towards the view plane, offering a more visually consistent way of looking at particle effects. The maximum number of visible particles was also increased, and should hopefully allow you to see the snow on Chasm again.

The bug where certain players crashed a server upon disconnecting was resolved, as well as a few other bug fixes for this release, summarized below. 

7c2917c Update changelog.

deaca2b Update changelog.

5633b82 Increase particle system limits.

d0d8663 Add cg_spawnEffects to disable spawn colorgrading since OSX doesn’t like it

4deff12 Fix error message

6e75400 Move build timer under momentum bar Fixes #455

06baab5 Revert “Add a check to avoid sending sync messages while handling async messages”

aa452fc Clear the tutorial text when the cvar is disabled Fixes #457

5e8ab1e Replace std::map with std::unordered_map in PropertyMap

96e94a5 Restore previous weapon HUD upon vid_restart

706a0b2 Adding /playSound /playMusic /stopMusic command

5a219bc Fix id of the ‘Resume Action’ button Fixes #464

a7e1c9b Remove feature test macros from qcommon.h

2711497 Detect a missing opusfile at configure time. Fixes #467.

366e8d0 Implement soft particle shader.

37655d9 Add depthFade to the acid tube acid shader

5607dbb Attempt to mitigate #409. Add logging for when it does happen

89dba82 Orient sprites toward view center.

dde6031 Add depthFade to the booster spores shader.

786e8c4 Avoid division by zero in Tess_SurfaceSprite.

1c5e599 Name the magic number in Tess_SurfaceSprite.

7569c59 Attempt to fix interpolation of fadeDepth.

8ea137a Version bump to Alpha 33