Wee, cool. I did peak at the main update notes, and just saw some stuff about films, and I also haven't played or downloaded any new scenarios in years. But maybe this is a good excuse to start doing that again. Thanks!
: You could say that.
: I’ll put it this way: Before 1.3 beta 3, I found the mouse almost unusable.
: It’s extremely smooth now, though.
: Just make sure you reduce your mouse sensitivity settings. A lot. I have them
: both at 0.25 and I sometimes think it still might be too high.
: This isn’t the only major fix in 1.3.1 that makes it worth upgrading, by the
: way: there’s finally a 64-bit Windows build (if you’re on 64-bit Windows,
: go to the Aleph One Releases Page below and get the
: “AlephOne-20200904-Win64.zip” download), which means that the issues most
: players had with Eternal 1.2 should be completely gone (unless they’re
: still on 32-bit Windows for who knows what reason); it’s got some big
: improvements to the rendering engine; it’s got a fix for a nasty bug that
: caused the game to freeze if you played 15 levels in a row without dying,
: which finally makes it practical to develop a Maratroidvania (it may never
: be finished, since RyokoTK seems to have 4GOTTEN again, but Echoes of the
: Ashen shows us what’s possible: https://youtu.be/zjvbhDb-Hss ); much
: better controls for music and sound effect volume; support for Marathon 1
: scenarios like Trojan; and quite a few other features.
: At this point, I may even drop support of 1.2.1 for future releases of games
: I develop, precisely because we’re likely to go at least partially into
: Maratroidvania territory for a few of them (Where Monsters Are in Dreams
: is likely to use this for a few levels, and I’m planning to use it for
: most of the second half of Chronicles). For the Tempus revamp, we may
: elect to specifically require 1.3.1, since it fixes the glow map
: wobble/pulsate on floors and ceilings, which will enable us to use our
: revamped teleporter texture with the same pulsate effect it had in the
: original releases without it looking colossally stupid.
: In any case, on the whole, unless there’s some major reason not to, it’s
: generally advisable to use the latest stable releases of software, since
: it usually contains significant bug fixes, some of which can patch major
: security holes. (As an example, I used 1.3.0 to render some old Aleph One
: speedruns of M1, because one of its bugs results in it providing the
: correct timing for speedrun purposes, at the cost of using the wrong
: engine and thus introducing possible film desync in a few levels for which
: there weren’t any speedrun videos to render. This was a bug that was
: obviously worth fixing, but for the specific purpose of rendering old
: speedrun videos, it was fortuitous that it existed.)
: In this case, Aleph One didn’t have any major security holes of which I’m
: aware, which makes upgrading less urgent, but other developers may make
: similar choices to mine in the future and stop supporting pre-1.3
: releases. AFAIK, mods in some other FPS communities almost always specify
: the latest version of the game as a requirement. I don’t think this is a
: bad policy.
: tl;dr: Yes, upgrade now, the mouse is way better, and so is a ton of other
: stuff. The feature list of each release is at the link below, and I’d
: recommend just getting 1.3.1 immediately, and specifically the
: “AlephOne-20200904-Win64.zip” build if you’re running 64-bit Windows.
