Update Sextiotre (63)

build id: 6547A592

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

MAINTENANCE UPDATE
This is a general maintenance and compatibility update, seeing as my general codebase has been mutating for over a year since Update 62, and it's always a good idea to have the deployed version be as close as possible to what I'm working with in the interest of finding and adressing potential bugs.

EXPANDED USER OPTIONS
In those modes with fine-grained control over various plan generation and rules settings certain settings have been expanded to include a new "unknown" value, which simply means that the game will randomize a value for you. These new settings are also available when creating user plans, and all existing user plans have been migrated to the new format.

SHADER MODEL 3.0 SHOULD NOW WORK ON AMD GPUS
The long-standing issue of materials "disappearing" on AMD GPUs along with the mess of trying to detect your gpu, forcing your settings to shader model 2.0, as well as the whole stop-gap of shader model 2.0 to begin with SHOULD now be resolved. The issue turned out to NOT be a bad implementation of the DirectX9.0c specification by AMD (as I had suspected for well over 10 years) but rather a LENIENT implementation on nVidia's partt which allowed me to (erroenously) specify "mixed" shaders where the vertex shader was 2.0 and the pixel shader was 3.0. This is explicitly forbidden by the specification, and the error was entirely mine.

As usual I have limited ability to test all of this, but I have verified that shader model 3.0 works on my own AMD hardware. I would appreciate reports from anyone who has an AMD GPU in the forums.

While I await broad verification that shader model 3.0 works on all AMD hardware, as well as in the interest of potential performance gains, I have left shader model 2.0 i the game as an option.

MISCELLANEOUS

• fixed bad XP calculation
  
• showing N / A when next rank is beyond maximum
  
• made list / grid buttons consistent with new blue / orange tab scheme
  
• fixed fancy space windows to work in shader model 2.0 (were erroneously requiring shader model 3.0)
  
• fixed lamp mode switch crash on shader model 2.0 - this is apparently because "legacy lamp" uses more too many shader ops for shader model 2.0 (65 of 64 available), and as a result "legacy lamp" is disabled when running shader model 2.0
  
• fixed security table collision bug that occured when the security table was too close to the reactor
  
• live sentries (pulsing diamonds) display is disabled on the tracker/map when the power is out
  
• removed PvP tags from store page
  
• added LAN co-op tag to store page
  

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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