We are happy to announce BAR’s Recoil Engine just received a hot update. This release brings in a ton of improvements and bugfixes as well as some exciting possibilities for BAR developers to utilise. We extracted the player-facing group of changes, read below:

Visual and UI Improvements

• New water normal map (waterbump_4tiles.dds) - default water looks better and more dynamic
• Crisper minimap rendering under SSAA (anti-aliasing) - improves UI clarity for players using enhanced graphics
• Minimap rotation in 90° increments - players can rotate the minimap to match map orientation
• Crisper minimap in case of SSAA
• Praise the sun! The shading texture (used by minimap, water, and grass) now tracks sun position changes immediately
• Skybox rotation support - mappers/modders (and possibly settings) can now rotate the skybox
• Terrain normals and shading updates now GPU-side - boosted performance and visual fidelity of terrain lighting
• Font rendering performance improved
• The new UI framework just got an svg (vector graphics format) support opening up awesome posibilities for future UI rework

Gameplay & Mechanics

• Better unit heading on steep slopes - Improves unit orientation when moving on slopes. Most visible with all-terrain units which will no longer “wobble” on bumpy cliffs.
• Missiles now respect myGravity from weaponDef - fine-tuned missile behavior, can change how they arc or fall. Might be used for more optimal nuke trajectories and such,
• Switch push-resistant units to trap check system - more robust collision avoidance and pathing for certain units
• Improve handling of HAPFS (Hybrid A Pathfinding)* - units navigate better around complex terrain/obstacles
• Reduce memory usage of QTPFS Pathfinding system
• Units being built update their height in real time - visibly smoother construction animations

Bugfixes

• Fixed minimap icons revealing whether a building ghost was dead or not.
• Landed aircraft no longer take off when EMP’d
• Waypoint update issues - addressed bugs in unit pathing or waypoint assignments
• Unintended unit group removal during ForcedKillUnit - prevents surprise loss of unit control groups
• improved archives checksumming performance
• Fixed affinity for HyperThreading cpus
• Server no longer automatically forcestarts the game if there is nobody connected after 30s
• Units no longer removed from groups at the start of their death animation
• Fixed (or at least mostly reduced) a freeze when you remove multiple thousands of units from a factory queue

We are also delighted to welcome new contributors to the wngine team. With this release several new contributors have made their first commits to the engine code: @ Moose, @ tizbac., @ ElMorrison, sirkcion. Thank you guys!

Let us know if you notice any issues after this update here. Pick up “Development” role from “channels and roles UI on Discord.

For full changelog see: https://beyond-all-reason.github.io/spring/changelogs/changelog-2025-03