RPG game engine Flare gets improved gamepad support, fonts and more in v1.13

Flare is a free and open source game engine for creating RPGs, plus it also has its own Empyrean Campaign to play through and it continued to get enhanced to be a bit more modern. Version 1.13 was just recently release, bringing with it some pretty major enhancements.

A big one is improved gamepad support that was overhauled. They’ve moved from using the SDL_Joystick API to using the SDL_GameController API, along with improved gamepad mapping and fixes to some deadzone issues. Navigating the UI is also quite a bit easier now too, as various actions give you a pop-up now to easily pick what to do.

Something more gameplay related is the addition of a fog-of-war. This is supported on both the game world, as well as the minimap. Font rendering also saw a huge improvement! Previously slightly difficult to read text is now dramatically clearer on the UI especially. Multiple equipment loadouts is now a thing too, so you can quickly swap between your favourite sets.

Nice to see this open source project pull in some pretty big advancements, hope to see it continue!

See the release notes for more. They’ve now added an AppImage to download and run easily or Linux, or there’s the Flathub page too.