News

Latest news

    GemRB 0.9.5 released! (Riches beyond compare edition)

    The GemRB team is proud to announce a new major release.

    It features significant changes in several areas. The audio subsystem received many improvements and input handling was upgraded especially for users of controllers. The pathfinding performance was dramatically increased, some tests quantifying that as 13-161 % for short paths, 48-196 % for medium paths, 68-146 % for long paths. EE-like zoom is now available in all games, just set “Zoom Lock” to 0 in the gem-*.ini file in your game folder.

    On the game support side of things this release brings many improvements for IWD2, now considered as polished as the other games, several fixes for PST and more work on compatibility with the EEs. Support for BG2EE is still experimental, but the Shadows of Amn portion is known to be completable. Our demo received a much nicer avatar and new asset creation capabilities were added (like animations not limited to 15 FPS).

    Due to user feedback the SDL1 backend has not been deprecated, but provisionally updated. There is a wish to move to C++17 in the next release cycle. If this would negatively impact your platform, do let us know.

    Sources and packages are available. You can get them from here.

    Full changelog digest:

    GemRB v0.9.5 (2026-03-23):
  New features:
    - partial audio system rewrite for better (spatial) audio and music
    - iwd2: customizable action bar, weapon set switching, item usability info
    - detect illusions, spell info on right-click, various hardcoded pst bonuses
    - smooth keyboard scrolling, in-game zoom
    - GUI enhancements are now configurable from within the game

  Improved features:
    - pathfinder and drawing speedups
    - video players, animations, controller input
    - iwd2 weapon sets, pst GUI, pst level up, ee compatibility
    - scripting, effects, projectiles
    - bugfixes

    Thanks to everyone that contributed their time, including: 2play, Andrej Pancik, ArminiusTux, arosenow, Ashvith10, Balxkodehodet, BinBashBanana, Boris Kruglov, Brad Allred, Bubb13, burner1024, CalamariDetective, Clort, CodeSpartan, Dariusz Pyś, DartPower, dbojan, dolio, exhuman, Florian Piesche, HugeTaffer, Jaka Kranjc, Jens Kleine-Herzbruch, JohnSmithBH84, Juan Mathews Rebello Santos, jvgp100, Lucas Z., MarcelHB, mark-314159, markfoged, MvKord, orcutt989, packrat0x, nerifuture, Peppersawce, quangtrinhvan93, Rodrigo Santellan, rubyFeedback, Stefan Schlosser, StVitruvius, Timo Gurr, traveler-gemrb, Tugcga, Ulroxiel, Warphi.

    Notes to packagers:

    • There is a wish to move to C++17 in the next release. If this would negatively impact your platform, let us know.
    • New config keys were added and some removed, so if you ship your own config defaults, we recommend syncing them with these changes:
      • GUIEnhancements has been removed and is now stored in the main game ini file plus configurable through the options screen
      • GamepadPointerAccel, GamepadLDeadZone, GamepadRDeadZone are keys for customizing controller input parameters
      • UseSoftKeyboard was unused and has been removed
      • EdgeScrollOffset determines when to trigger area scrolling when the cursor is close to the window edge
      • GamepadSupport replaces the compile time define USE_SDL_CONTROLLER_API

    If you want to be notified of GemRB releases via email, subscribe to the gemrb-release mailing list.

    What’s next?

    The plan for 0.9.6 is to work on polishing, improving moddability and new game support, maybe getting bg2ee out of experimental status, deal with some postponed issues, and whatever piques the contributor’s fancy.

    We’re looking for ninjas to help with replacing FreeType (with SDL_ttf) and libvlc, GLESv2 support), general Enhanced Edition compatibility and several problems unique to apple devices. Other contributions are of course welcome as well.

News in the making

If you want a curt overview of what to expect in the next release, check the changelog in the making, which we update approximately every 100 changesets. If you want to know almost everything, follow the commit log instead.

If you want to know only when new releases happen, you can subscribe to the very low frequency gemrb-release mailing list.

Older news