After five years since the last update, I’ve released a new update to Ascension. Wait, what? And why?
The 1.43 update is nothing big, mostly just a compatibility patch for newer JRE versions. Some platforms no longer have audio because of incompatibilities with the audio library, but this is at least handled gracefully now where 1.4 just crashed. On Windows it includes a private JRE which works correctly, and it also works correctly with the default OpenJDK on Ubuntu at the time of writing. It’s now built against OpenJDK 8 targeting JRE 8 so the minimum requirement is up from Java 7 to Java 8.
The only functional difference is that saves are now stored in the user folder (*nix) or AppData (Windows). The game will automatically try to move your old saves the first time you run it. This change was made for consistency with newer titles and because the install folder is not guaranteed to be writable.
It was… interesting to go back and work on such an old project.
- Ascension isn’t under source control, because I didn’t know how to use it yet. Instead, there are several copies of the project folder, some of which are labelled correctly.
- Ascension is also so old that it uses decimal versioning (1.5 > 1.41 > 1.4) rather than semantic-ish versioning (1.41.0 > 1.5.0 > 1.4.1 > 1.4.0).
- The code is really, really, apocalyptically bad. Seriously, I’ve worked with various bits of bad code in the past few years (and even written some) but this ancient project takes it to a new level.
- I really do much prefer C# to Java, although this might not be entirely fair given that I haven’t used Java seriously in years.
- Eclipse looks pretty much the same as it did seven years ago.
You can grab Ascension 1.43 here.