Woohoo! It's been a little while since we released Allegro! This release as always was made possible by the hard efforts of our many amazing contributors, some new and some old. Many bugs were squashed, and many features were added. One particular feature I want to highlight is the new Android build system courtesy of Elias, which makes compiling Allegro for Android a cinch!

You can grab the source archives and MinGW packages here. The MinGW dependency packages have been updated to the newest versions of dependencies (not libwebp yet though), and I've tried to make the archive naming scheme be more useful.

MSVC packages are available on Nuget, and Ubuntu PPA and OSX homebrew will be updated in the coming days.

Enjoy!

Changes from 5.2.2 to 5.2.3 (October 2017)

The main developers this time were: Elias Pschernig, SiegeLord, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, Vitaliy V. Tokarev, Simon Naarmann, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro, Trent Gamblin.

Core

• Add al_path_ustr (Bruce Pascoe).

  
  

• Handle NULL sections more gracefully with the config API.

  
  

• Add missing glStencilMaskSeparate prototype (Aaron Bolyard).

  
  

• Add al_clear_keyboard_state.

  
  

• Don't add blank lines before config sections when writing them out.

  
  

• Fix fs_stdio_read_directory appending an extra slash.

  
  

• Fix al_set_window_constraints when the flag ALLEGRO_MAXIMIZED is set.

  
  

• Fix al_set_clipping_rectangle when out-of-bounds (Bruce Pascoe).

  
  

• Enable blocked locking of S3TC formats unconditionally.

Raspberry Pi port

• Set default file interface when attempting to read /boot/config.txt.

Android port

• Replace the old build system that used deprecated tools with a new Gradle-based system.

  
  

• Work around crashes on some Androids when an FBO is bound during egl_SwapBuffers.

  
  

• Fix LocalRef leak when opening files using APK interface.

  
  

• Remove -Wno-psabi switches from Toolchain-android.cmake.

Linux port

• Make three finger salute and LED toggle configurable.

  
  

• Fix KEY_CHAR events under X11 with compose key enabled.

  
  

• Fix clearing the ALLEGRO_MAXIMIZED flag under X11.

  
  

• Add al_x_set_initial_icon.

  
  

• Free wm_hints in set_initial_icon.

  
  

• Read Allegro system config from ~/.allegro5rc on Unix.

Windows port

• Make bitmap contents persist again after device loss.

  
  

• Add large file support for MSVC.

  
  

• Only test cooperative lavel if device is known to be lost.

  
  

• Don't leak the D3DEffect when attaching multiple sources.

  
  

• Fix al_get_monitor_info (Tobias Scheuer).

OSX port

• Various fixes for OSX 10.6.

  
  

• Fix some Bluetooth mice on OS X (Tom Bass).

  
  

• Fixed deprecation warning when starting OSX console app (Tom Bass).

  
  

• Fix OSX magic main with the LTO switch (Evert Glebbeek).

Audio addon

• Allow setting the buffer size for ALSA.

  
  

• Don't apply gain twice for sample instances and streams when pan is not ALLEGRO_PAN_NONE.

  
  

• Disallow attaching mixers with different channel configurations.

  
  

• Add al_set_sample_instance_channel_matrix and al_set_audio_stream_channel_matrix.

  
  

• Don't free the extra pointer in DirectSound if voice fails to play for some reason.

  
  

• Add al_lock_sample_id and al_unlock_sample_id.

  
  

• For OpenAL, detach from buffers before deleting.

  
  

• Return true when seeking mod audio streams.

Acodec addon

• Free audio stream buffer in flac_stream_close.

  
  

• Add DUMB 2.0 support.

Color addon

• Add XYZ, xyY, Lab and LCH color spaces.

  
  

• Remove "purwablue" named color, add "rebeccablue".

Native dialog addon

• Improve save dialogs under GTK driver.

  
  

• Improved path behavior in GTK native file dialog ([bk]door.maus).

  
  

• Enable ALLEGRO_FILECHOOSER_FOLDER On Linux (Todd Cope).

  
  

• Use unique ids to identify menu items internally, fixing their event sources.

  
  

• Make the native message box return 2 on Windows when cancel is pressed.

Image addon

• Set compression level to Z_DEFAULT_COMPRESSION in png saver by default.

  
  

• Make PNG, JPEG compression level configurable.

  
  

• Make PNG gamma value configurable.

  
  

• Add WebP support with libwebp.

Video addon

• Allow calling al_init_video_addon after al_shutdown_video_addon was called.

Build system

• Detect and link optional FreeType dependencies.

  
  

• Add a CMake option to prefer static dependencies.

  
  

• Fix SDL platform build.

Python binding

• Fix some corrupted regexps in the generation script (verderten).

Documentation

• Lots of improvements as usual (Edgar Reynaldo, Mark Oates, twobit).

Examples

• Fix various issues with ex_curl.

  
  

• Fix memory leak in ex_audio_simple (Rm Beer).

SHA256 SUMS

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d1d47f6fb66d9e0ae33a9a584562069df5cab3f13c432cd56cfa7f0109b111cc  Allegro.5.2.3.0.nupkg
5a4d40601899492b697ad5cfdf11d8265fe554036a2c912c86a6e6d23001f905  allegro-5.2.3.0.tar.gz
66b15ca57a3144e91ffba4488de871d2d675c02ab28c42bccc1f630f109e3d53  allegro-5.2.3.0.zip
f99046c3617d15a5edaaaa544dd483adc9d2510b16b6f33af4b8019a61bdc632  Allegro.5.2.3.1.nupkg
b071150075acc0ae4acd6c80c94f15ae880bbedd7ce4455e0529677777d9dcfb  AllegroDeps.1.6.0.0.nupkg
092ae18cddd57956cc655ae2779833824551d6eeb63147ba253c1a32b27de4bd  AllegroDeps.1.7.0.0.nupkg
da8833542085b15563e3c59ce2bc4a7a5b7c52ba65a8d2570c8508e16f72f1bf  allegro_deps-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-1.6.0.zip
04cbaa0430de784ec190092b7f3b023b30bd4fdaa31c4c9c4ab01b1350f95f9a  allegro_deps-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-1.7.0.zip
142378919baf9cf78c8ea06d6d686709f60c5ddcb4fea88763ac650aacef9963  allegro_deps-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-1.6.0.zip
d14f1eeec0b82cf9af20f3645e00d8f0e85ac6db94f77ec8e02a302f7d4d8f36  allegro_deps-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-1.7.0.zip
1947dfdcae4f1cbfc57e7d9e7246bd3b514123686ee7d169f40655197beaef2a  allegro-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-dynamic-5.2.3.0.zip
5aaa8e71a2bbd18df81f5e03e9212c23273c28973a68e2c9d958999a0c03d1e1  allegro-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-dynamic-5.2.3.1.zip
36c67adf14878729e2560812bf19f8927fd5f2782968f0b150895d3281a888f7  allegro-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-static-5.2.3.0.zip
f0bbfa65858ae903cf62e6c91385fa95a1a5a25007865d29e42eb67096273997  allegro-i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-dwarf-static-5.2.3.1.zip
b3c0b53c2d1fd9d6636d0945706729dfd52758f9877be7d68dfc4f52c1e17554  allegro-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-dynamic-5.2.3.0.zip
2cc37df3e8afe908fa5dfe69b18c9dcf1c5bef096598bf5d2b7ecc62c43140d6  allegro-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-dynamic-5.2.3.1.zip
1f0364413871e776b81217dd6227ba9a35e884517baa0b8b2541f4e5980cc3a2  allegro-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-static-5.2.3.0.zip
54c9f350a5d2bba563e4416f81304654fa5066536d615e52259ff9218a1f651b  allegro-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-static-5.2.3.1.zip

Awesome, congrats all! I appreciate all your efforts to keep this framework going!

Congrats on the stable release!

It's an honor to be listed among the main devs for connecting the wires between Allegro 5 and DUMB 2.0. I've learned a lot and contributed to both libraries along the way.

-- Simon

Hey SiegeLord, thanks for your hard work.

In the dependencies, did you happen to fix physfs? There's a bug in physfs 2.0.3 that makes files in archives not load properly. I have a patch from a mailing list that fixes this if you need it.

There's also a bug in libtheora, but that only affects building theora's encoder_example.c .

Edit
By the way, could we get download links to the compiler versions you used to build allegro and the dependencies?

Edit2
SiegeLord, here's the patch for physfs 2.0.3. Don't know if this was fixed in 3.0.0 or not.

zip_seek.diff

Wow, great job on the release!

EDIT: Nevermind, they no longer use zlib, so they don't have the bug anymore, so it's all fixed on their end. Just need to update.

Looks like PhysFS 3.0.0 does not include the fix... unfortunate. But there was a bit of activity around it recently, so perhaps it can be sent in. Either way, maybe I'll patch it in soonish.

Awesome, nice work!

Awesome, great work!
Thank you for effort towards this amazing library!

If you don't mind, I think it would be nice for audio addon to have tempo change speed functionality in near future.

We have the "al_set_sample_instance_speed" which is altering pitch and tempo at the same time. It could be divided into 3 different functions (pitch, tempo and this speed function).

To understand what i'm talking about you have to open Audacity and some sound to work with. Play with "Change Pitch/Speed/Tempo" functions under "Effects" menu on the sound.

What are current changes / needs / milestones that people can help with to continue development?

Any addons? Modules? etc

I've considered writing a RawAPI driver for multiple mouse/keyboards in the past. I'd like to do a full API that decouples effectors (inputs) from their actions and allow changing things like applying function curves (change linear input to exponential or vice-versa), debouncing, etc. But that's a much bigger project and might be an external library that allows linking to Allegro (and other libs).

I use DAlleg. Anything added or tested you need with that, Siegelord?

Chris Katko, see the mailing list for a small discussion of Multi mice/keyboard support. Basically you use the RawInput API on Windows and monitor all the HID devices attached. I wrote a program that does this, called ManyMouse, which you can view here :

https://github.com/EdgarReynaldo/ManyMouse

For good measure, I updated the docker build environment to 5.2.3

https://hub.docker.com/r/amarillion/alleg5-buildenv/tags/
https://hub.docker.com/r/amarillion/alleg5-plus-buildenv/tags/

There was an issue with the Nuget packages, and I patched the PhysFS bug, so the windows packages were correspondingly updated.

This is actually a pretty complex algorithm, while the simple speed manipulation is pretty trivial. I don't know if it can be done in a streaming fashion. Besides this, we'd need to figure out some API for this.

In general, reducing the number of issues is something we work on, https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/issues, we have a number of issues tagged 'Easy'. Overall, the input system could use a bit of work: on Windows we don't properly support IME, and on Linux we're not quite doing the right thing (https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/issues/723). Also joystick support really could use a rework across all platforms. There are quite a few other longstanding issues as well.

Am I required to compile something with that latest version? Lately, I'm trying to learn about timer in this version but it crash. As well as for the font.

ajsuson, post a new thread with your source code and the problem and we'll work on it.

I may compile binaries, don't know yet, probably will at some point.

I just use whatever MSYS2 provides. The filenames for the binaries should contain all the necessary information, I think.

Good work, I'm almost afraid to try it.

You can use Rubber Band for this. I use it in one of my projects.

If you build rubberband from source, make sure to use link time optimization. It GREATLY improves the library's performance.

For those rare jalleg users on Win64 I've released a new version of https://github.com/gillius/jalleg-rt with the 64bit Windows runtime that I got from https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/releases/download/5.2.3.0/allegro-x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-7.2.0-posix-seh-static-5.2.3.1.zip

jalleg binding library version is the same, only if you want to pull in a pre-built JAR that unpacks the DLL for you, you can use newer jalleg-rt. It'll be a couple of hours before the artifacts hit Maven Central.