Use newer libs?

[kablooey123]

Sure you're aware, Valve released new compiled libraries and DLLs for Alien Swarm 3 years ago. ASWRD seems to be using the older ones. Is there a reason why? Seems to be a drop-in replacement - only noticeable change is the addition of some new string utils in tier1. Hopefully the newer ones have slightly better bytecode?

[BenLubar]

We were given custom DLLs by Valve shortly before release in 2017 and an updated engine.dll when an exploit was discovered in 2020.

[kablooey123]

Every lib present in the SDK at sdk_src/lib/common/ has a newer version. The file sizes are around the same, so I think they used the same compile settings, just a potentially newer compiler. I've tested compiling and running the game against them, seems to work just fine. Would be worth benchmarking though.

The new DLLs and EXEs in bin/ are all tool related. Hammer.exe hasn't been compiled with large address awareness, so maybe don't use that... However it may be worth looking into the other tools, specifically VRAD, which had a performance bug patched in late 2017.

[BenLubar]

At some point I want to port the Source SDK 2013 map compilers over, but for now I'll put the lib and dll files in the beta branch and see if anyone complains.

[BenLubar]

updating videocfg.lib caused the game to boot in 640x480

[BenLubar]

Ok, getting a lot of weird crashes. I've reverted the library change for now.

Porting changes from other Source Engine branches or games is definitely something I'm still interested in, whether it's open source code I'm allowed to use or replicating a feature from scratch, but it looks like these libraries are not going to work, at least not without a lot of additional effort.