This is a slightly experimental build.  In appearance, it’s almost identical to the Milestone 4 build from earlier this week, but under the hood it’s almost completely different.

Here’s a list of differences:

• Now requires an OpenGL 3.3 core profile.
• All buildings, trees, monsters, and players are drawn using instancing. Which means that it should be possible to have a lot more of them on screen at once before it starts to affect the frame rate.
• When clicking to activate a region, it now moves the camera a bit to try to frame the region for easy editing. (Early days on this; needs more work)
• Lighting is slightly different (darker) than in the MS4 build.
• Lines don’t look as nice on Retina or HighDPI displays as they did in the MS4 build. (they’re often far too thin to be picked up by the bloom pass)
• Fixed a camera glitch that has been annoying me figuratively forever, which resulted in the camera sometimes ‘popping’ up or down up to several hundred meters, at a seemingly random point while zooming in on the ground. Making this fix involved introducing a different glitch, but I think the new glitch is subtle and inobtrusive enough that it doesn’t make me want to stick forks in my eyes every time it happens, so I call that a net win.
• Any forests placed during game start now get trees placed in them, exactly as though you’d placed the forests yourself. In MS4, such automatically-created forests had no trees.

So there’s not really anything new to see or do in this build, but I’d be grateful if folks could download it anyhow, and verify whether or not it works for you! And also how it compares against the MS4 build in terms of speed/smoothness, if any difference is noticeable.

• Windows build
• OS X build (requires OS X 10.8 or later)

Thanks, guys, I really appreciate your help!