- Compatible client of Ace of Spades (classic voxlap).
- Runs on very old systems back to OpenGL 1.1 (OpenGL ES support too).
- Shares similar if not even better performance to voxlap.
- Free of any Jagex code, they can’t shut it down.
- Open for future expansion.
- Easy to use.
- A lot of hidden bugs.
- Support of big-endian systems e.g. PowerPC (but not limited to, that is, support of little-endian systems is available as well).
- Unicode & UTF-8.
- Customizable key bindings.
- Cleaned up user interface.
- Makefiles instead of CMake (now obsolete version of CMake takes ≈2 hours to build on G4 CPU but still cannot be used to build BetterSpades).
- A couple of small features that you can find in “Settings”.
- Imported from other forks & unmerged PRs bugfixes (as well as original ones) for several chronic bugs.
| Type | min. requirement |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows 98 or Linux |
| CPU | 1 GHz single core processor |
| GPU | 64 MiB VRAM, Mobile Intel 945GM or equivalent |
| RAM | 256 MiB |
| Display | 800×600 |
| Others | Keyboard and mouse Dial up network connection |
This project uses the following libraries and files (their code is included in the repository):
| Name | License | Usage | GitHub |
|---|---|---|---|
| inih | BSD-3.Clause | .INI file parser | Link |
| dr_wav | Public domain | wav support | Link |
| http | Public domain | http client library | Link |
| LodePNG | MIT | png support | Link |
| libdeflate | MIT | decompression of maps | Link |
| enet | MIT | networking library | Link |
| parson | MIT | JSON parser | Link |
| log.c | MIT | logger | Link |
| GLEW | MIT | OpenGL extensions | Link |
| hashtable | MIT | hashtable | Link |
| libvxl | MIT | access VXL format | Link |
| microui | MIT | user interface | Link |
You will need to compile the following by yourself, or get hold of precompiled binaries:
- GLFW3 or SDL.
- OpenAL.
Use MinGW-w64 from MSYS2:
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw mingw-w64-x86_64-openal unzip
$ make TOOLKIT=GLFW gameIf everything went well, the client should be in the dist/ subfolder.
You can build each library yourself, or install them with your distro’s package manager. For example, on Ubuntu 24.04:
sudo apt install libgl-dev libopenal-dev libglfw3-dev
Start the client e.g. with the following inside the dist/ directory:
./betterspades
Or connect directly to localhost:
./betterspades -aos://16777343:32887
On the buggy drivers (like “mesa” under PowerPC Macs) it may be neccessary to export MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.5 before starting the game to avoid (weird) graphics glitches. Also try build with EXTRAFLAGS="-DUSE_SOUND -DUSE_GL_FLOAT" if fonts are not rendering.
The development headers for OpenAL and OpenGL don’t have to be installed since they come with macOS by default.
For any copyright year range specified as YYYY–ZZZZ in this package note that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.