- 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).
- 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).
| 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.