The February update for Spine is now available and introduces Steam support for Gothic 1 and 2 out of beta and improved the download handling.

In 1.15.0 we introduced Steam support for Gothic 2 as experimental feature. We didn’t receive any feedback, so either nobody tested it or it just worked for everybody who tested it. Either way, we did some more testing, added it to the UI (you can activate it in the path settings for Gothic 1 and 2) and improved the code even more. So if you want Steam to track your play time of the both games (of course you need to own them on Steam for it to work) you can do that now.

The download improvements affect they way downloads are handled. Previously there was always a dialog popping up and showing the progress, but blocking the UI while active. This doesn’t happen anymore. Instead downloads run in the background now. You will see the progress in the task bar on Windows 10 and for mod downloads there will still be a message box popup when the download finished. But in the end it means that you can continue browsing through the database or other Spine functionality while downloading something. This even works for screenshots on the info pages and achievement icons in the achievement view. The only downside is, that you can’t cancel downloads anymore. In the future we might add some download overview as in Steam, but one step after the other.

Another thing we improved is the download speed. It won’t affect the server speed, but the local handling of downloads. So far a file was downloaded, then uncompressed and hashed and afterwards the next file was downloaded. The uncompressing and hashing could take a while especially for big files, so it was wasted download time. Now a file is downloaded and at the same time the next download is started while the first file gets uncompressed and hashed in the background.

Spine 1.17.0 will move towards the separation of UI and mod language. That means the goal will be to allow to download also German mods when Spine is used with English UI language. The feature won’t be done in 1.17, but the foundation for it should be finished so we can build on it in 1.18 for April.

Full changelog

Enhancements:

• Switching to library as well as installation and uninstallation are a lot faster now
• Steam support for Gothic 2 now out of beta
• Added Steam support for Gothic 1
• Added download queue to download files in background
• Added link to tutorials in help menu
• Improved download speed a little

Fixes:

• Restored hack for DEP again as it seems like it worked under some circumstances
• Fixed restoring of ini files
• Newly loaded patches now are directly shown for selected mod in library
• Unicode paths should work now
• Patches and tools can be selected again when offline
• Removed corrupted files from integrity check and showing count instead

For questions and feedback either use the feedback functionality, have a look into the thread @ World of Gothic or join our Discord server.