Odamex 10.5.0

[LexiMax]

 

Latest version: 10.5.0 (May 5, 2024)  Release Post

Website: https://odamex.net/

Download: Github

Discord: https://discord.gg/aMUzcZE

 

Odamex is a portable source port with a focus on client/server multiplayer of classic Doom, Boom, MBF and early ZDoom content.

 

Odamex's interface resembles its old-school ZDoom roots, but the port is close enough to Vanilla to run many (but not all) Doom 1.9 demos, including the demo reel. At the same time, the port supports many modern amenities like a truecolor software renderer, uncapped framerates, on-the-fly WAD loading, slopes and other ZDoom mapping features, and of course online client/server multiplayer with up to 255 simultaneous players.

 

You can find more information about the latest version of Odamex (10.5.0) in the release post linked above.  What follows in the spoiler is the original post containing the patch notes for Odamex 0.9.0.

 

Spoiler

Of course, those are the things we had in our last versions. So what have we added in 0.9? Well, it's the gamemode update, so lets start with the gamemodes...

 

New Gamemodes: 3 Team TDM and CTF

 

Green team joins the melee! Fragging the enemy team and capturing flags is a fair bit more hectic with three teams in play....and even more fun!

 

New Gamemode: Survival

 

It has been a long time coming, but Survival has finally arrived in Odamex! See if you can last through the best cooperative content Doom has to offer with a limited number of lives!

 

New Gamemode: Last Marine Standing

 

Cooperative is not the only place where you can lose your life. You have limited lives and a limited grace period at the start of every round to grab whatever weapons and ammunition you can. Once the round starts, it's kill or be killed. See if you can outlast your friends...or enemies.

 

New Gamemode: Team Last Marine Standing

 

Don't care to go at it alone? Have a buddy or two watch your back and see which team comes out on top!

 

New Gamemode: LMS Capture The Flag

 

We got so carried away adding lives-based game-modes that this just kind of...fell out the work we had already done! Add flags to TLMS...why the heck not! Throw in a third team if you want!

 

The Big Twist

 

We have added no new major game modes. There are still just four: Coop, DM, TDM, and CTF.

 

All of the existing Odamex game modes work with a separate setting which turns on lives support. In addition, there is yet another setting to add support for multiple rounds. You can run a game mode with one, both, or neither of these settings, and the game mode will adjust accordingly.

 

The groundwork we have laid in 0.9 means that we should be able to support rounds and lives in all future game-modes when it makes sense to do so. More importantly, this is part of a larger strategy where we intend to introduce fewer completely distinct gamemodes, but with many ways to customize them. Such as...

 

New Gamemode Setting: Attack & Defend CTF

 

One team has to defend a flag, the other teams are trying to take it from them. All the defenders have to do is hold out until the time limit while preventing the attackers from scoring their flag. If rounds are enabled, the defending team changes every round. If there are three teams, one team is on defense, the other two are on offense.

 

This is also not a new major game mode, but an additional setting that is compatible with CTF. Like lives and rounds, the "sides" setting can be toggled independently, and could also be used with future gamemodes where adding sides makes sense.

 

And that's just gamemode settings. There's more in this release than just gamemodes.

 

In-client WAD Downloading Support

 

Who needs a WAD downloader in a server browser when you can seek WAD files directly from your client? New to 0.9 is a WAD downloading system that searches a collection of popular WAD hosting services and grabs the WAD file much faster than the old server-based downloader ever managed, with none of the extra server processing required.  You can even download files without connecting to any server with the download console command.

 

Join Queue for Spectators

 

Want to join the game, but there's no room? Attempting to join will now put you in a queue that will let you join the game at the next opportunity. You can even set up the game to automatically boot the losers of a game and then cycle the queue.

 

Improved Mouse Code

 

Shoot with precision! The mouse code has been redesigned to reduce latency between moving the mouse and seeing the player camera change on your screen.

 

An Online-friendly Substitute for Voodoo Dolls

 

Our solution for fixing coop maps that use Voodoo Dolls is to not use traditional Voodoo Dolls. Instead, we've come up with a special object called an Avatar which occupies all voodoo spawns in the map. They aren't player objects, but they will activate player triggers, hand out any item it touches to all in-game players, and if you try to telefrag one it will kill you instead, leaving the Avatar unharmed.

 

Support for Modern MAPINFO

 

Our MAPINFO parser has learned quite a few new tricks and now supports a sizable chunk of modern MAPINFO in addition to the classic brace-less version. It even attempts to parse ZMAPINFO as well and understands a few settings from ZDoom 2.x.

 

Support for Modern LANGUAGE Lumps

 

The old ancient binary LANGUAGE lump has finally been kicked to the curb, in favor of the modern LANGUAGE lump most commonly seen. As a bonus, many WAD's that were missing strings entirely (Valiant) now work again!

 

Console Improvements

 

In our ongoing quest to freshen up the interface, this version comes with a new console font. The new font is courtesy of Team Eternity and should be a bit easier on the eyes with more gradients and fewer sharp edges. There is also a new auto-complete interface based on zsh that should do a better job of showing you possible command completions.

 

Support for Sprites with 16 Rotations

 

Just what it says on the tin - it works just like it does in Doom Retro.

 

Configuration Assistance

 

Need help configuring your game client or server? New to Odamex 0.9 is a cvardoc console command that will write an HTML file to disk that contains all console variables that Odamex (or Odasrv) knows about, along with documentation.

 

Of course, our sample server configs have seen an update as well, and can help setup a server in many common configurations.

 

Installs and Behaves like a Modern Windows App

 

The installer for the Windows version of Odamex now gives you the option if you want to install it for the current user or system-wide. Additionally, the installer will configure Odamex to save configurations, screenshots, and other files to Documents\My Games\Odamex like most modern games.

 

ZIP distributions do not have this behavior by default, but it can still be opted into by creating a text file named odamex-installed.txt in your program directory - contents doesn't matter.

 

What a Switch!

 

The most portable multiplayer port now runs on the Nintendo Switch! Is there anything else that needs to be said? Maybe not, but they say pictures are worth a thousand words, so let's let the picture do the talking.

 

More Bug Fixes Than You Can Shake a Stick At

 

Thanks to the magic of netdemos, crash dumps and Address Sanitizer, a significant number of bugs have been sought out and squashed. Netcode weirdness, crashes, indeterminate gamestates, maps that didn't behave quite right, HOM-filled demos, no bug was safe.

 

An Incredible Community

 

We would like to give a special shout-out to our Discord community that has been immensely helpful in not only helping us test, but giving us feedback and helping guide the direction of the port. You folks are amazing and none of this would be possible without you.

 

Edited May 18 by LexiMax
Odamex 10.5.0

[Edward850]

Source code?

[Linuxmaster1992]

19 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Source code?

https://www.github.com/odamex/odamex

[Edward850]

On 3/19/2021 at 8:40 AM, Commodore Forever! said:

https://www.github.com/odamex/odamex

Heh, good due diligence, though I somewhat predicted that would happen. :V

I was making a joke at the expense of Zdaemon. I work with AlexMax so if I needed the source code I'd just have asked her directly.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Edward850

[Redneckerz]

Odamex's multiplatform presence remains a unique point of interest from a official stance. That and the general sense of direction makes Odamex a more forward looking multiplayer port with its own merits.

 

6 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

I was making a joke at the expense of Zdaemon.

ZD is quite literally the other side of the coin indeed. It has some very impressive works though given what they work with, some utilizing the port's more novel features.

[SiFi270]

Binding a key to "look down" doesn't work, because it doesn't recognize the corresponding command. Also, when the ENDOOM screen is enabled, the screen sticks to the last thing it was showing while the ENDOOM screen opens in the background, and pressing any key only lets you see the latter for a split second.

 

Hope I don't sound too negative here, it's just easier to say what's being done wrong than what's being done right, but the vast majority of things in this port are clearly being done right.

[Ch0wW]

1 hour ago, SiFi270 said:

Binding a key to "look down" doesn't work, because it doesn't recognize the corresponding command.

I just noticed this issue, and I just fixed it through this pull request. It was an error I caused it when I quickly updated the Actionbits code. Thanks for reporting the issue!

[Ru5tK1ng]

3 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Source code?

I got ya fam: https://www.mediafire.com/file/vdl5wv1h9djz4ih/zdaemon10611_win32_src.zip/file

[Edward850]

10 minutes ago, Ru5tK1ng said:

I got ya fam: https://www.mediafire.com/file/vdl5wv1h9djz4ih/zdaemon10611_win32_src.zip/file

That code might actually be older than some members on this forum.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Ru5tK1ng said:

I got ya fam: https://www.mediafire.com/file/vdl5wv1h9djz4ih/zdaemon10611_win32_src.zip/file

Kinda silly to have a Mediafire link when there is a ZDaemon thread with a permalink.

[Ru5tK1ng]

1 minute ago, Redneckerz said:

Kinda silly to have a Mediafire link when there is a ZDaemon thread with a permalink.

Nothing wrong with having mirrors. If anything is silly, it's your nitpicking.

[Gregory Stephens]

In-game WAD downloading? It feels like this is something Skulltag/Zandronum wanted to do in the past but never did, at least from. Really happy to see a relatively highly faithful client/server based port come so far over the years while taking in some nice amenities we've enjoyed in the other ones.

[Decay]

Damn, about time to see survival finally make it's debut. Excellent work on active port development!

[Redneckerz]

5 hours ago, Ru5tK1ng said:

Nothing wrong with having mirrors. If anything is silly, it's your nitpicking.

The permalink has binaries, source code, and redirects to diff tools to compare code of different versions.

[Flambeau]

Back on topic. Nice release.

[Manc]

15 hours ago, Gregory Stephens said:

In-game WAD downloading? It feels like this is something Skulltag/Zandronum wanted to do in the past but never did, at least from. Really happy to see a relatively highly faithful client/server based port come so far over the years while taking in some nice amenities we've enjoyed in the other ones.

Fun fact - it has actually been a feature in Odamex for many years, but it suffered from implementation issues.  It's been improved now using a proper method for retrieving the files.

[Ch0wW]

We have been aware of an issue where some people were unable to compile Odamex on Linux, "miniwget.h could not be found" during compilation being often reported. If that is the case, we recommend you to update CMake to version 3.13 as the bare minimum and regenerate the project.

 

We are planning to increase the CMake's minimum version, for the future. Apparently, only Ubuntu users seem to be affected by that issue.

 

To update CMake, you have several solutions:

- Add Kitware's APT repository

- Update it through Python

- Compile it yourself.

 

Also, another element, for servermakers:

 

If you plan to create a server and add the game_duel command, do add the following afterwards:

 

set sv_warmup_autostart "1.0"

 

A fix is in the works.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Ch0wW

[Doomkid]

IDK how I missed this.. 5 stars!

[bond]

On 3/18/2021 at 8:46 PM, AlexMax said:

Who needs a WAD downloader in a server browser when you can seek WAD files directly from your client? New to 0.9 is a WAD downloading system that searches a collection of popular WAD hosting services and grabs the WAD file much faster than the old server-based downloader ever managed, with none of the extra server processing required.

 

Well, the server browser does it much better (at least for now) - i know such one :)

First, it searches not only .wad but .zip too - and many doom archives store wads in zip (idgames for example)

Second, it can search and download several wads simultaneously - that is, many times faster than a sequential search

 

Also, it was not good idea to remove wad download from server - sometimes user could start server with his own wad not caring about uploading it to public servers

[LexiMax]

8 hours ago, bond said:

Well, the server browser does it much better (at least for now) - i know such one :) 

 

Sorry, that was my copy, and I think I should've worded that better.  It was actually meant squarely as a poke at our own Odalaunch, which never had such a feature in the first place.   Because...

 

...you are correct, our downloader currently does not unzip archives.  It also does nothing like the multi-threaded Wadseeker.  However, during development I actually realized that for most of the active servers that are running, there are enough hosts that serve plain WAD files that things worked out okay.  ZIP archive support is a definitely a future TODO, though, and the ingame WAD downloader is much better than what we had before.  Speaking of...

 

8 hours ago, bond said:

Also, it was not good idea to remove wad download from server - sometimes user could start server with his own wad not caring about uploading it to public servers 

 

I wrestled with if I should keep the functionality or not, and I finally decided against.  The feature was slow and sometimes dropped transfers.  Plus, a good number of servers actually disabled the old downloading feature outright lest it slow down their server.  Even in retail games that had the feature, it was never particularly fast, and I finally decided that odasrv was designed for playing Doom, not serving files, so I got rid of it.  In the long term, the TSPG experience of having someone else host your server complete with WAD is much easier to figure out for newer players than self-hosting.

 

That said, there are traces of the feature still left in the port, and I am open to returning it to functionality if there's enough support for it.

Edited April 1, 2021 by AlexMax
Rearranged my points to be less scattered.

[Edward850]

3 hours ago, bond said:

Also, it was not good idea to remove wad download from server - sometimes user could start server with his own wad not caring about uploading it to public servers

2 hours ago, AlexMax said:

I wrestled with if I should keep the functionality or not, and I finally decided against.  Even in retail games that had the feature, it was never particularly fast, and I finally decided that odasrv was designed for playing Doom, not serving files.  I also think that the TSPG experience of having someone else host your server complete with WAD is much easier to figure out than self-hosting, and a good number of servers actually disabled the feature outright lest it slow down their server.

 

That said, there are traces of the feature still left in the port, and I am open to returning it to functionality if there's enough support for it.

To add, I too have tried to wrestle with UDP file transfers in a retail environment. It's absolutely not worth it and people should stop trying to reinvent this. Just chuck in an HTTPS downloader or whatever other service you have available and call it a day.

Edited March 31, 2021 by Edward850

[UberGewei]

On 3/29/2021 at 2:22 AM, Doomkid said:

IDK how I missed this.. 5 stars!

I double that!

*whips out his switch*

[Doomkid]

Hey guys, just want to report that this version of Odamex seems to no longer support sprite renaming via DeHackEd, even though older versions did. I hope this is fixed some time soon, it basically destroys compatibility with 80% of the stuff I've made!

[fran]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

Hey guys, just want to report that this version of Odamex seems to no longer support sprite renaming via DeHackEd, even though older versions did. I hope this is fixed some time soon, it basically destroys compatibility with 80% of the stuff I've made! 

 

I tested Rowdy Rudy 2 in this version, in this wad are sprites renamed, or not?

 

The problem that I've seen is that this release have serious problems of compatibility with wads that contains a mapinfo lump

[Doomkid]

That's right, the sprites are renamed in Rowdy Rudy 2. I just tested it out and it still shows the default pistol graphic (among other really weird side effects)

[fran]

8 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

That's right, the sprites are renamed in Rowdy Rudy 2. I just tested it out and it still shows the default pistol graphic (among other really weird side effects)

 

I just tested it again and I see those beautiful graphics

Edited April 23, 2021 by toxic.rat

[LexiMax]

In the future, it would be really nice if these bugs could end up on the Odamex issue tracker on GitHub.

 

3 hours ago, toxic.rat said:

The problem that I've seen is that this release have serious problems of compatibility with wads that contains a mapinfo lump

 

Yeah, I know that our MAPINFO parsing could use some work.  In 0.8.3 Odamex blew past unknown tokens which resulted in considerable breakage - if a map worked, it was often by complete accident.  I reworked the parser for 0.9.0 to accommodate brace-style MAPINFO, but apparently whatever I did to fix it went too far in the other direction of being irritated with any type of token it didn't already know about.

 

There is a MAPINFO Pull Request in the hopper that might make things better, along with adding support for UMAPINFO.  I also just committed a fix destined for 0.9.1 that should fix Going Down.  So yeah, fixing up MAPINFO is of active interest to us, and if you see a WAD that doesn't work because of MAPINFO, let us know (preferably in a bug) and we'll get it taken care of.

Edited April 23, 2021 by AlexMax

[Ralphis]

I played through the first 3 maps of Rowdy Rudy 2 on the newest build I have and also idkfa'd and all the new monsters and weapons seemed to be working as expected. Flamethrower marines are still such a great idea @Doomkid

Edited April 23, 2021 by Ralphis

[Doomkid]

Thanks Ralphis! Hmm, since everyone else is reporting that’s it’s working fine, there must be something wrong on my end... I’ll try wiping my .cfg file and reinstalling Odamex.

[SiFi270]

Does Odamex support loading multiple DeHackEd patches yet? If not, it might be that.