Gez

ZDoom's SVN repository reached r2500 recently. Shortly after, ZDoom 2.5.0 is there, followed by GZDoom 1.5.0. The highlight is the new "MiniBSP" system which harnesses the internal nodebuilder to allow polyobjects to have any arbitrary shape, instead of being limited to convexity. They can also travel all around the map. But there are also many other important changes, such as non-compressed extended nodes (also supported by PrBoom+ and Eternity Engine), support for using Byte Map Fonts in mods, compatibility options allowing a gameplay much closer to vanilla, and a ton of other enhancement and bug fixes.

A new official version of ZDoom is available, 2.4.1. As typical, this is mirrored by a new version of GZDoom, 1.4.2. I said it was mirrored! Not many fancy features this time, these are mostly bug fix releases. Floor waggle effects are smoother now Sliders in the menus work correctly now Negative numbers in the alternate HUD have their minus sign at the right place now Menu option scales better in widescreen resolution Player setup menu looks better in non-Doom games Moving cameras work correctly again Polyobjects glitch a bit less now The internal nodebuilders works correctly now with certain troublesome maps Strife conversations fixed and improved Many nitpicky fixes in Strife (switch sounds, messages, etc.) Action Doom 2 and Harmony can now use idclev, and they have their Autoload section in the .ini MAPINFO "ResetInventory" keyword now works as expected If you experience input problems when using ZDoom through something such as Wine, set the norawinput console variable to "true". GZDoom fix: sprites are no longer oddly stretched or squashed on graphic chipsets that do not support non-power-of-two textures. New features do include these two things: When saving, if you use a game controller rather than the keyboard, an input grid now appears and lets you enter a name and actually save. The input grid remains off if no controller is plugged, or if it isn't used when saving the game. A new control lump type has been added. GAMEINFO is extremely simple to use.

To celebrate the new year, a salvo of new official versions of ports has been launched: Eternity Engine 3.37.00 "Sekhmet": includes decorative slopes, sprite scaling, widescreen support and more. GZDoom 1.4.0: include several bug fixes, better portals, and more flexible actor functions. ZDoom 2.4.0: includes so many new features compared to 2.3.1 that even listing just the major ones would take all day. Many of those are "old" features for those who used GZDoom 1.3.17; but we can list greater accuracy in Heretic and Hexen gameplay, many powerful new options for skill definition in MAPINFO, dozens of new flags, properties and codepointers for custom DECORATE actors, enhanced support of several MBF features, rewritten input code letting one play with a joystick or gamepad without hassles, rewritten archive code adding support for many more formats, IWAD recognition expanded to Ultimate Freedoom, Action Doom 2, Blasphemer and Harmony, and the possibility to compile ZDoom on a Macintosh (Mac binaries not included).

CodeImp has released a brand new version of his Doom map editor. Doom Builder 2 has many original new features, such as: Textured sector surfaces in 2D editing modes Full support for the new UDMF map format Instant visual mode that requires no nodebuilder Intuitive geometry drawing across any existing geometry Multi-core CPU support for faster loading and error checking Plug-in support that allows programmers to write their own features Multiple selections in visual mode Doom Builder 2 requires recent hardware for optimal performance, but Doom Builder 1 is still available for download on the website for anyone with older hardware. Anyone that has been testing Doom Builder 2 through beta versions or custom builds is recommended to completely delete them from their hard disk before installing the official release.