GZDoom 4.6.0 released

[Armaetus]

This is nice, this is very nice. Sprite shadows? In my Doom game? Lovely!

[Tormentor667]

Congratulations on the release, very well done!

[Cherno]

Dynamic number of models per frame instead of a hard limit of four. (#1298)

For me, this is one of the highlights of this release, and I mainly commited it because I like using models and don't want to be limited by the amount of models per actor frame. I hope others will find this to be useful for their own projects as well, since this has been asked for every now and then in the past years. Let's hope it'll work for everyone!

[Peccatum Mihzamiz]

O wow, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work ! *Runs over to check out them sprite shadows !

[Devalaous]

The sprite shadows are neat, although they do clash with the pre-dead corpse decorations in that monster corpses have shadows, while the pre-placed ones do not. The biggest advantage to these shadows is that flying enemies far above me no longer surprise me.

Nash's widescreen Deathkings assets did not load when I launched it through Doom Launcher, so I had to extract them and make a seperate wad to load, guessing this is due to how GZDoom pretends that Deathkings is an IWAD. Also, the widescreen Hexen graphics did not apply to the Hexen demo, figured it would, given the Doom Shareware graphics that are included (I assume Heretic's shareware is also taken into account?)

[Rachael]

The shareware assets are an issue with how GZDoom enforces licensing restrictions with those IWADs. The loader code responsible for making sure you do not "-file" with the shareware version also ensures that the custom content (widescreen/brightmaps/lights) do not load either. I personally don't see much harm in changing that, but then I am kind of have the belief that no one really is going to care if GZDoom loads custom content on top of those wads anyway since GZDoom is itself technically a mod. (To be specific, having a widescreen viewport and high resolution and uncapped frame rate definitely never were part of the original shareware version)

[Korell]

The sprite shadows are pretty cool. However, I am wondering if there could be an option where they don't display for invisible/partially invisible enemies. Seeing Spectres with shadows seems a little off. Other than that, they work fantastic. Tried them with Doom, Heretic, Hexen, The Adventures of Square, the Ghoul School mod, and the Quake Descent into Heresy mod.

[Nash]

For the pre-dead monster corpses - it would be trivial to add +CASTSPRITESHADOW to them in the base actor definitions. But it might be messy with Dehacked that repurposes those actors into something else. Thoughts?

I'll see what I can do about the spcetres.

For the shareware games - no, I forgot to include them. I wasn't sure if there were even any filter folders for those.

[Redneckerz]

Yeah and this is also the first official release to support Apple Silicon natively. Too many changes in total I guess...

I am curious how much the performance uptick is on a M1 machine, say a Mac Mini M1.

However, being different ISA's makes it more difficult to select a comparable x86 machine. The M1 GPU is around a RX560 in terms of GPU performance, but CPU wise the M1 is radical. So direct comparison is difficult.

Still, GZDoom being native makes it what, the first accelerated Doom port to support Apple Silicon natively?

[Graf Zahl]

I'll see what I can do about the spcetres.

My advice would be:

1. no shadows with RenderStyle Fuzzy
2. less opaque shadows when the monster is already translucent.
3. for additive translucency reduce alpha by half before applying shadows.
[/quote]

[Devalaous]

After blasting through a chunk of Doom 2 with the shadows on, yeah I was going to post that spectres shouldn't have shadows, as it looks really..odd with them on. Someone has beaten me to it though

[Barry Burton]

Sorry if this is a silly question but what does "Default" mean in the sprite shadows option? Player and Monsters and Off are pretty obvious but default?

[Nash]

Sorry if this is a silly question but what does "Default" mean in the sprite shadows option? Player and Monsters and Off are pretty obvious but default?

"Default" means - no shadows by default, but modders are able to selectively add +CASTSPRITESHADOW to their custom actors so that the shadows are drawn for them, without any user intervention.

"monsters and players" will always draw shadows for monsters and players, on top of modder-defined actors.

[Warrex]

I am curious how much the performance uptick is on a M1 machine, say a Mac Mini M1.

However, being different ISA's makes it more difficult to select a comparable x86 machine. The M1 GPU is around a RX560 in terms of GPU performance, but CPU wise the M1 is radical. So direct comparison is difficult.

Still, GZDoom being native makes it what, the first accelerated Doom port to support Apple Silicon natively?

The performance difference is big enough to make this the most relevant new "feature" of 4.6.0 for owners of Apple Silicon Macs. See here: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=71303#p1179875

This is for looking down at Frozen Time's infamous bridge. I did not bench anything else but I now run GZDoom at 1080p@120fps connected to my Sony OLED and never saw it drop below that for the stuff I am actually playing which is all I currently want.

And yes, as far as I can see GZDoom is the first Doom port to support Apple Silicon SoCs natively.

[Blzut3]

And yes, as far as I can see GZDoom is the first Doom port to support Apple Silicon SoCs natively.

I ran Chocolate Doom natively on my work M1 Mac Mini back in January for lols. Didn't want to compile anything that would be super involved since if it didn't work straight out of the box, being a work machine, I can't use that machine to develop fixes. A lot of software just compiles for ARM without much issue. So while GZDoom may be the first accelerated port to officially support M1, and possibly even the first port with official M1 binaries. I would be surprised if someone didn't already compile PrBoom for it, and likely found it to just work.

As an aside, also compiled ECWolf out of curiosity and besides a hang on exit it appeared to work fine. Didn't debug the issue since, like I said I legally can not use that machine for such purposes.