News from 18 February 1999

[randi]

Randy released to me ZDoom 1.17. It has been posted on the downloads page. Go download it!

For your viewing pleasure, here's the README.

I'm releasing both DOS and Win32 versions simultaneously. (The DOS version does not support MIDI/MUS music or a joystick.)

Bug fixes:

• Multiplayer games with monsters do not crash.
• Player corpses do not levitate and then fall down when a player respawns in multiplayer games.
• Using togglemap outside of a game will not crash.
• Monsters stop attacking their target once it's dead.
• EV_StopPlat() does not get stuck in an infinite loop if there are moving platforms.
• Partially invisible players are drawn the proper colors (instead of green) if r_drawfuzz is 0.
• If you are invisible, so are your muzzle flashes.
• Trying to execute a non-existant script will not crash.
• Using a ChangeCamera special from an open script will not crash.
• The FloorAndCeiling_RaiseByValue and FloorAndCeiling_LowerByValues now behave like Hexen's.
• Using -loadgame from the command line works.
• Fixed a memory leak during generation of the translucency tables.
• In high resolutions, weapon sprites meet the bottom of the screen.
• Sounds will not cut out mysteriously when there is no reason for them to do so.
• Sounds will also not be stopped immediately when a thing is removed, so explosion sounds will play to their full length.
• Things can make more than one sound at once.
• The deathmatch scoreboard is aligned properly at high resolutions.
• Spynext and spyprev work properly instead of leaving the status bar "lagging behind" the player being viewed.
• The light-amp does not disable colored lighting.
• The sky gets inverted when using the invulnerability powerup.
• Implemented better z-checking code (from Heretic/Hexen).
• Pain elementals will spawn one lost soul at a time instead of two inside
  of each other.
• Bex patches that use thing mnemonics really do work now, and unknown bit messages aren't generated for regular DeHackEd patches.
• Linedef type 134 for regular DOOM/BOOM maps requires a red key for
  activation (it was being improperly translated to require a blue one).
• Monsters can activate secret lines when they cross them. (See DOOM2/MAP08).
• The player extreme death sound is used.
• When a player leaves a network game, their body is removed instead of being left empty.
• 0-length sounds are treated as empty sounds instead of sounds 4 gigs long.
• Skins that replaced player sounds with sounds in the IWAD work.
• Muzzle flashes do not light up foggy areas, and fullbright sprites stay
  shrouded in fog.
• Alphanumeric keys no longer automatically repeat on the console.
• Wads such as gothicdm2 that used new flats in addition to the ones in the IWAD with the regular doom.exe work.

New features:

• Significant speed improvements on modern processors.
• Armor and keys are shown on the fullscreen HUD.
• Colored text.
• A playdemo console command.
• A chasecam.
• A particle sytsem.
• An optional railgun to show off the particle system. (Start the game with -deh railgun.bex if you want to use it.)

New features interesting for wad authors:

• Polyobjects.
• Sound sequences.
• WAVE files can be used as sound lumps without converting them to DMX's format first.
• A sky can be specified to not be stretched even if it is shorter than 200
  pixels.
• Sparks.
• Particle fountains.
• Parallax skies.
• Some new DeHackEd thing flags from Hexen (bobbing, reflective, etc.).

[randi]

It seems I forgot to replace the secret sound for 1.17. The overwhelming consensus was that the one from 1.16 was horrible. I've reuploaded the new version with the original secret sound.

In other news, I've ported HETH to DJGPP 2 so that it runs under Windows. I'll also add support for the new features found in ZDoom that aren't in Hexen. When it's done, it will be available here, and, in keeping with the naming conventions of DETH and HETH, it will be called ZETH.

[randi]

One nasty bug has been found in ZDoom 1.17: If part of the world kills you (such as slime or a crushing polyobject), the game crashes. Rather than wait for a new version to release a fix, I've fixed it now, so be sure to go visit the downloads page again.

There are two other, less serious bugs that are fixed, too. The boss cubes on DOOM2/MAP30 would disappear before they moved anywhere, which made the level pretty easy because no monsters would ever spawn. The other was that open scripts numbered above 255 would not properly restart when a level was reloaded.

I also updated the editing package with some new documentation for the ChangeCamera special. It now takes three parameters instead of two. If the third one is 0, it behaves just like it used to. If you set it to 1, the player's view will return to his own body when he moves. This way, implementing something like a security camera with ChangeCamera is more reasonable, because the player can take their view away from the camera just by moving instead of having to rely on another ChangeCamera special to do it for them.

Here's an example script that can be used to switch between five cameras with tids 1 through 5:

Code: Select all

int lastview;

script 1 (void)
{
    lastview++;
    if (lastview > 5)
        lastview = 1;
    ChangeCamera (lastview, 0, 1);
}

To use it, give a line somewhere the special ACS_Execute (1,0,0,0,0), and make it repeatable. Then each time a player activates the line, their view will change to a different camera.