The primary motivation for this release was the new vastly improved polyobject support. To recap, polyobjects in Hexen and previous versions of ZDoom had to obey these restrictions:
- They had to be simple, convex objects.
- They could not leave the subsector they were spawned in.
- You could not have more than one polyobject per subsector.
- Polyobjects can be any crazy shape you want.
- Polyobjects can move anywhere on the map without restriction.
- You can have as many polyobjects in a subsector as you want. You can even have polyobjects inside polyobjects if you feel like it!
- You can also have a polyobject cover as many subsectors as you want.
- Support for uncompressed extended nodes, also supported by Eternity Engine and PrBoom+, to create a new cross-port standard for node storage.
- Support for using Byte Map Fonts.
- Ability to use metadata tags in audio formats to define custom loop points.
- Added support for the [wiki]MUSINFO[/wiki] lump (from Risen3D and PrBoom+).
- Improved compatibility settings to optionally allow a greater faithfulness to the vanilla Doom and vanilla Heretic.
- ZMAPINFO as an alias for MAPINFO to avoid compatibility problems with other ports parsing this lump.
- Full rewrite of the [wiki]SBARINFO[/wiki] system allowing many additional features and options.
- Added support for multi-monitor display.
- Buddha mode (one undestructable hitpoint)
- Default reverb environment setting in MAPINFO
- Several generalized codepointers to emulate some very specific Heretic and Hexen action functions
- Enhanced poison damage system
- Generalized railgun codepointers
- New automap options
- HOM detection system
- ...and more