Raze 1.6.1 released

[Graf Zahl]

Download (OpenGL 3.3/OpenGL ES 2.0 and higher required)

• Windows 64-bit
• Linux (Portable) 64-bit
• macOS (1.5.0)
• Source

Visit the new homepage (still under construction)


This is a bugfix release addressing the following issues:

• Blood: add all statically stored EventObjects to the GC processor.
• fixed: when deactivating the app, pausing the sound system should not depend on the game's internal pause state.
• fixed ESC pressing on Duke's monitors.
• Blood: relax range check in AlignSlopes. This now checks the full range of the wall array and if outside just does nothing. E2M6 has a bogus value for this feature that asserted with the old check.
• Blood: fixed blood splats being spawned in the wrong place.
• Blood: fixed 3 places where 3D distance was used but 2D should have been.
• Fix pitch direction for controller input.
• added a - sign to FindBestSector' default return. This somehow get lost when the code was moved out of clipmove into a separate utility function.
• fixed velocity handling in a few enemy swimChase functions. The one for the gill beast was particularly bad.
• Exhumed: allow Anubis to get out of the walking state if he loses his target.
• fix initialization issues with a few serializer functions.
• fixed bad direction setup for vertically moving SE 0. This also adds missing interpolation for this case.
• Duke/RR: fixed floor alignment of flames in sloped sectors
• Duke: fixed flames not being floor aligned. The same code was correct in the RR variant, so it just got copied over.
• Exhumed: The ObjectList was not properly garbage collected.
• fixed kill counting in Blood.

[Casualfan]

I'm surprised Raze releases don't get as much attention from the community. I've loved playing through the old build engine games with it, and I appreciate you taking the time to maintain another engine!

[Graf Zahl]

These games are a lot less popular than Doom and due to how they had been handled over the last 20 years (i.e. no source releases for most, SW ports only being half-assed attempts) the only one with semi-decent support had been Duke 3D. As a result they never had a chance to thrive in the way Doom did with its various ports.

[DarkkOne]

Hopefully with games like Cultic appearing, maybe Build-style will have a small resurgence. This project has been really exciting for me, I was a Doom kid, and being able to revisit the Build games and actually play them "for real" with quality of life improvements to input and such is really nice.

Thanks so much for the work!

[Graf Zahl]

TBH, Cultic is a great example of people trying to jump onto some retro bandwagon without any understanding of how games in the 90's were designed. The ugliness it exhibits is not how any old game ever looked, but ultimately just piss-poor design being marketed as an old-school look.

[KynikossDragonn]

TBH, Cultic is a great example of people trying to jump onto some retro bandwagon without any understanding of how games in the 90's were designed. The ugliness it exhibits is not how any old game ever looked, but ultimately just piss-poor design being marketed as an old-school look.

Does Cruelty Squad also count considering one of it's shaders is literally named "psx"?

I'm still finding it difficult to believe we live in a era where we have to write crazy shaders to purposefully ruin the precision of modern GPUs.

[Rachael]

I'm still finding it difficult to believe we live in a era where we have to write crazy shaders to purposefully ruin the precision of modern GPUs.

That is an artistic/stylistic choice, you may not like it but some people do, and I really think there's nothing wrong with that.

That being said though, I agree with Graf that I am not too impressed with Cultic's visuals, at least from what I've seen so far. It looks way too busy and flashy for the aesthetic it is supposedly trying to emulate.

I would suggest to the authors (if they read threads like this) that they actually play some 90's games. 256-colour games particularly before 1996 tended to be very detailed and artists went to great lengths to actually try to hide the weaknesses of the 256-colour palette - and these blending techniques are exactly what gave the art its charm. Simply trying to emulate it by just slapping a shader on it without a second thought isn't the way to go.

I think the best examples of this would be some of the Westwood games - Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2, Lands of Lore, and even Command and Conquer (and Red Alert).

[Graf Zahl]

The real irony is that the games of the 90's tried their best to get most out of limited hardware - while the modern copycats try the exact opposite. My main gripe is that few of these titles succeed. Games back then did *NOT* look like this, they used graphics artists touching up their creations as much as possible to make do with the limited colors.

It gets particularly ludicrous when trying to emulate PSX aesthetics. I have done actual development on a real one, and so far all these facsimiles thoroughly failed to catch the essence of developing for such a memory starved platform with insufficient rasterization capabilities.

I would suggest to the authors (if they read threads like this) that they actually play some 90's games.

I doubt it'll help. These people feel above criticism from what I saw - getting defensive about all it and calling it "artistic choice". Well, yeah - it's still not 90's aesthetics, no matter how much choice there is.

[KynikossDragonn]

That is an artistic/stylistic choice, you may not like it but some people do, and I really think there's nothing wrong with that.

Oh, I don't mean to say I have a problem with it, it just boggles my mind shaders are the only way of forcing that kind of appearances to the graphics, anything short of actually doing everything in a software renderer with reduced precision's.

When S3 came out with the ViRGE, you could actually flip a setting on the card itself to make it render the texture mapping as "affine", which sped up the card at the expense of it producing the same problem the PlayStation's hardware suffered from. But if you wanted to do this on modern hardware you gotta write a silly shader, it's just such a funny concept to me.

[Graf Zahl]

You do not need a shader for this. In fact, this isn't actually that easy to achieve with just a shader - it is a lot easier to alter the geometry to be rendered post-projected, just like the Playstation did. If you go all retro, do it for real, goddamnit! You also want to emulate all the clipping bugs of the PSX as well, don't you?