CodeImp found a bug in ZDBSP 1.11 that would cause it to crash after he changed the way Doom Builder saves UDMF maps. This new version of ZDSBP fixes that. (Note that the currently available release version of Doom Builder 2 does not exercise this bug.)

This post marks the release of ZDBSP 1.11. It now supports maps created in the Universal Doom Map Format. Aside from that, the nodes it builds are identical to ZDBSP 1.10's.

This version was also compiled with a newer version of GCC, which seems to have produced slightly faster code.

ZDoom has been updated to version 2.3.1. This version:

• Fixes the bug that prevented you from switching weapons after respawning in multiplayer.
• Fixes a performance regression introduced in 2.3.0.
• Adds support for zip/pk3 files with LZMA and BZip2 compression. (7-Zip is one program that can create such files.)
• Addresses a few other niggles.

After more than a year of waiting, ZDoom has been updated to version 2.3.0. Since a lot has gone on since 2.2.0, I'm not too sure what to highlight in this news post. So here is just a quick list off the top of my head:

• Improved performance on intensive maps.
• New and improved sound system supporting reverb effects on all sound cards, not just Creative Labs'.
• SPC is now a first-class music format that no longer requires an external DLL to play.
• Supports the UDMF map format.
• Text-based texture definition format.
• Supports Vavoom's vertex height things.
• Supports Eterity's 3DMIDTEX lines.
• Supports linked sectors, to ensure that multiple sectors can move consistently in sync.
• More compatibility options, and automatic selection of those options for selected maps that require them to be playable.
• New DECORATE features, including better error reporting.
• Freedoom, Chex Quest, and Chex Quest 3 are recognized as IWADs and can be selected in the IWAD picker dialog box.
• New ACS features.
• New SBARINFO features.
• Various and sundry bug fixes.

See comments for more.

Now that I'm starting to get my system back in order, here's a build of ACC 1.47 that works with WadAuthor (and ZETH, but does anybody still use that?).

It's not exactly ZDoom, but a new release of ZDBSP is now available, one week after the new ACC. There are two bug fixes here. One was corrected in the internal nodebuilder over two years ago, but I forgot to make a new release of ZDBSP for it back then. The other is a recent fix for maps with poorly constructed polyobjects that could cause the nodebuilder to hang.

There is no new functionality here, and performance should be pretty much the same as ZDBSP 1.9, but if you use ZDBSP, you are encouraged to upgrade anyway so that you can benefit from the fixes.

P.S. Happy New Year.

I had hoped to put out a new version of ZDoom before the end of the year. Alas, the fates have conspired against me. I awoke today to discover that my computer would no longer recognize my hard drive. I probably won't be able to get a replacement for it until 2009, so that means there will be no new ZDooms this year.

As a consolation, here's a new version of ACC instead. It includes support for setting #include directory search paths, courtesy of CodeImp. This allows you to have two ACS files in the same directory where one includes the other, and it will always find the included file. Previously, this was problematic. There is also support for features that will be available in the next version of ZDoom.


I believe most everything on the hard drive was either replaceable or expendable. Nevertheless, there are certain things I am sad to see go. This includes an archive of every ZDoom version I have ever released, both public and private. There was also a prototype of ZDoom using the Build engine's wall sorting algorithm that would have allowed for complex shaped polyobjects and multiple polyobjects per sector. And lastly, I had completely deciphered and documented all the important parts of the Blood map format. That's work I'll have to restart from scratch now.

Fortunately, I had no uncommitted changes in the trunk for the SVN repository, and my scripting language work was backed up on a flash drive, so I won't actually be set back any once I get the drive replaced.

(The worst part of this whole matter is that the drive was only four months old! The drive it replaced is still running fine in another computer.)

After far too long, ZDoom 2.2.0 has finally been released. There have been a lot of changes—too many for me to list here—that can be found in the changelog. This release is also accompanied by a new version of ACC, which I quietly uploaded last night. Both are available from the standard place on the downloads page.

Short list of new features:

• Custom damage types
• Custom pain chances for custom damage types
• Custom damage effectiveness to make monsters stronger/weaker against custom damage types
• Custom state labels. Actors are no longer bound to Spawn, See, Death, etc. Users can define their own states.
• User Constructable Statusbars
• Custom Skill settings to modify or add user definable skill settings to the skill selection menu
• most thing functions treat a tid of 0 as an activator tid.
• Many things ported from skulltag including powerups and flags for increased port compatability
• New D3D display code for better Vista support
• Startup screens that mimic the MS-DOS versions of all games
• ENDOOM lump support for displaying dos graphic lumps once zdoom quits

Long list of more additions, in approximate chronological order:

• Custom blood on an actor by actor basis into decorate
• Smart autoaim code to prevent the targeting of friendly monsters.
• Skulltag-type armor bonus that increases the max amount that can be given by other armor items.
• New flag that prevents bleeding actors from spawning blood decals.
• Customizable border textures. They are defined with the MAPINFO keyword 'bordertexture' and are settable per map.
• Custom label support for A_Chase and A_VileChase
• r_maxparticles CVAR from Skulltag
• Added Skulltag's REDMAP and GREENMAP
• Player.RunHealth property to expose the StrifePlayer's behavior of not being able to run when its health is below 10.
• Customizable gravity per actor
• Summonfoe console command, which is analagous to summonfriend but forces the summoned creature to be hostile instead.
• Damage-specific player pain sounds
• Added two new MAPINFO flags to control what actor activates impact lines:
  
  • MissileShootersActivateImpactLines - the current behavior
    
  • MissilesActivateImpactLines - the original Hexen behavior
• Damage-specific player death sounds, in the same fashion as the
  damage-specific player pain sounds. The game looks for a sound with a name like
  "*death-damagetype" first and then "*death" if the first sound didn't exist.
• More player water sounds:
  
  • *dive - Played when your head goes below water
    
  • *surface - Played when your head goes back above water
    
  • *gasp - Played when you were drowning and get your air back
• Using "*" with ACS's music commands will play the level's default music set in MAPINFO
• Two new cvars (win_x and win_y) that keep track of the window position when not playing in fullscreen mode
• Key bindings can now be printed with ACS
• KEEPDEPLETED flag for inventory items to keep them in the player's inventory even when they have been used up. If the item also has an inventory bar icon, it will be drawn darkened while it is depleted.
• IGNORESKILL flag for ammo that prevents the given quantity from being modified by the skill level
• AttackZOffset for PlayerPawn. This is the offset from the center of the player at which their attacks are fired and scales according to their crouched height.
• Added a new SetActorState ACS function:
  

  Code: Select all • Expand view

  int SetActorState (int tid, str statename, optional bool exact);

  
  If tid is 0, it affects the script activator, otherwise it affects all the matching actors. Statename is the name of the state you want to put the actor in. The final parameter, exact, specifies whether or not partial state name matches are accepted. If you don't specify it or set it to false, if you try to do something like:
  

  Code: Select all • Expand view

  SetActorState (0, "Foo.Bar");

  
  And the actor has a Foo state but no Foo.Bar state, it will enter the Foo state. If you set exact to true:
  

  Code: Select all • Expand view

  SetActorState (0, "Foo.Bar", true);

  
  Then the actor must have a Foo.Bar state, or it will not change state at all, even if it has a Foo state. The return value for this function is the number of actors that successfully changed state. Note that you should refrain from using this function to enter special states such as Death, or unpredictable results could occur.
• CANUSEWALLS flag which allows a monster to activate 'use' specials like doors. This flag is on by default for any monster, which was the previous behavior.
• Thing_Stop action special
• Skulltag's Drain and Regeneration runes as powerups and used specific player sounds for their sound effects
• Skulltag's PowerQuadDamage and PowerQuarterDamage as more customizable PowerDamage and PowerProtection. These new powerups allow free customization of the damage modification per damage type by inheriting from these classes and setting specific values. Such derived damage/protection powerups will be considered as separate powers so that for example a QuadDamage and a DoubleDamage item can be stacked which would result in 8x damage.
• Skulltag's high jump rune as a powerup
• Skulltag's custom F1 help screen MAPINFO option
• New flag that allows exploding items to hurt boss monsters
• New flag that allows using things to execute their specials
• Compatibility option to restore the original behavior of the Invisibility powerup
• Telefrag option added to A_SpawnItemEx.
• Added option to A_Chase that prevents the monster from moving.
• Skill definitions from MAPINFO
• 'Allowrespawn' MAPINFO option
• New scoreboards
• IWAD-based [*.Autoload] ini support for games that have more than one IWAD. They are:
  
  • [Doom1.Autoload]
    
  • [Doom2.Autoload]
    
  • [Plutonia.Autoload]
    
  • [TNT.Autoload]
    
  • [HexenDK.Autoload]
• Custom status bars through the SBARINFO lump
• New A_LookEx function
• Customizable teams through the TEAMINFO lump
• 'Take' console command to do the opposite of 'give'
• UseInventory/UseActorInventory ACS functions
• New A_CustomBulletAttack aimfacing parameter
• New A_PlaySoundEx attenuation parameter
• Automap markers are stored in savegames now
• 'No respawn' DMFlag2 which prevents a player from respawning after they have died
• 'Keep frags gained' DMFlag2 which allows you to choose whether you want to reset the frags of each player next level or not
• Sector_Outside sector type which forces outside fog regardless of ceiling texture
• User-defined crosshairs in the Display Options menu. See xhairs.txt in zdoom.pk3.
• Skulltag's SAME_SPAWN_SPOT flag
• Skulltag's pickup sprite for the pistol
• Gneric log display that can show Strife's log messages in all games regardless of the current game, active status bar and HUD mode
• GZDoom's alternate HUD.
• Support for stencilling actors
• .TXT files can now be loaded by simply dragging-and-dropping them on top of zdoom.exe
• 'Ice' translation is accessible from DECORATE
• Teamplay MAPINFO option.
• Custom damage color per player class.
• ACS script type "return". These are executed by players who return to a map they've previously been to.

Now that zdoom.org is on a site that I have more control over, I've finally been able to do something I wanted to do ever since I first put up the changelog page: make it work. There was a simple version in place initially, but apparent resource utilization problems made me replace it with a boring page that linked to the log file in the repository.

No more. It's now much closer to what I had initially intended it to be. Now you can browse the changes for different revisions and see exactly what changed.

Now I should be able to get back to working on ZDoom itself. Maybe if we're lucky, I'll actually get a release out in 2007.

PS. The code that fetches files from the repository and turns them into HTML is written in Lua because Lua is just that awesome.

Most of the site is now online at the new host. If you're reading this, then that means your name servers also know where zdoom.org's new home is. Good.

It took forever to perform the conversion to phpBB 3, but the forum is back online. I'm not quite done setting it up yet, but it should at least be usable once again. There were some problems with attachments in private messages that are in both the sender's sent box and the recipient's read box. If this affected you and you need the attachment, send me a PM with the message's ID (from the end of the URL for that message), and I'll see if I can recover it. Also, if there are any other aspects of the forum that are broken, please let me know.