The /newstuff Chronicles #362 Farm Fresh on Dagobah: Sometimes, WADs with a very simple idea executed properly can be astoundingly good. Unfortunately, Dagobah is not one of those WADs. [...] There may be a few people who will appreciate it, but it's not going to be going on my hard drive any time soon. (more)

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Doom Classic Code Review 2 : The gift and the curse (11:26 am)
Classic Doom - Posted by AlexMax - 11 Comments

Fabian Sanglard, the author of an article describing the rendering process of classic Doom a few weeks ago, is back. This time, he plumbs the depths of the recently released iPhone Doom source code. Unlike the last article where he simply dissected the renderer, he now goes into quite a bit of depth on many of the different aspects of the source, including the new main game loop, the new OpenGL renderer, and more. Like the last article, there are nice little Quicktime videos that show a single frame being rendered.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

rrr on Greenwar II: The release of Greenwar 2 is a landmark event for gaming. It is also a landmark event for bringing the clash of layout-making and wad-detailing to monumental new heights. (more)

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A new official version of ZDoom is available, 2.4.1. As typical, this is mirrored by a new version of GZDoom, 1.4.2. I said it was mirrored!

Not many fancy features this time, these are mostly bug fix releases.

• Floor waggle effects are smoother now
  
• Sliders in the menus work correctly now
  
• Negative numbers in the alternate HUD have their minus sign at the right place now
  
• Menu option scales better in widescreen resolution
  
• Player setup menu looks better in non-Doom games
  
• Moving cameras work correctly again
  
• Polyobjects glitch a bit less now
  
• The internal nodebuilders works correctly now with certain troublesome maps
  
• Strife conversations fixed and improved
  
• Many nitpicky fixes in Strife (switch sounds, messages, etc.)
  
• Action Doom 2 and Harmony can now use idclev, and they have their Autoload section in the .ini
  
• MAPINFO "ResetInventory" keyword now works as expected
  
• If you experience input problems when using ZDoom through something such as Wine, set the norawinput console variable to "true".
  
• GZDoom fix: sprites are no longer oddly stretched or squashed on graphic chipsets that do not support non-power-of-two textures.

• When saving, if you use a game controller rather than the keyboard, an input grid now appears and lets you enter a name and actually save. The input grid remains off if no controller is plugged, or if it isn't used when saving the game.
  
• A new control lump type has been added. GAMEINFO is extremely simple to use.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

360 degrees of /newstuff Chronicles freedom today. This time, nearly all the reviews are provided by Brandon D. Lade—I mean, MegaDoomer. I'm sorry, did you really think I didn't know? The thumbnail screenshot is from Maniacal by Chris Wright. (more)

Thursday, January 14, 2010

iPhone developer Fabian Sanglard, before diving into the iPhone version of Doom, spent some time studying the original 1993-vintage Doom we all know and/or love in order to learn its many secrets. He's now posted a detailed article about the original software Doom renderer full of references to linedefs and segs and ssectors and all those things I understand just as vaguely now as I did back in the day. Most interestingly, the page includes some Quicktime videos showing the process of drawing a single Doom frame, slowed down considerably of course.