PrBoom 2.5.1.4 Released

After a mere four years and change, PrBoom 2.5.1.4 is finally official and available for download. The changelog details all the additions and fixes, perhaps the most noteworthy of which is a fix for the wall wiggle bug prevalent in high-resolution software modes.

I must be dreaming!

Excellent!

P.S. What about MAC-version?

Awesome! I was wondering when the next release would drop, and here it is :D

This is great news! Excellent timing for us guys over at the Ty tribute project! :D Just gave it a whirl and I think it's pretty smooth and flawless so far!

Cool, what a great surprise.

Worth noting this is about Prboom-Plus, not the original PrBoom :P

Still great news. I still wonder why it hasn't taken over the original project.

Cool, some interesting changes in there too, e.g. Mouse-look in software mode.

Great job! And, thanks for the shout out on the wall-wiggle fix, and the wiki article - much appreciated. Working with entryway was a blast - make no mistake: this guy knows his stuff. It should probably be noted somewhere that the Wiggle Fix is essentially a software emulation of floating-point. It adjusts the "binary decimal point" just like the mantissa in a floating-point variable.

In other words, a floating-point renderer would see this and many other related bugs go away. But, you have to give credit to Carmack - for the time, for 320x200 resolution, for 386 PCs, his faking of floating-point using fixed-point, combined with a carefully chosen scale factor was purely genius. Doom would have crawled without it.

As for the wiggle fix, another point often overlooked is that the fix doubles as a sort of limit-removal. With wiggle fix, you can have taller walls, and deeper pits, all the way up to the maximum of 32767 units, whereas before, the limit was roughly 8192. You may experience some wiggle at those heights/depths, but the renderer stays stable. So it could be said that the wiggle-fix removes the height limit.

I'm very happy to see a proper release. PrBoom-Plus is quite a mature product at this stage, and I hope entryway is proud of his achievement. Bravo! But, maybe, just maybe, it should be called 2.6? Or even 3. Just a thought.

Awesome!

Awesome and unexpected news!

Though I got to say I was hoping for True Color support since this is about the most ported port there is thanks to RetroArch and all. The extended Joypad support should help though!

Breeder said:

I was hoping for True Color support

Use GlBoom-plus. EDIT: It is true color, or not?

Cool news! I'm really glad that the wall wiggle bug was fixed.

scifista42 said:

Use GlBoom-plus. EDIT: It is true color, or not?

With the Gl modes on PC, yes, but for PrBOOM via Retroarch it's always been confined to software mode and 8-bit color.

That's awesome! I thought the official release would never see the light of day. Good job!

kb1 said:

In other words, a floating-point renderer would see this and many other related bugs go away. But, you have to give credit to Carmack - for the time, for 320x200 resolution, for 386 PCs, his faking of floating-point using fixed-point, combined with a carefully chosen scale factor was purely genius. Doom would have crawled without it.

To be fair, no game programmer at the time who was worth his salt used floating point for anything anyway because many PCs didn't even come equipped with an FPU. It was Quake that finally broke tradition by using floating point math thoughout and that was a big deal at the time, as big as say Quake3 requiring dedicated graphics. All in all fixed point math is not really difficult and I wouldn't call it genius, as by that point Carmack and his cohorts would have had experience using it on many prior 3d and 2d games, but it was an appropriate and useful optimization for the time.