Freedoom 0.8 Released

Freedoom is back with a 0.8 release. Ultimate Freedoom's episode 4 is now the Cacoward-winning Double Impact. Many maps have been updated, and a few sprites and sounds have been upgraded as well. Freedoom's deathmatch spinoff project, FreeDM, is now vanilla compatible and has quite a few new maps. A .bex file has replaced many strings such as weapon pickups and intermission text. There are very many other changes you can check out here. Download latest version here.

Great stuff, it's been a long time (too long!) since the last release of Freedoom. I didn't realise how much stuff is "new" in this release until I looked at the Git changelog.

There are a few nerdy techie things that I've worked on that aren't in the announcement and that others might find interesting. The first is the improvements to the GENMIDI lump (used for OPL playback). I made a video of it here:

The system for generating the GENMIDI lump uses standard .SBI format OPL2 instruments, so if you have any experience with AdlibTracker or OPL music in general and can help with improving this, please take a look.

Also music-related, for pedantic completeness Freedoom now includes a DMXGUS lump (see here). So you can theoretically run Freedoom with Vanilla Doom on a DOS machine with a GUS card now. Some source ports have GUS emulation support now so that isn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

Freedoom now has a colormap generator that can generate alternate colormaps and do various special effects. If you're developing some mod that you want a custom colormap for, this might be helpful for you.

Finally there's the text generator system that now automatically generates all the menu and intermission screen graphics. I wrote a bit about how this is a good thing, and thanks to this we're now naming Freedoom's levels (because until now they've just been MAP01, MAP02, etc. and that's boring). If you've contributed a level for Freedoom in the past or are just plain creative with level names, please take a look and see if you can come up with some good names.

How did this manage to slide under the radar? Downloading . . .