Welcome Tiger to the team!

You may remember Tiger from Skulltag, he helped out as a moderator and also maintained the wiki.

Well he's decided to volunteer to help us out with Doom Builder 2 builds! Thank you very much, Tiger, and welcome!

New ACC build

For anyone wanting the bugfixes and enhancements that have been brought to ACC after the 1.51 release, a new build has been compiled.

Note that this is a Windows build, it will not work in a DOS environment or with WadAuthor.

Notice about GZDoom builds and dynamic lights

The following issue has now been resolved and current builds of GZDoom are free from both the crashing problem described and the anomalies with the dynamic lights because the workaround is no longer required.



Old news:
Please be aware that there is a known bug with current GZDoom builds that can cause a crash under certain circumstances. Specifically, if there is an object on a map that changes state in the first tic of gameplay and the object has a dynamic light associated with it, the game will crash.

This is a fairly rare occurence but it can be seen on MAP40 of Hexen. There are some switchable decorations (flame effects in the fire pits within the level) that are set to be dormant in the map editor. These spawn and then immediately change state to their dormant form causing a crash.

The crash only happens when dynamic lights are used so it can be avoided by playing the game without lights.pk3 loaded.

There have been attempts made to provide a temporary workaround for the crash but these had some undesirable visual side effects. However, if you want to use a relatively recent build that avoids the crash, r1298 has the workaround. Please be aware though, you are likely to see some unusual patterns of light where dynamic lights are used on a level. Builds from r1299(1300) revert the workaround so lights look fine but the potential for this rare crash is back.

The bug will be properly addressed in the fullness of time.

If you wish to find out more, the bug is being discussed in this thread. viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5633

Fluidsysnth

Zdoom, and thereby GZdoom, now support midi playback using fluidsynth. If you want to try this feature, you will need to get a copy of fluidsynth.dll compiled by Randy Heit.

To use the feature, unpack the above linked file into the same directory as you put your Zdoom and/or GZdoom SVN binaries. Then, start the game and go to the sound options menu and change the midi device option. There should be a listing for fluidsysnth. Select it and restart the sound.

With some sound cards (eg Creative cards) this should work "out of the box" with the cards' built-in sound font. However, other users may have to download and/or initialise a soundfont before using fluidsynth. The fluidsynth website has links to a few soundfonts which may be useful.

If you experience difficulties/need more help or wish to comment on fluidsynth support in some other way, the Zdoom forum would be the appropriate place.

Doomseeker

Zalewa joined the SVN team to provide builds of Doomseeker! They can be found here. Doomseeker is a server browser for client/server Doom ports, such as Skulltag, Odamex, Vavoom and others.

SLADE3

Slade 3 is the latest addition to the family of ports and utilities finding its development builds hosted by DRD Team. You can find it along with Doom Builder 2 and ACC under the "Editors" header, or here.

In addition, the latest official version of Slade 3's predecessor Slumped can be found in the same directory, where it will remain until the Slumped homepage is back up. Slumped is back up on its homepage.

Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Hi! I've just uploaded a new revision of Vavoom engine, which contains the test for the advanced renderer, this updated version of the renderer has new lightning features (real time shadows, new lightning mode for models, among other nice looking stuff...), we would like to know if it works fine for each of you, please download it and test, also note that this new features are only available in OpenGL rendering mode, using Direct3d might not work properly as of now.

The engine has code that will select the new renderer automatically for you if your hardware supports it, the main requirements for the advanced renderer is that your video hardware supports shaders, video cards from 2 or 3 years ago will not have problems with this AFAIK. You can get the test version from the usual spot at: http://svn.drdteam.org/vavoom/

If you don't see the new renderer, chances are your hardware doesn't supports shaders, if you think your hardware does support renderer and want to test the new features, you can type the following BEFORE starting the game:

r_level_renderer 2

. If starting the game with this option produces incorrect graphics or a crash, then your hardware can't run the new renderer, you can return to the normal renderer bu typing at the console:

r_level_renderer 0

Please post your experience with the new renderer on this thread, if you find any bugs, please report them on the usual way, Enjoy!

Doom Builder 2 back online!

Since the official Doom Builder website is currently not available, we are hosting a copy of the latest DB2 installer. Remember that our SVN builds for DB2 are meant to overwrite an existing installation; you need to have an installed DB2 in the first place before you can use them. So if you do not have DB2 already installed, and you want to try one of our SVN builds, use this installer first.

This is a temporary solution; once doombuilder.com is back online this file will be removed from our server.

Update: As of 18-Mar-2010, the DB2 website and its forums appear to be back online.

7zip archives [Poll]

There is currently some discussion about moving to 7zip archives for our (G)ZDoom builds.

There are pro's and con's to this issue, and I think every person should have their own say. Please be aware, that like all of my polls, I will be paying much more attention to the replies and discussion in this thread than the poll itself - and I will be basing my final decision on what I feel is best for the community.

1) Pro's
- 7zip archives are, in fact, smaller. And in every revision, G&ZDoom both only get bigger.
- 7zip is free. http://www.7-zip.org/ - 7zip archivers typically do not require purchase or registration, are open source, and pretty much free of BS.
- 7zip is a "solid" archiver - i.e. the entire archive is compressed, not every file individually.
- Zip is obsolete.

2) Con's
- Not supported by WinZip.
- Not supported by some of the other popular commercial archivers.
- Zip is widely supported because it has been around far longer.

I honestly think transitioning to 7zip is the best move - it is a space saver, and while it's not a drastically huge difference, it's enough of a difference that it matters.

To respond to this poll, please click here.

ZDoom on the Macintosh!

As you may have noticed, ZDoom 2.4.1 has been uploaded on the site for the Macintosh. This is the first step in our efforts to offer Macintosh builds for ZDoom.

This is special thanks to our newest SVN Team member, Blzut3! He has offered to help maintain the Mac builds for our site, and we graciously appreciate it! (Because we DO know there are some of you Mac Doomers out there!)

Thank you, Blzut3!