Several optimizations have been made that improve the overall performance of DOOM Retro.
When DOOM Retro is opened for the first time the following message is now displayed:
There are now 2 levels of graphic detail, “HIGH” and “LOW”, adjustable through either the options menu or by pressing the F5 key. The “HIGH” level has the same graphic detail as in previous versions of DOOM Retro. It has an effective resolution of 640×400 (or 640×336 in widescreen) and is the default. The “LOW” level is new, and has an effective resolution of 320×200 (the resolution used in Vanilla DOOM).
When the title screen is displayed, it will now alternate with the credits screen.
The gray text in the status bar is now twice the resolution when the graphic detail is set to “HIGH”.
A bug has been fixed whereby the sounds of Revenant and Cyberdemon projectiles would become corrupted in some instances.
The file default.cfg has been renamed to doomretro.cfg.
The background when a menu is displayed or the game is paused is now in grayscale, as well as being blurred and darkened. This may be disabled by changing grayscale to false in doomretro.cfg.
The menu background’s blur is now calculated differently, and should resolve the performance issues some users were experiencing.
Minor corrections have been made to the drop shadows and kerning of text in the menus.
Menus are now always centered vertically.
Many changes have been made so that custom graphics in PWADs are now handled better, when previously they may have either ignored completely or misaligned.
When changing the music using the IDMUS cheat, the name of the music will be displayed.
When changing the map using the IDCLEVxy cheat, the name of the map will be displayed.
When using the IDBEHOLDx cheats, the message displayed will indicate if the power-up is being toggled on or off.
In doomretro.cfg, menublur has been renamed to just blur, show_messages to messages, usegamma to gammalevel, and screenblocks to screensize.
When the player’s health, ammo or armor drops to 10 or less, those values will start flashing in the widescreen HUD as a warning.
When the player is invulnerable (either by having picked up an invulnerability power-up or using the IDDQD cheat), their health will be displayed in gold in the widescreen HUD. This corresponds with the gold eyes of the player’s face in the status bar.
There are now 31 different gamma correction levels between 0.50 and 2.0 inclusive, in increments of 0.05. Gamma correction level 0.75 is still the default.
The first press of the F11 key will now display the current gamma correction level. Further presses of the key before the message disappears will then increase the level (or decrease the level if the SHIFT key is held down).
Autorepeat is now allowed for the F11 key.
The gamma correction level is now saved the moment it is changed.
The weapons dropped by Shotgun Guys and Heavy Weapon Dudes when they die are now mirrored horizontally at random, independent of their corpses.
A bug has been fixed whereby the player was unable to pick up stimpacks or medikits in the BFG Editions of DOOM or DOOM II.
There is now slightly more blood.
Because of some significant improvements to the drawing of blood splats, the number of blood splats that may be in a map is now unlimited. The bloodsplats setting in doomretro.cfg may still be changed from unlimited to a value between 0 and 32768 inclusive.
Blood splats are now mirrored horizontally at random for some additional variation.
The blood and blood splats from Spectres, as well as the player when they have the partial invisibility power-up, now appear with the same “fuzz effect”.
Blood splats are now drawn first and no longer overlap other sprites, making them appear closer to the ground.
When the mouse sensitivity is set to 0, the mouse is disabled. (And similarly, when a gamepad is in use, it is also disabled.)
The translucency of blue and green blood has been reduced slightly.
doomretro.wad no longer appears in the WAD launcher.
Any PWADs selected with doom1.wad in the WAD launcher will now be ignored rather than displaying an error.
nerve.wad can now be selected without doom2.wad in the WAD launcher, even when another PWAD is selected with it, and doom2.wad will be looked for automatically.
A bug has been fixed whereby the keys the player had previously found weren’t being restored when loading a savegame.
The location of GUS patches can now be specified using timidity_cfg_path in doomretro.cfg.
Rotate mode is now enabled by default in the automap.
Some minor changes have been made to the help screen.
Screenshots are now saved as Untitled.bmp if taken while in the help screen.
Messages will now timeout when the help screen is displayed.
The lighting in maps is now calculated differently slightly.
The small ‘3’ and ‘8’ digits used for marks in the automap, and the small ‘3’ digit in the status bar, have been altered slightly.
There is now a chance that the super shotgun may gib a monster when fired at point blank range. (This idea has been taken from Fabian Greffrath’s Crispy DOOM.)
