DOOM Retro v1.4.1 has now been released. It may be downloaded here. This small point release fixes a rather nasty bug when adjusting the sound volume, and includes a few new additional changes. The release notes are as follows:

• A bug has been fixed whereby the sound would become disabled if adjusting the volume through the menu or pausing and then unpausing the game.
• The visplane limit has been removed, allowing for more detailed levels to run without crashing.
• A sound will now be heard if a wrong selection is made in the WAD launcher and it needs to reopen.
• When a Heavy Weapon Dude is killed, their corpse is no longer randomly mirrored.
• Projectiles will now pass through map decorations like they do in Vanilla DOOM. (Please note that this particular change means savegames from previous versions of DOOM Retro won’t work with DOOM Retro v1.4.1.)
• If music can’t be loaded for a particular map, that map will still load without music rather than the game exiting with an error.

DOOM Retro v1.4 is now available for your downloading pleasure! This version corrects a couple of nasty (and embarrassing) bugs, is much more well behaved with Vanilla DOOM mods, and introduces a few new features such as a low graphic detail mode, enhancements to the widescreen HUD, and most importantly: more blood. You may download DOOM Retro here.

Once again, many thanks to those on Twitter and the Doomworld forums for providing their support. Your help truly makes this hobby/obsession of mine all the more worthwhile. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or bug reports to give, please feel free to participate. As always, you may follow @doomretro on Twitter, leave a comment on the DOOM Retro thread on the forums, leave a comment on this post, help out with the DOOM RETRO Wiki or raise an issue on the GitHub repository. And if you’d like to earn my undying, unconditional love(!), please consider giving a donation through PayPal by clicking on that ever so enticing button to the right. C’mon. You know you wanna.

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”.

DOOM Retro’s new enhanced status bar. Click to zoom.

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.)

After one month of some insanely rigorous coding, I’m proud to present DOOM Retro v1.3! This release continues to improve on the game’s stability and performance, fixes several bugs, and introduces a new widescreen HUD! Check out the long list of release notes for a full account on the changes. You may download DOOM Retro here.

Thank you to all those on Twitter and the Doomworld forums for providing their support. (A BIG “ありがとうございます” to 倉敷楠花 (Nanka Kurashiki) for allowing me to use an example of her freakin’ adorable fanart in this post.) I’m only just getting started with DOOM Retro, and if you have any suggestions, feedback, or bug reports, please feel free to participate. You may follow @doomretro on Twitter, leave a comment on the DOOM Retro thread on the forums, leave a comment on this post, help out with the DOOM Retro Wiki or raise an issue on the GitHub repository. And if you’d like to help out even more, please consider giving a donation through PayPal by clicking on that ever so enticing button to the right.

An extensive number of optimizations have been made that improve the overall performance of DOOM Retro.

A heads-up display (HUD) is now shown in widescreen mode.

Each element of the HUD is slightly translucent.

An additional press of the + key, or move of the “SCREEN SIZE” slider to the right in the options menu, will hide the HUD.

The HUD isn’t displayed while the player is dead.

If the player has the berserk power-up, and has his fist selected, the berserk power-up will replace the medikit in the HUD.

The keys that the player has picked up are displayed in the order they were found, from right to left.

If the player attempts to open a door they don’t have the key for, that key will flash in the HUD.

If the player has no armor, the keys are displayed along the right side of the screen.

The type of armor the player has (either green or blue armor) is displayed.

The background is now blurred when in a menu or the game is paused. This effect may be disabled by changing the menublur setting in default.cfg to false.

The green blood of Hell Knights and Barons of Hell is now slightly darker.

A bug has been fixed that existed in Vanilla DOOM that caused monsters to be able to see the player through walls, or not see the player when they should have, in some instances. Thank you to 倉敷楠花 (Nanka Kurashiki) for bringing this to my attention.

The PRINTSCRN key and ALT + ENTER have been added to the help screen.

The “HELP” title has been added to the help screen in DOOM II to be consistent with the other versions of DOOM.

The player’s weapon is no longer displayed in the help screen’s background.

Switching between widescreen and non-widescreen modes is now much cleaner. The status bar will no longer briefly appear at the bottom of the screen.

Several bugs have been fixed whereby some IWADs and PWADs would sometimes fail to load from the WAD launcher.

If the selection made in the WAD launcher is incorrect, it will reopen rather than exit with an error.

By popular demand, default.cfg is now saved in the same folder as doomretro.exe. To make it clear where the settings are, a copy of default.cfg is now included in the distribution.

The settings in default.cfg are now sorted alphabetically.

DOOM Retro is now less likely to crash if certain settings in default.cfg are set incorrectly.

The bloodsplats setting in default.cfg is now a number rather than true or false, and is 1024 by default.

A bug has been fixed whereby over 700 different level-specific fixes (replacing missing or incorrect textures, moving stuck objects, etc.) weren’t being applied.

Tweaks have been made to the animations of Zombiemen, Shotgun Guys and Mancubi.

Screenshots are now saved as a 256-color Windows BMP, reducing their size in kilobytes by more than 66%.

Pillarboxes are no longer saved in screenshots.

The PRINTSCRN key now no longer saves the screen to the clipboard when taking a screenshot.

Rotation in the automap is now more accurate.

A bug has been fixed whereby the crosshair could still decelerate from panning while the menu was displayed.

The red crosses in stimpacks are now darker to be consistent with medikits.

If a sprite is replaced with a custom sprite in a PWAD, any translucency will be removed and custom offsets won’t be applied.

The width of pickups are now calculated differently such that they are less likely to be suspended in midair when close to a change in height.

The TEKWALL1 texture (for example, as used on the green armor platform in E1M1: Hangar) is now displayed the same way as in Vanilla DOOM.

Windows accessibility shortcut keys are disabled during the game.

The WINDOWS key is now also disabled when in a window.

The pistol sound is now used when toggling messages in the options menu using the ← and → cursor keys.

Changes have been made to how mouse sensitivity is calculated such that it is now exactly the same as Chocolate DOOM.

The default mouse sensitivity has been increased.

Blood splats no longer appear on RROCK0x animated flats.

A bug has been fixed whereby if the “reject matrix” in a PWAD is empty, it will create an overflow and cause monsters to behave strangely. Thank you to jeff-d on the Doomworld forums for providing a solution to this.

The berserk power-up may now be toggled off using IDBEHOLDS cheat.

A bug has been fixed whereby the Lost Soul wouldn’t rotate correctly in DOOM II’s cast sequence.

Translucency may be disabled by setting translucency setting in default.cfg to false.

The fuzz effect is now applied to the muzzle flash of the player’s weapon when they have the partial invisibility power-up.

A bug has been fixed whereby some floors weren’t rising or lowering when they should. Thank you to Jon Krazov for bringing this to my attention.

key_prevweapon and key_nextweapon will no longer work when in a menu.

Savegame descriptions are no longer updated to the current map’s name when the player saves a game if they have previously edited it.

The correct skill level is now saved in savegames.

The ENTER key on the numeric keypad can now be used wherever the main ENTER key can be used.

DMENUPIC is now used on the intermission screen in DOOM II (BFG Edition).

There are no longer any overlapping drop shadows in the menus.

Keys are now positioned correctly in the status bar.