And here we go once again! Announcing yet another small point release, DOOM Retro v1.4.3! Many small bugs have been fixed in this one, along with the introduction of a new and interesting feature if pixel art happens to be your thing. You may download it here. And here’s a list of what’s changed and fixed:

• The screen size can now be adjusted correctly in the options menu when not in a game.
• The size of the pixels when the graphic detail is “LOW” can now be changed by editing the pixelwidth and pixelheight settings in doomretro.cfg. Both are set to a default of 2.
• A bug has been fixed whereby pressing ENTER to save a game in an empty savegame slot wouldn’t clear that slot and replace it with the name of the current map.
• Barrels are no longer randomly mirrored when they explode.
• Some settings in doomretro.cfg are now sorted differently.
• A bug has been fixed whereby graphic anomalies could appear in some parts of some maps.
• The correct graphics will now be used for the titles of the load and save game menus, if custom graphics are present in a PWAD.
• If there are custom sprites present in a PWAD, they will now animate correctly.
• nerve.wad is now correctly recognized by the –FILE command-line parameter.
• –PWAD is now allowed as an alternate to the –FILE command-line parameter.
• Checking what things are on a floor that raises or lowers is now more accurate.
• Optimizations have been made when drawing the sky.
• The sky is now flipped vertically when repeated, as originally intended.
• A bug has been fixed whereby randomly colored pixels would appear along the very top of the screen when drawing the sky in some instances.
• There are now two settings in doomretro.cfg that control how many blood splats appear. bloodsplats_total (previously known as just bloodsplats) controls the total number of blood splats spawned in a level. It’s default is still unlimited. bloodsplats_visible is a new setting that specifies the number of blood splats that will appear on the screen at any one time. It’s default is 1024.
• A bug has been fixed whereby use of the –EPISODE, –SKILL and –WARP command-line parameters would cause the game to silently crash.
• Gamepads now work correctly.

The development of DOOM Retro is still going strong, and has no signs of letting up! After only 1 week since the last one, another small bug-busting point release, DOOM Retro v1.4.2, has now been made available! You may download it here. And here’s what’s changed:

• Several more limits have been removed, allowing larger and more detailed maps to be loaded without crashing.
• DOOM Retro will now try to fix some common map errors before loading a map.
• Optimizations have been made to the loading of large levels, and the handling of gamepads.
• The smoke trails of the player’s and Cyberdemon’s rockets can now be disabled by setting smoketrails to false in doomretro.cfg. It is true by default.
• The limit on the size of savegames has been removed, allowing the game to be saved on larger maps without exiting with an error.
• Several changes have been made to the HUD:
  • The HUD is now displayed in non-widescreen modes.
  • The drop shadows of the numbers in the HUD are now slightly lighter.
  • The HUD has been shifted downwards slightly.
  • Values in the HUD will now start flashing at 20 (rather than 10), and the speed at which they flash will increase the closer they get to 0.
  • When the player is invulnerable, only the red part of the medikit turns gold, and not the health value.
  • Keys are no longer seen to disappear from the HUD before wiping the screen when using the IDCLEVxy cheat to warp to a new map.
• The positions of blood splats are now randomized better.
• A memory leak has been fixed when loading a savegame.
• A bug has been fixed where the gamma correction level was being reset to 0.75 each time DOOM Retro was loaded, regardless of what it was previously set to.
• A bug has been fixed whereby some users were experiencing jerky mouse movement.
• A flashing HOM (“Hall of Mirrors”) indicator has been implemented. The screen will flash red in place of missing textures, but not when the player has enabled “no clipping mode” using the IDCLIP or IDSPISPOPD cheats.
• When saving a game, the savegame description will only be updated to the current map name if it hasn’t been changed to something other than map name previously.

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.