DOOM Retro v1.6.2 has been released and may be downloaded here. This is a small point release and the changes are as follows:

• A bug, inadvertently introduced in v1.6.1, has been fixed whereby the wrong colored keys would appear in the HUD.
• The default value for the saturation setting in doomretro.cfg has been changed from 0.75 to 1.00.
• The gamma setting in doomretro.cfg has been renamed to gammacorrectionlevel, and the alias off can now be used when it is set to 0.
• Blood splats will now appear in maps from PWADs that use a DeHackEd file or lump.
• The clipping of the bottom of things will now be updated when the sector they’re in changes to/from liquid.
• Spectres now have slightly lighter shadows than the other monsters, with fuzzy edges.
• Minor changes have been made to the values of settings in doomretro.cfg. The true/false aliases now appear as on/off, and the none alias now appears as a hyphen. Aliases yes/no may also be used.
• Setting the mouse sensitivity to 0 will no longer disable the gamepad as well.
• The range of gamepad sensitivity has been increased.
• Several minor changes have been made to the properties of pickups in HacX: Twitch ‘n Kill.
• The , and . keys can now also be used to strafe left and right, as they could in Vanilla DOOM. They are changed using the key_strafeleft2 and key_straferight2 settings in doomretro.cfg.
• Shifted characters are now allowed when entering savegame descriptions. (In Vanilla DOOM, pressing SHIFT + /, for example, would still display “/” rather than “?”.)

DOOM Retro v1.6.1 has been released! It may be downloaded here. This is a small point release and the changes are as follows:

• If a DeHackEd file (with a .DEH extension) is present with the same name and in the same folder as the selected PWAD, it will be automatically opened as well.
• Improvements have been made to when the player slides against walls.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the screen would not render fully after switching from fullscreen to windowed modes when pressing ALT + ENTER.
• Several compatibility fixes have been made when using DeHacked files and lumps.
• Savegames for Back To Saturn X are now separated by episode.
• A bug has been fixed whereby HacX: Twitch ‘n Kill wouldn’t load at all. Specific support has now been added for it.
• Fake contrast is now applied to outdoor areas again.
• Thing triangles no longer appear for the invisible corpses in Chex Quest when using the IDDT cheat in the automap.
• The default value of snd_maxslicetime_ms has been changed from 120 to 28. This is consistent with Chocolate DOOM’s default, and reduces the slight lag when playing sounds.
• The centeredweapon setting has been added to doomretro.cfg. Setting it to true will center the player’s weapon each time it’s fired (the default). If false, Vanilla DOOM’s behavior is used.
• A bug has been fixed whereby input would momentarily become stuck if the splash screen was skipped at startup.
• Blood splats are now green in Chex Quest as intended.
• A bug has been fixed whereby switching to and from the chainsaw using the number keys really quickly would cause either a crash, or the player’s weapon to disappear completely.
• The player’s weapon bob is now consistent with Vanilla DOOM.

In anticipation of New Hallows’ Eve, I’m proud to finally announce the release of version 1.6 of DOOM Retro. This iteration sees many, many new features, the most significant of which includes dynamic shadows, partially submerged objects in liquid, and DeHackEd support. You may download it for free here, and browse its ridiculously exhaustive release notes here.

I’d like to thank those on Twitter and the Doomworld forums who “get” what I’m trying to achieve with this port, and for lending their support. My deepest gratitude especially goes to Jon Krazov for being my beta tester for this release, and Luke Jones for contributing some of his coding expertise. DOOM Retro isn’t perfect... but I most certainly want it to be! If you yourself have any suggestions, feedback, or bug reports to give, I urge you, please, to participate. As always, you may follow @doomretro on Twitter, or the DOOM Retro page on Facebook, leave a comment on the DOOM Retro thread on the forums, leave a comment here on this post, help out with the DOOM Retro Wiki, or raise an issue in the GitHub repository. And most importantly, please consider giving a donation through PayPal by clicking on the button at the top right of this page.

Further enhancements have been made to DOOM Retro’s overall performance and stability.

Widescreen mode is no longer stretched horizontally on displays with a greater aspect ratio than 16:10.

Monsters, pickups, corpses and rockets now all cast dynamic shadows on the ground. These shadows are not cast when in or over liquid, nor when the player has either the light amplification visor or invulnerability power-ups. Shadows may be disabled by setting shadows to false in doomretro.cfg. Shadows are translucent, but if translucency is set to false in doomretro.cfg, they are solid black.

All objects are now partially submerged when standing in liquid. This feature may be disabled by setting footclip to false in doomretro.cfg.

The player’s view is now lowered slightly when standing in liquid. Setting footclip to false in doomretro.cfg will also disable this.

Less friction is applied to corpses and dropped items when in liquid.

Blood splats are now drawn regardless of how far they are away from the player.

The firing animation of the Heavy Weapon Dude when facing to the right is now smoother.

Since they all cast shadows now, the Lost Soul, Cacodemon and Pain Elemental are higher off the ground in DOOM II’s cast sequence.

Deaths are now randomly flipped in the cast sequence.

It is now possible to warp to episodes beyond episode 4 using the –WARP command-line parameter.

DOOM Retro now supports DeHackEd files and lumps, including those with BOOM extensions. DeHackEd files may be opened by using the –DEH or –BEX command-line parameters. DEHACKED lumps will automatically be parsed unless –NODEH is specified on the command-line.

If a map from a PWAD is loaded, and no DEHACKED lump is present in the PWAD specifying its name, then the PWAD’s name will also be included in the automap.

The intermission screen is now displayed at the end of ExM8.

The amount of kills is now correctly capped at 100% on the intermission screen in all instances.

Walls are now drawn with even greater precision, fixing many graphic anomalies that may appear when the player stands on a line with a change in height.

Fake contrast is no longer applied to walls in outdoor areas.

The position of floating items has been raised off the ground slightly.

A message is now displayed in stdout.txt when an Arch-vile resurrects a monster.

The mouse controls that select next and previous weapons can now be set by changing mouse_nextweapon and mouse_prevweapon in doomretro.cfg. They are set to wheeldown and wheelup by default.

The use action may now be bound to a mouse button by changing the mouse_use setting in doomretro.cfg. It is set to none by default.

The maximum mouse sensitivity has been doubled from 64 to 128.

Mouse and gamepad sensitivity are now two separate settings.

Both the mouse and gamepad are now completely disabled when sensitivity is set to 0 and not in a menu. Previously, only the turning movement of both devices was disabled.

The overall gamepad sensitivity has now been reduced slightly.

Moving sliders in the menu with the gamepad is now faster.

When a game is loaded, including when a savegame is autoloaded after a player’s death, a message is now displayed.

A version number is now embedded in each savegame to avoid a crash when attempting to load an older and incompatible savegame.

Minor changes have been made to the help screen.

The red screen tint when the player has the berserk power-up has been reduced slightly.

All drop shadows in the menus, in the HUD and on messages are now solid when translucency is false.

Specific support has been added for Chex Quest:

• The window caption is displayed as “Chex Quest”.
• CHEX.DEH is automatically loaded if it’s present in the same folder as CHEX.WAD and –NODEH isn’t specified on the command-line.
• The episode menu is skipped.
• No obituaries are printed to stdout.txt.
• No items are dropped.
• No additional blood is spawned around map decorations.
• All blood splats are green.
• Since corpses are effectively invisible, there are no blood splats or crunch sounds made if an invisible corpse happens to be under a door.
• The screen will flash green rather than red when the player is injured.

Specific support has also been added for both episodes of Back to Saturn X:

• The window caption is displayed as “Back to Saturn X E1: Get Out Of My Stations” or “Back to Saturn X E2: Tower in the Fountain of Sparks”.
• DOOM Retro’s custom sprite offsets, previously only used with the official DOOM IWADS, are now used. This fixes a bug that caused some level decorations to “twitch” as they animated.
• If only BTSX_E2A.WAD is loaded from the WAD launcher, then BTSX_E2B.WAD is automatically loaded as well, and vice-versa.
• The map number in the message displayed when using the IDCLEVxy cheat is of the form “ExMyy” to match what’s displayed in the automap.
• To avoid a crash, you are no longer able to warp to a DOOM II map that is not replaced by a map in Back to Saturn X’s PWAD, using either the –WARP command-line parameter or the IDCLEVxy cheat.

The amount of blood splats produced when crushing corpses is now based on their width.

The edges of blood splats have now been softened slightly.

Decorative corpses can now be crushed.

Changes have been made to the text on the splash screen.

The splash screen now fades onto and off of the screen at startup.

The splash screen may now be accelerated by pressing a key or button.

Monsters will now try to move away from tall dropoffs.

When spawning blood splats around decorations when a map is loaded, blood splats will no longer be spawned on floors close to but higher than the decoration itself.

Textures RROCK05 to RROCK08, and SLIME09 to SLIME12, are no longer considered liquids, and therefore blood splats can now appear on them.

Further improvements have been made in detecting Mancubus fireball collisions.

Spawn cubes are no longer spawned when the –NOMONSTERS command-line parameter is used.

A bug has been fixed whereby a flashing skull key in the HUD would cause other keys next to it to shift slightly.

In the automap, lines won’t be shown as being teleport lines (that is, in dark red) unless:

• it is part of an obvious teleport by being adjacent to a floor with a GATEx texture,
• the player has been teleported by it, or,
• the player is using the IDDT cheat.

All settings in doomretro.cfg are now validated at startup. If any setting is found to be invalid, it will be reset to its default.

Improvements have been made to the smoke trails of player and Cyberdemon rockets, and Revenant projectiles. The smoke will take slightly longer to dissipate, and is better randomized.

The heights of Revenants and Arch-viles have been restored to their lower defaults. Many maps rely on this, and so therefore this fixes instances whereby sometimes these monsters would be stuck and wouldn’t attack the player.

A monster will no longer go fullbright when firing a projectile if they are facing away from the player.

A bug has been fixed whereby if an action was assigned to the I key, it wouldn’t work since “I” is the first character of every cheat.

The patch offsets for textures SKY1 and BIGDOOR7 have been corrected.

Long map titles in the automap and when saving a game, as well as player messages, are now truncated and followed with an ellipsis.

The read-only xinput setting has been removed from doomretro.cfg.

A read-only version setting has been added to doomretro.cfg.

If doomretro.cfg was deleted, and then regenerated by running DOOM Retro, the defaults for the corpses and videodriver settings are now correct.

The DOOM Retro icon is now always used in the window caption.

All trademark symbols have been removed from the window caption.

Multiple PWADs may now be selected in the WAD launcher without an IWAD.

Monsters will no longer go to sleep after killing a monster and not seeing the player anymore.

All palette effects are now removed while a menu is displayed or the game is paused.

Improvements have been made to the translucency of the blue armor in the HUD.

The player can now still pass under solid hanging corpses if there is sufficient room.

A bug has been fixed whereby the , key was being incorrectly mapped, causing it to act like the - key if it was bound to anything.

Use of the ALT and CTRL keys in the menu has been disabled.

Empty savegame slots may no longer be selected in the load game menu.

Only update savegame descriptions of the form “ExMy” in DOOM games, not DOOM II games.

The text caret in the save game menu is now better positioned when using a PWAD with a custom character set.

A bug has been fixed whereby the position of the skull cursor could be misplaced when exiting and then returning to the menu using the gamepad in some instances.

The number of characters that can be entered in a savegame slot is now calculated correctly.

If the CAPSLOCK key was on before DOOM Retro was run, it is now turned back on as necessary when quitting.

Player messages and the map name in the automap are now translucent and have drop shadows when using a PWAD with a custom character set.

A bug has been fixed whereby an Arch-vile could resurrect a monster for it to instantly become stuck in another monster.

The player’s screen will no longer flash red if they are hit by a projectile while already dead.

A bug has been fixed whereby the game would crash when using the –NOSFX or –NOSOUND command-line parameters.

A bug has been fixed whereby you could switch weapons when zooming in the automap if both actions were set to the gamepad’s left and right shoulder buttons.

Skies with heights other than 128 pixels are now rendered correctly.

Just barely a week since the last one, but already a small but meaty point release, DOOM Retro v1.5.2, is available for download! This version includes several obligatory bug fixes, as well as a couple of welcome new features. It may be downloaded here, and the changes are as follows:

• Monster targets are now completely restored upon loading a game, regardless of whether they were targeting the player, or they were infighting.
• A Boss Brain no longer needs to be in MAP30 for the monsters it spawns to telefrag the player.
• A bug has been fixed whereby monsters were allowed to be above or below other monsters after teleporting, when normally they wouldn’t be.
• Improvements have been made to the position of some elements in the menu and HUD.
• Optimizations have been made to the loading of maps, and the lighting of the player’s weapon.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the game could crash when trying to draw the player’s weapon in pitch black areas in some instances.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the CAPSLOCK key was not being turned off when quitting the game.
• Pressing CAPSLOCK during a game will now display an ALWAYS RUN ON/OFF message. If when quitting the game the CAPSLOCK key is still on, it will be turned back on the next time DOOM Retro is started.
• In the previous version of DOOM Retro, the default video driver was changed from Windows GDI to DirectX to help in improving performance in fullscreen mode. If DirectX wasn’t installed, DOOM Retro would exit with an error. Now, if one video driver fails, DOOM Retro will try the other driver before exiting with an error.
• All in-game messages are now output to stdout.txt, whether messages are enabled or not.
• Whenever the player or a monster is killed, a message is displayed in stdout.txt.
• Minor changes have been made to a few messages.
• A bug has been fixed whereby DOOM Retro would exit with an error if the IDDQD cheat was used to resurrect a dead player.