In celebration of DOOM’s 21st birthday (and DOOM Retro’s first!), point release v1.6.4 is now available for download. Here’s a list of the changes it brings:

• Several optimizations have been made in an attempt to further improve the overall performance of DOOM Retro.
• DeHackEd files (*.DEH and *.BEX) are now displayed and can be loaded in the WAD launcher. CTRL-click to select them along with the WAD file(s) you want to load.
• When multiple PWADs are selected in the WAD launcher, and with no IWAD, every PWAD will now be checked until the IWAD required is determined, rather than potentially failing if the first PWAD checked contains no map data.
• The FPS counter will now work correctly when –DEVPARM is specified on the command-line.
• Problems with movement of the mouse have been fixed when starting DOOM Retro in windowed mode.
• Panning when follow mode is off in the automap is now back to working correctly.
• Several changes have been made so that the window caption is now updated correctly.
• Smoke trails and bullet puffs are now greyer then before, and displayed using 33% translucency rather than additive translucency.
• The player’s view will no longer be lowered further due to the footclip setting when standing in a self-referencing sector.
• Improvements have been made to switching weapons using a gamepad.
• For non-widescreen displays, the status bar is no longer displayed when in the automap if it isn’t displayed during a game.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the screensize setting was being reset at startup for non-widescreen displays.
• The “dead zones” of the left and right thumbsticks of gamepads can now be adjusted using the gamepad_leftdeadzone and gamepad_rightdeadzone settings in doomretro.cfg. They are 24% and 26.5% by default.
• There are now settings for every control in the automap, for both the keyboard and gamepad, in doomretro.cfg.
• The sfx_volume and music_volume settings in doomretro.cfg have had their underscores removed, and their values are now displayed as percentages.
• Smoke trails are no longer displayed for Revenants’ non-homing rockets, as intended.
• The menu may still be opened with the gamepad’s START button if gamepad_sensitivity has been reduced to 0.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the help screens wrongly indicated that the A and D keys were used to turn rather than strafe.
• The overall gamepad sensitivity has been increased even more, and the default of gamepad_sensitivity has now been doubled from 16 to 32.
• The player will now bob as intended when playerbob is greater than 75%.
• Changes have been made to the messages displayed when adding and clearing marks.

DOOM Retro v1.6.3 has been released and may be downloaded here. Although yet another point release, it includes a significant amount of changes, and they are as follows:

• Several internal optimizations have been made in an attempt to improve the overall performance of DOOM Retro.
• Decorative corpses are now randomly mirrored when a map is loaded.
• A potential overflow has been fixed if there was more than 32 characters in a savegame description.
• Cheat sequences can now be overridden in DeHackEd lumps and files.
• The bobbing up and down of floating powerups can now be disabled by setting floatbob to false in doomretro.cfg.
• The window caption is now updated when ending a game through the options menu.
• DOOM2.WAD savegames are no longer placed in the NERVE.WAD folder.
• A bug has been fixed whereby extreme slowdown would occur if a large amount of monsters (and blood splats) were on a moving sector.
• Pressing the window’s maximize button will now switch to fullscreen mode.
• The messages displayed when the player picks up ammo are now accurate, since the amount can vary depending on the skill level chosen and/or whether a monster dropped it or not.
• A bug has been fixed whereby monsters were not always remembering their last target when attacked by something else. This would affect monster infighting in some instances.
• Widescreen mode is now supported in windowed mode. Rather than displaying pillarboxes, the window will expand and contract horizontally as necessary when toggling widescreen mode on and off.
• The display of the “screen size” slider in the options menu is now fixed when in windowed mode.
• The width and height of the window are no longer set to be even numbers.
• A stretched cursor will no longer sometimes briefly appear in the center of the window when opening the menu in windowed mode.
• DOOM Retro should no longer crash when switching between fullscreen and windowed modes with ALT + ENTER, and when resizing the window.
• If NERVE.WAD is loaded, the window caption will now be updated to indicate the selected expansion when in the expansion and skill level menus before starting a game.
• Shadows are now saved in savegames, even when the shadows setting in doomretro.cfg is false.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the value of the bloodsplats setting in doomretro.cfg was always set to the default of unlimited regardless of what it was changed to.
• If a setting in doomretro.cfg that has a range of values is set out of range, it will be capped at the minimum or maximum, rather than changed back to the default.
• A mapfixes setting in doomretro.cfg has been implemented to allow the several hundred map-specific fixes that DOOM Retro applies to be enabled or disabled by type. The default is linedefs|sectors|things|vertexes.
• The weapon number keys can now be changed by altering the key_weaponx settings in doomretro.cfg.
• A bug has been fixed whereby some combinations of flags used by the corpses setting in doomretro.cfg weren’t being considered valid.
• Key settings in doomretro.cfg can no longer be set to function keys.
• The controls set by gamepad_prevweapon and gamepad_nextweapon can no longer be used when the game is paused.
• Faster switching to the next and previous weapons is now allowed.
• Improvements have been made to the menu in HacX: Twitch ‘n Kill.
• Smoke trails are no longer applied to Revenant non-homing rockets by default.
• Instead of just on and off, the smoketrails setting in doomretro.cfg has been changed to allow smoke trails to be enabled or disabled depending on who fired the projectile. The setting can be any combination of the following flags: player (smoke trails for player rockets), revenant1 (smoke trails for revenant non-homing rockets), revenant2 (smoke trails for revenant homing rockets) and cyberdemon (smoke trails for cyberdemon rockets). The default is player|revenant2|cyberdemon.
• A bug has been fixed whereby pressing the CAPSLOCK key on the titlescreen will cause the use of the key to then become inverted (that is, turning CAPSLOCK on would turn “always run” off, and vice versa).
• The display of the asterisk character is now allowed in a savegame description.
• The player arrow in the automap is now displayed correctly when zoomed in.
• A bug has hopefully been fixed that caused objects to sometimes disappear when standing on sector boundaries.
• Several changes have been made to improve DOOM Retro’s DeHackEd support.
• A bug has been fixed present in Vanilla DOOM whereby the vertical position of an arch-vile’s fire attack could be set incorrectly in some instances.
• There is no longer any small upward thrust when the player is receives an arch-vile’s fire attack while “no clipping mode” is on using the IDCLIP cheat.

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 “?”.)