DOOM Retro v1.6.5 has been released and may be downloaded here. This is a small point release and the changes are as follows:

• Many optimizations have been made to further improve the overall performance and stability of DOOM Retro.
• A bug has been fixed whereby secret sectors that lower and change their texture may not be displayed in the automap correctly.
• Decorative corpses spawned at the start of a map are now randomly mirrored as intended.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the player sometimes wouldn’t trigger a teleport when running over it in some instances.
• Changes have been made to how lighting is calculated.
• Liquid sectors, and the partially submerged objects that are on them, now animate up and down. This feature may be disabled by changing the animatedliquid setting in doomretro.cfg to false.

• A bug has been fixed whereby objects on a sector that lowers and becomes liquid wouldn’t update immediately (that is, the bottom of their sprites wouldn’t be clipped, their shadow wouldn’t be removed, and blood splats wouldn’t be removed either).
• Blood splats that are spawned around decorative corpses at the start of a map are now spawned in a more natural-looking circular pattern, and may also be offset slightly from the corpse to give the impression that the corpse may have slid.
• Blood splats that are spawned when crushing a corpse are now also spawned in a circular pattern.
• The positions of shadows for several monsters have been improved.
• The total amount of blood splats that can be spawned when a corpse slides across the floor has been doubled.
• The total amount of blood splats that can be spawned when a corpse slides across the floor is now saved in savegames. This breaks savegame compatibility with previous versions of DOOM Retro.
• Blood splats that are spawned around decorative corpses at the start of a map now come from this same total.
• A bug has been fixed whereby it was possible for the screen to switch between the TITLEPIC and CREDIT lumps before wiping the screen after the player selects a skill level in the menu to start a new game.
• The top and bottom edges of Spectre shadows are now “fuzzy”.
• The top and bottom edges of Spectre shadows are now “fuzzy”, and also lighter, in DOOM II’s cast sequence, to match how they appear in the game.
• A savegame slot that isn’t empty is now automatically selected in the load game menu if the player previously exited the save game menu while a savegame slot that is empty was selected.
• The screen will now flash the same amount for keycards and skull keys as for other pickups.
• The window can now be resized when in widescreen mode.
• Several changes have been made so that DOOM Retro will behave better when custom sprites are present in a PWAD.
• DOOM Retro will no longer exit with an error if a flat’s texture is missing in a WAD.
• Zooming in and out of the automap using a gamepad has now been fixed.
• The textures PLANET1, SW2BLUE and SW2MARB now have brightmaps.
• NERVE.WAD will now be automatically loaded if DOOM2.WAD is selected in the WAD launcher and there are also one or more PWADs selected that don’t contain any map data.
• The translucency of blood splats has been reduced slightly, and their edges are no longer softened.
• Green blood splats are now slightly darker.
• A bug has been fixed whereby some shootable switches would only work once.
• The edges of shadows are now black when the translucency setting in doomretro.cfg to false.
• The sfxvolume and musicvolume settings in doomretro.cfg will no longer round down to 0% when set to 6%.

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.