After almost 3 months of some pretty solid development, I'm proud to finally announce the availability of DOOM Retro v1.7. This is a major release, and contains many differences to prior versions, the most significant of which are:

SDL2 Support

DOOM Retro now uses SDL 2.0.3 for its graphics and audio. This brings significant performance improvements, as the screen is now scaled using hardware acceleration.

The Console

DOOM Retro now includes a console. It may be opened at any time by pressing the ~ key. The DOOM Retro Wiki will be updated in the coming days with instructions on the many different commands and variables that can be entered in the console, but in the meantime, try cmdlist and cvarlist.

Uncapped Framerates

DOOM Retro now has uncapped framerates, and through the use of interpolation, player, monster and sector movement is now much smoother, resembling the feel of more modern shooters. (Of course, you can always cap the framerate back to 35 FPS by changing the vid_capfps cvar in the console.)

You may download DOOM Retro v1.7 for free here, and browse its ridiculously exhaustive release notes here.

I would like to thank AnotherLife, Jon Krazov and Jeff Doggett for providing so many bug reports and suggestions over the past few weeks, AlexMax for his uncapped framerate code, Fabian Greffrath for his SDL2 code, and everybody else for their continued support. DOOM Retro has come a long way since its release on December 10, 2013, and although it may not be to everybody’s liking, it truly is my ideal version of DOOM. As always, if you have any suggestions, feedback, or bug reports, I encourage you 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, or raise an issue on the GitHub repository. And only if you want to, please consider giving a donation through PayPal by clicking on that button to the right.

DOOM Retro now uses SDL 2.0.3 for its graphics and audio. This brings significant performance improvements, as the screen is now scaled using hardware acceleration when possible, as well as the following features:

• The monitor to display the game on can now be specified.
• Vsync can now be toggled on/off.

DOOM Retro now includes a console. It may be opened at any time by pressing the ~ key.

DOOM Retro now has uncapped framerates, and through use of interpolation, player, monster and sector movement is much smoother.

Several memory leaks have been fixed, making DOOM Retro more stable.

A bug has been fixed whereby if a PWAD was selected in the WAD launcher that didn’t contain any map data, DOOM Retro would give up and not look at the other PWADs selected.

If none of the PWADs selected in the WAD launcher contain any map data, and no IWAD is selected, DOOM2.WAD will try to be loaded.

Many performance optimizations have been made to the rendering of blood splats and shadows.

The following changes have been made to animated liquid sectors:

• They are all slightly higher.
• The edge where two adjacent liquid sectors at different heights meet is now rendered correctly.
• The player will now move smoothly when ascending from one liquid sector to a higher one.
• No sounds are made when they move up or down.

A bug has been fixed whereby if more than one flight of stairs was meant to be triggered at the same time, only one would be.

The gaps around “1” digits in the HUD have been removed.

A bug has been fixed whereby the game could crash when rendering Spectres in some instances.

Underscores now appear under the message displayed when entering the IDBEHOLD cheat.

The map title will now be displayed correctly in the automap if a PWAD is loaded using ZDL.

Corrupt savegames will no be created if saving a game while a button is active.

Blood splats and shadows will no longer appear on sectors without floors.

The blood splats produced when the corpses of Barons of Hell and Hell Knights are crushed under a lowering sector are now the correct color.

The player’s weapon is no longer off to the right by 1 pixel in some instances.

The bottom righthand corner of the view border is now rendered correctly.

The message that is displayed when DOOM Retro is run for the first time now includes a button that opens the DOOM Retro Wiki in the default browser.

The cursor keys will no longer make a sound when pressed on the help screen.

A bug has been fixed whereby decorative corpses wouldn’t smear blood when sliding in some instances.

Smoke trails are now displayed for Cyberdemon rockets as originally intended.

The “always run” setting is now remembered between games as originally intended.

If you load a savegame that had monsters but now the –NOMONSTERS command-line parameter is enabled, the correct percentage of monsters you actually did kill now appears in the intermission.

A bug has been fixed whereby DOOM Retro would crash when trying to save a game in Final DOOM if the savegame description was changed to anything other than a map name.

Additional blood splats spawned under decorative corpses when a map is started now won't be randomly shifted away from the corpse if the corpse is hanging from the ceiling.

Several improvements have been made to DOOM Retro’s support of DeHackEd lumps and files.

Now BEX files as well as DEH files, with the same name and in the same folder as the PWAD selected in the WAD launcher, will now be automatically loaded.

DEH files are no longer automatically loaded if a PWAD is loaded from the command-line. They will need to be explicitly loaded using the –DEH command-line parameter.

A bug has been fixed whereby some teleporters in Back To Saturn X were animating as if they were liquid.

The position of the player arrow is now drawn much more accurately when in the automap and rotate mode is on.

The automap will no longer disappear, nor the game crash, when zooming out in very large maps.

Translucency is now applied to MegaSpheres as originally intended.

DOOM Retro v1.6.7 has been released and may be downloaded here. This is a small point release and the changes are as follows:

• A bug has been fixed whereby DOOM Retro would crash at startup when trying to run in a screen resolution that wasn’t widescreen.
• DOOM Retro will no longer crash after successive presses of ALT + ENTER to switch between fullscreen and windowed modes.
• Ceilings that use liquid textures will now render correctly.
• An error will now be displayed at startup if a WAD file contains DeePBSP or ZDBSP nodes.
• The saturation setting in doomretro.cfg has been deprecated.
• A bug has been fixed whereby the shadows of dropped items weren’t also being mirrored when the mirrorweapons setting was true in doomretro.cfg.
• Weapons spawned at the start of a map are now also mirrored when the mirrorweapons setting was true in doomretro.cfg.
• Thanks to some excellent coding from entryway and kb1, Vanilla DOOM’s “long wall error” has been fixed.
• Further optimizations have been made to improve the overall performance and stability of DOOM RETRO.
• Teleporters in Back to Saturn X are now drawn correctly in the automap before they have been triggered.
• Whether the automap is active or not, and any automap marks, are now saved in savegames. (Note that this change breaks savegame compatibility with previous versions of DOOM Retro.)
• A header comment has been added to the top of doomretro.cfg, with a note advising to “go to http://wiki.doomretro.com for information on changing these settings”.
• The FPS counter displayed when –DEVPARM is specified on the command-line now won’t be hidden when taking a screenshot, and will continue to update when in a menu or the game is paused.
• Diminished lighting from the player has been enhanced.
• Bloodsplats are now only spawned at the same height as corpses as they slide.