Week 40/2013: Starting on Q4
Last week we released the stable 1.12.
In the days following the release I've been enjoying a playthrough of Hexen, which is something that I haven't done in a couple of years. Turns out I've actually forgotten huge chucks of the game; some of the maps still manage to surprise me. Hexen is the game that has always been my primary (and initial) motivation for working on Doomsday, so it is refreshing to relive it while benefiting from the years of work we've put into the engine. Good boost for motivation.
Work on 1.13 is now underway. I already got a chance to do a couple of tweaks, namely a Key Grabber utility in Input Settings and improvements to the automatic updater's notifications.
The Key Grabber shows you the actual key codes received by the engine when you press a key on the keyboard. This should be useful if you're doing bindings manually, or trying to figure out why the console shortcut key isn't working, for instance.
The update notification dialog will no longer appear after an automatic update check. When playing the game or navigating menus, having a dialog suddenly pop up was not the user-friendliest way to handle the situation. Now when an update is available, only the notification icon will appear in the top right notification area. You can then deal with the update when it is convenient for you by either clicking on the icon or by selecting "Check for Updates" in the DE menu.
With the stable release out of the way, the roadmap is again opened up for reassessment. 2013 is shaping up to be quite a year with four major releases, as 1.13 is being planned for December. So far we've been addressing multiplayer in 1.10, and map data and engine UI in both 1.11 and 1.12. In 1.13, I would like to finally begin revising some portions of the renderer. However, due to the nature of the work, this must begin from the "superficial" layers that are not so tightly bound to the inner workings of the map/surface rendering. Nevertheless, it should be rather exciting.
In the days following the release I've been enjoying a playthrough of Hexen, which is something that I haven't done in a couple of years. Turns out I've actually forgotten huge chucks of the game; some of the maps still manage to surprise me. Hexen is the game that has always been my primary (and initial) motivation for working on Doomsday, so it is refreshing to relive it while benefiting from the years of work we've put into the engine. Good boost for motivation.
Work on 1.13 is now underway. I already got a chance to do a couple of tweaks, namely a Key Grabber utility in Input Settings and improvements to the automatic updater's notifications.
The Key Grabber shows you the actual key codes received by the engine when you press a key on the keyboard. This should be useful if you're doing bindings manually, or trying to figure out why the console shortcut key isn't working, for instance.
The update notification dialog will no longer appear after an automatic update check. When playing the game or navigating menus, having a dialog suddenly pop up was not the user-friendliest way to handle the situation. Now when an update is available, only the notification icon will appear in the top right notification area. You can then deal with the update when it is convenient for you by either clicking on the icon or by selecting "Check for Updates" in the DE menu.
With the stable release out of the way, the roadmap is again opened up for reassessment. 2013 is shaping up to be quite a year with four major releases, as 1.13 is being planned for December. So far we've been addressing multiplayer in 1.10, and map data and engine UI in both 1.11 and 1.12. In 1.13, I would like to finally begin revising some portions of the renderer. However, due to the nature of the work, this must begin from the "superficial" layers that are not so tightly bound to the inner workings of the map/surface rendering. Nevertheless, it should be rather exciting.
Comments
What would be some examples of this? Would this include something like the "bug" of the sound origin when hitting a switch?
Also, I know that one major render hack is still yet to be supported in Doomsday (the missing texture one). You see this frequently across Final Doom (both TNT and Plutonia), so it'd be nice to know if this will make it into 1.13. Thanks.
Support for this hack is indeed on my to-do list for 1.13
I ask this because of the current Tag 667 behavior under Doomsday. Doomsday right now uses the BOOM method of interpreting Tag 667 (which ignores the dimensions of AASHITTY/AASTINKY), instead of the Doom method (which takes those dimensions into consideration when finding out which lower texture has the shortest height). This causes compatibility problems with Map07 of AV, where the bridge leading to the exit rises too high (making the exit inaccessible without cheating) after all of the Arachnotrons are killed.
This issue was resolved a while back (bug #734), but since the release of Doomsday 1.9.7 we have gone back to using BOOM's method of interpreting Tag 667.
In the meantime, everything has to be one or the other by default and all the required variants added in a clean way.