Odamex

   Over the past few months, Odamex development has come to a grinding halt as our lead developer and other notable people who worked on the code have been caught up with other things. The Odamex team is looking for someone to join up and be able to take the reigns on a project with so much potential. This person should have a solid grasp of C++ and, experience with net code, not easily defeated by frustration, and as a plus, knowledge of the Doom engine.

   Odamex is the most popular client/server Doom engine that is licensed under the GPL. Founded in 2005, Odamex still does many things that the other popular multiplayer engines do not, including but not limited to, on-the-fly wad loading (allowing for servers with an infinite number of maps in rotation) and wad downloading. Odamex has been ported to just about every platform that supports SDL, even including consoles like the XBox.

   Ultimately, I'm making the post because there is a significant player base looking for Odamex to be better. The players want it, but Odamex is not where it needs to be yet to support them. The engine is in a good position but still needs work put in to make it as great as it can be.

   As far as immediate concerns, Odamex needs to get to version 0.5. There's a list of bugs that we wish to have closed before 0.5 is released. We are seeking patches for all of these bugs.

   If you feel that you can help the Odamex project and its community, please contact me by email, through our message boards, or through irc (irc.oftc.net #odamex). There are many players that need your help!

The Odamex Bug Tracker Cleanup Initiative is back! The initiative is being revived in light of a clouded bug tracker which was being bogged down with duplicates and bugs which were already resolved. With the help of you, the user, we can aid the Odamex programmers by creating a healthier, more manageable project. This will certainly help speed up Odamex's development and growth.

Getting involved is easy! Read More...

The fifth, and likely, the last release in the 0.4.X series of Odamex, 0.4.4 introduces some important fixes for server administrators and players.

Odamex 0.4.4 comes with the usual code optimization and bug fixes, as well as improvements related to client/server sector desyncs and dehacked support.

The Odamex client comes with a few fixes which include weapon sorting issues, a working reimplementation of spynext in coop, server disconnects, and crashes which affected Linux users.

Important changes for server administrators are included in 0.4.4, including fixes for a variety of memory leaks which were found since the release of 0.4.3. Odamex 0.4.4 also corrects a crash which occured on win32 machines when using the "clearmaplist" command. It appears that the infamous bug which spawned random objects in capture the flag mode has potentially been resolved as well.

An additional cvar, sv_unblockplayers, allows server administrators to make it so that players may pass through eachother. This may be useful to prevent players from stopping forward progression by problematic players in cooperative mode.

The launcher received a significant number of fixes and optimizations since the last version, notably with improved Mac OSX support.

There's much more technical and smaller fixes in this release! Check out a more extensive list in the release page or the complete listing using our svn changelog.

The Odamex team would like to remind our users that the Odamex project thrives off of user input, particularly when it comes to resolving bugs in the engine. If you would like to be involved in helping Odamex's development move forward, please take a moment to sign up for the Odamex Bug Tracker. The team refers to the bug tracker to determine how development should move forward. If you come across something odd or broken that is not listed in the tracker, please submit as much information as you can! Odamex can only truly succeed with the help of dedicated users!

If you are interested in tracking official Odamex news releases more easily, you can subscribe to updates in a variety of ways:

1) You can subscribe to the Odamex releases rss feed.

2) You can receive email alerts (requires a sourceforge account or an openid).

3) Join the Odamex Facebook group.

The cross-platform server browser, Doomseeker, has been updated to include even more support. With the release of the Doomseeker 0.5b beta (revision 364), the powerful browser now has Mac OSX support thanks to the efforts of our Hyper_Eye.

On top of support for Mac OSX, Doomseeker also has improved stability among a variety of other changes.

The changelog,download links, and discussion for this beta of Doomseeker 0.5b can be found in this development blog.