** This is a required update **
* The Release *
Odamex 0.9.0 has officially been released! Huge credit to AlexMax, Ch0wW, Ralphis, Hobomaster, Hyper_Eye, Manc, DeathEgg, pmjdebruijn, and Ru5tK1ng for all of their contributions that made this release possible. Read on to view a more comprehensive changelog.
* Introducing Mouse Polling *
Despite the strives we made for a better mouse with 0.8.3, resident coder Hobomaster still dug into reported issues and discovered more ways to reduce latency via mouse polling. After a lot of testing and feedback from veteran competitive players, the mouse feels amazing now!
* Changelog *
There are a lot of details with this release, but what you need to know is listed below:
New Features
- Introducing Avatars! These are substitutes for voodoo dolls in co-op;
- An avatar is an object that attempts to take the place of a voodoo doll in multiplayer. Instead of pretending to be any player in particular, it's just an object, but with special handling in order to make any effects that would normally target a player target all ingame players instead.
- Introducing new game modes: Survival, Last Marine Standing (and team Last Marine Standing), and Attack & Defend CTF.
- All of these new game modes were added as modifiers to the existing game modes. You can independently turn on lives, multiple rounds and sides to configure your game how you like it.
- The scoreboard and HUD will dynamically change depending on if lives, rounds and sides are enabled.
- There are also new "roundlimit" and "winlimit" conditions that trigger after a specified number of rounds have been played and certain number of rounds have been won respectively.
- There is also a new floating arrow sprite above attacker's flag sockets in Attack & Defend CTF.
- A new CTF setting that prevents touch-returning the flag, g_ctf_notouchreturn.
- Our playtesting has found that this greatly enhances Attack & Defend CTF.
- Introducing support for a third team, colored green.
- This team can be used with any team-based game mode, and both the HUD and scoreboard will make room for it.
- A new in-client file downloader!
- Utilizing the popular cURL library, this feature will download resources like WAD and DEH files from web sites. This new system is much faster and reliable than the old odasrv-based downloader and thus the old system was removed.
- If the files necessary to connect are not found, the new system will still check the server's sv_website setting for files to download.
- As a fallback, the system will use an internal list to search web sites to search for the files. You can customize this list with cl_downloadsites.
- You can download a WAD or DEH without having to connect to a server using the new download command.
- LANGUAGEv2 support for LANGUAGE lumps.
- Support for the old binary-format LANGUAGE lump has been removed.
- Numerous fixes for Boom/MBF maps.
- Server-side logging for WDL-format statistics.
- A new cvardoc command will export a complete list of client and server cvars to an HTML file on disk.
- Player join queues! This way all players have equal chances to play by queuing up for a game. Excellent for duels!
- Secrets found in Cooperative and Survival are broadcasted to all players now.
- Support for analog controller triggers has been added.
- The "Secret has been revealed" message is now accompanied by a unique sound.
- Server admins can specify a -crashout launch parameter to specify where to save crash dumps to.
- A new CVAR sv_sharekeys has been added that shares keys among all players in cooperative modes.
- Servers will now inform clients when a setting has been changed server-side.
Third-party code contributions
- Restored compatibility with the shareware iwad (doom1.wad). Thanks pmjdebruijn!
- Support for "no stop teleport" special 154. Thanks Ru5tK1ng!
- Support for 16-frame sprite supports. Thanks DeathEgg!
Fixes
- Keys were not displaying to other players when viewing them.
- A bug that caused HOMs in netdemos.
Changes
- Mouse movement has been modified to make it more responsive.
- SDL2 has been updated to release 2.0.12.
- There is now a build-time dependency on deutex in order to build odamex.wad.
- Increased maximum resolution to 8192x6144.
- The number is sound channels is now 32.
- Team Deathmatch now always shows the team objective scoreboard, and the team points that go with it.
- Tab-completion now lists all commands that the user might be looking for instead of completing to the next command in alphabetical order.
- Team-based strings now have added team colors in the console and message area.
- The console font has been changed to a fresh new one, courtesy of Team Eternity.
- Updated various sprites in odamex.wad, including many of the BIGFONT letters and the marine picture frame.
* Going Forward *
Many under-the-hood changes have been implemented into this release, and because of that we anticipate a few bugs and crashes that testing did not reveal to be uncovered with un-organized play. Because of this, we can expect 0.9.1 to release within a few weeks to resolve major issues found with this release. Still, this release is solid and will be a noticeable improvement over 0.8.3. Please report all found bugs on our new GitHub Bug Tracker (https://github.com/odamex/odamex/issues).
* Discussion & Download *
Have we said enough that we love our amazing Discord community? Thanks for always being there with us for great games and development help! Join the fun (https://discord.gg/aMUzcZE) to chat, organize games, and track development of the Odamex project!
The official release changelog can be viewed here (http://odamex.net/wiki/Releases#Odamex_0.9.0).
Download Odamex 0.9.0 for your preferred platform now! (https://sourceforge.net/projects/odamex/files/Odamex/0.9.0/)