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Odamex 0.9.4 has been released.  Download it from Sourceforge or Github.

By far the most visible feature is the fact that our WAD downloader now supports (and is configured to look at) DogSoft's enormous WAD repository.  If you haven't touched your list of download sites, DogSoft should be added automatically.  Thank you so much to Mega-Dog for going above and beyond to natively support Odamex's download feature.

But of course, that's not all.  Odamex 0.9.4 also has a few more goodies to offer.

• A new setlobbymap console function that can apply lobby functionality to any arbitrary map in any loadable WAD.
• Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown now scroll the console 16 lines at a time.
• In 3-Team modes, dead players on a team who is completely out of lives can now spectate other teams as well.
• Mouse sensitivity now has much finer control when adjusting from the menu. Thanks to Hugo Locurcio for the contribution.
• An occasional crash caused by the fuzz drawer has been pinpointed and fixed.
• An instance of Tutti Frutti that showed up in tall wall and sky textures that had more than one post per column has been taken care of.
• Teleport line type 208 (WR Silent, Same Angle, Also Monsters) now works again.
• Certain classes of corrupt patches that would have crashed the game now raise an error instead.
• odasrv on Windows now properly shows an error message in the console output.

I think that an IRC client in the launcher would be a really neat idea.  Both IDE and Doomseeker have one, but I think that making IRC a little more 'front and center' than either of those options would be a good idea, in order to make finding games with players easier.  It's been done before; Doom Connecter had chat in the bottom pane of the server browser (not IRC).



As well as Doomwire:



And of course DWANGO itself:



One downside is that autojoining an IRC channel exposes your IP address to everyone in the channel unless you cloak yourself.  Unfortunately, Quakenet does not allow ordinary users to cloak themselves unless they're registered and set themselves +x before joining.  And as we well know, other networks are usually not as hospitable to gamers and clan scenes as Quakenet, and running an Odamex-specific IRC network would be overkill.

EDIT: A quick mockup

After much headache, I have finally been able to set up a system of nightly Odamex builds for testing purposes.  Every night at 6AM, or whenever I click the magic button (tm), a new build is uploaded.

However, I must stress that these builds are for TESTING PURPOSES and probably will break on most of the servers you try to connect to.  If you want to actually play these builds with other people, join our IRC channel and bug me to organize a test session.  And please run odamex-dbg.bat instead of odamex.exe (type in start to start the game and then continue to continue past a breakpoint), because if you crash, gdb will be able to catch the program, and we can diagnose what went wrong assuming you get a backtrace (type in bt).

Confused?  I'll be writing a wiki article soon on how to properly test and how to use GDB.  But if you don't know what you're doing, don't download it.  It's that simple.

The filenames are named odamex-svn-###.zip.  The number at the end is the SVN revision.  You can find out what has changed in that particular revision by looking at the SVN Tracker or Changelog, both of which are accessable from the left hand panel.

So what is actually avalible in the zip file you download?  The zip come with a Win32 Debug compiled version of odamex, the odamex server, a copy of GDB, and a batch file to run Odamex with GDB. This should make testing orders of magnitude easier.  By the way, thanks for actually reading this the whole way through, you need to click on the sixth word on the sentance at the bottom of the page to actually go to the downloads page.  However, my script is not yet advanced enough to tell if compiling has failed. So if you download the latest revision and it turns out to be missing odamex.exe, that’s why.  And for godsakes, if you get one of these defective builds, tell me

Also, it goes without saying that these builds are not endorsed by the Odamex team, and in fact are liable to start and stop being updated without notice.  This is something I hacked together in my spare time.

If you have read everything click here to access the nightlies

With the sucess of last week's bugtestfest, I am now hereby inagurating a new event that takes place sometime durring the weekend, basically when it is most convenient for me and other people, but otherwise on Saturday nights.

Our objective is twofold.  One, we go through the list of unresolved bugs in the bugtracker and see if we can add more information to them, especially ones that say "please test".  Two, if we find more bugs, we post them.

Our requirements are simple.  All we need are at least three people, preferably a half dozen or so, and occationally a lot, that can compile odamex on their own, run it against gdb, and are able to follow my agenda (i.e., not expect to be entertained, but instead actually follow along with what I'm trying to test).  Why three?  Because in my experience, more players tends to bring the bugs to the forfront.

So, how do you compile odamex?  Simple, check the wiki for instructions.  How do you run gdb against odamex?  Simply grab gdb for your platform, stick it in your odamex directory, run gdb odamex at the command line, then type start (and then continue if it hits a breakpoint before loading completely).  Then, if the program crashes, you need to type in bt at the prompt, paste the output in the pastebin and then copy the URL of the pasted backtrace into #odamex so we can discuss it further or perhaps even add a bug report pertaining to it.  And keep gdb open until someone says you can just restart the program, just in case a developer wants you to run more gdb commands to help pinpoint the problem.

Note that this is not encouraging all bugtesting to take place one day a week.  Really, I'm starting this so people can learn how to compile and run odamex against gdb, and hopefully get more people doing bug testing at all other times durring the week.  The bugtracker has become stale, filled to the brim with tons of bugs that haven't had any followup.  It's time we change that.

A major milestone has been hit in the wx Launcher development process.  I don't know how regularly you guys check the wiki, but the Launcher now officially runs on all three major platforms natively.  Screenshots of this latest breakthrough can be seen here:

http://odamex.net/wiki/Launcher

Hats off to our development team for making this happen.

So I decided to finally take the covers off of Odamex CTF the other day. You can download the latest beta here. 8CTFDUME had the cumulation of about a months worth of modifications to it.

Now for what I've got in the oven. For 8CTFDUMF, I spiffied up Ralphis' map and put in lights like he wanted (even though the light sourcing looks like an AlexMax light source and not a Ralphis one, so I'll have to ask Ralphis' opinion on that). I then took a long look at my CTF maps (MAP01, MAP02, MAP03 and MAP05) and decided to simplify each of them, because I felt too many of them were being encumbered by the tons of switches I had put in there for gimmick features that in retrospect were kind of a bad idea in the first place.

MAP02 has been changed around AGAIN. This time, I put the switch to lower the rockets in front of the lift itself. I might put it back where it used to be in older betas, but they're kind of out of the way already, I want them to be used, but out of the way enough to not be abused and not be picked up if you're in a hurry, which happens often on this map. I also changed around the 'behind the weapon' teleport on each side, now the hallway is deeper and enterable from two sides. I also made an identical 'behind the weapon' corridor on the opposite side near the flag, minus the teleporter, but I have no idea what I want to put in there. Not armor, I don't want defenders getting cozy. Not health, I already have the health in an easily accessable yet really vulnerable position already. Maybe ammo, but I dunno, your mortality is so guarenteed on this level that it might not be worth going in for. Blur sphere maybe, to spice things up, I mean seriously, when was the last time you saw a blur sphere in a map?

MAP03's gimmick that I introduced in recent betas kind of bugged me, because if you got trapped in the blood pit, your only recourse was to teleport out. I remember in earlier betas where the middle would become a chokepoint and battleground, and while I didn't like how people blazed through in the origional version, the redo actually made it worse, and I wanted to fix that. So I raised the blood river and the wooden passage to the north to be 8 below the rock formation so it's now a three way intersection again. The only difference is that it's now possible to spam the shit out of that corridor because the staircase that was in earlier betas was replaced with gradually increasing rock steps, which aren't as restrictive in terms of spammage. However, the wood paneling in the middle is still there, so not only is it not possible to spam from one end of the level, but it also prevents you from just zooming straight through the middle like in earlier betas. Now you HAVE to turn in one direction or the other, which would encourage use of the teleporters, which is what my whole experiment with the middle was about in the first place. Also, I suppose the wood paneling gives you a barrier to juke your way around or have a SSG battle around, more of those situations is always a good thing. The plasma is still down the long dark hall, but it's a damage floor, so you can't camp it, and it's out of your way, and you're also pretty vulnerable to getting your shit ruined by a rocket. Maybe being able to camp the plasma is a good thing though, we'll have to see how it playtests.

The other two remain unchanged. MAP05 in particular is to remain untouched. I had considered putting in a platform in the back that would allow spamming in without allowing access, but I couldn't figure out how to impliment it right and I dropped the idea. I still don't know how I came up with such a cool map design, espcially one with so much room for depth and strategy.

Wow, that turned out longer than I had exprected. You guys probably have no clue what I'm ranting about, so I'll see if I can get some screenshots. I should seriously jot down a few tutorials about good CTF level design, because aside from Toke, who came up with a few brilliant ideas which I wanted to incorperate some of which in my own maps, I really haven't seen anyone consiously trying to bring something new to the table...or they try and their grand map design doesn't work out quite like they expected because they play too much Unreal Tournament or something.