Janis Legzdinsh

Happy birthday! Vavoom is now 1 year old and with this also a new version 1.8. The greatest new feature of this version is Quake lighting engine, also called “lightsourcing”. There’s static lights that casts shadows, when blocked, dynamic lights, like in Quake there’s no sight checking since it will be too slow, and all lights even can be colored. And all this works even in 8-bit software mode. Also there’s particles, mipmaping, 32-bit colors, for OpenGL and Direct3D also 24-bit. What else – raven-games.com are doing server change, so website has new URL – http://www.raven-games.com/hosted/vavoom/, so update your links.

Well, here’s final version 1.7. As I promised I worked on optimizing software rendering. It is faster and, what’s more important, it’s more balanced, this means that speed improvement in simple scenes is less than speed improvement in complex scenes. I also implemented a new algorythm in glVIS, it’s more precise, but it works slower. Also in fast mode it will perform some rough tests, and not just a empty lump. Note: there’s no reason why you should rebuild already compiled vis data.

5th, and hopefully last beta is out. Menus, intermissions and finales are moved to progs (in other words mod authors can customize them). As usual – bug fixes and optimizations. For final version I will focus on rendering optimization.

BTW A high recomendation for all programmers – “Michael Abrash’s Graphics programming black book” (with foreword by John Carmack), a REALLY good book.

4th beta is here. As I said, I tried to optimize rendering and other drawing stuff, especially in OpenGL and Direct3D. All the stuff that slowed down OpenGL and Direct3D was removed. I also improved glBSP utility to correctly recognize sectors with polyobjs and to avoid to split them as whell some other bugfixes and improvements. Read file glbsp_jl.txt for list of all changes. I also created a little launcher for Windows version.

Here’s version 1.7 BETA 3 and there will be some more betas. In this version in Doom and Heretic I switched to Hexen-like line defs. I tried to do this in a ZDoom compatible way so Doom wad files converted with zwadconv runs in Vavoom. Also new demo levels for Doom and Heretic. WadAuthor config files and ACS script include files are included with demo levels. For next beta I will put attention on optimizing rendering to make it a little bit faster.

Vavoom version 1.7 BETA 2 is out! As you probably know, this version haves 3D floors and deep water effect. Hexen demo also includes WadAuthor config file. With Doom and Heretic there’s a little problem – slopes requires map in Hexen format but in current version it uses old line specials. In next beta I will switch to Hexen-like line specials and then there will be config files for Doom and Heretic.

A little precision – DeHackEd support was removed only from engine. As previously you still can convert DeHackEd patches into progs.

Great news – I have completed work on 3D floors and deep water effect. This together with slopes looks realy cool. A new beta will be released very soon.

Version 1.7 BETA 1 is now available for downloading. We are saying “Bye-bye” to DeHackEd support and “Welcome” to the slopes. There also are some big changes in progs and compiler. Now there are pointers to pointers, indirect function calls, C++ style structure inheritance, operators with vectors, varargs for builtin printing functions. Also you can also use preprocessor of Borland C++, not only DJGPP. An interesting news are testing support for Strife. From editing features are possibility to use wall textures on floors/ceilings and flats on walls.

Also available demo levels for Doom2 and Hexen. They show the usage of slopes, Doom2 demo also demonstrates how to implement a new weapon – Skulltag’s grenade launcher.

After building release I did some new changes and I’m rendering 3D floors:

Slopes!

Released version 1.666. This version also supports Direct3D rendering. It’s also selectable from command line with param -d3d. Finally created new demos. Currently playback is done only from file. Also fixed some strange crashes with no reason as well crashing when starting a net game. Now it should run fine.