Holiday update

As usual December has been a busy time, but a little bit of progress has been happening with Doomsday, too.

Saving 3D model state. I’ve put the most effort into ensuring that the state of 3D model animations gets saved and restored when writing and reading savegames. This has no bearing on gameplay as such, but visually it is pretty important that the objects get rendered the same way before and after loading a save. In practice, this was quite challenging because the new model renderer supports advanced features like multiple animation sequences, scripted rendering passes, and shader variables. All this state information gets included in the savegame package as a new file, so it can also be gracefully ignored in case any compatibility issues or other problems arise when dealing with old save files.

Multiplayer resource check. When joining a multiplayer game, the client checks that the same packages are loaded as on the server. This includes all WADs, DEHs, and PK3s. Any resource mismatches could lead to crashes or other problems during MP games.

Mac menu. I did a small tweak for the Mac UI: Doomsday now has a native menu bar for switching between the available games.

Fate. Finally, I’d like to call attention to a cool Hexen mod by fate that I recently enjoyed playing through. If like me you are a fan of Hexen, this is a nice way to spend a few hours during your holidays: fate_v0.1.pk3. Please leave your feedback and/or comments to the author on the forums.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone! *<:)