Version 1.9.9

The third stable release of the 1.9 series.

In 1.9.9 we are starting to see the benefits of migrating Doomsday to the Qt platform: we have been able to incorporate complicated new features in a relatively short time and still have had time to address a long list of bugs and other issues.

• Built-in automatic updater: Doomsday will check for and download updates from SourceForge. It is now much more convenient to stay up to date, particularly when using the frequently updated unstable builds.
• Faster map loading thanks to optimizations in the BSP builder.
• Improved music support for OS X 10.6+ and Linux: SF2 soundfonts can be used with the original games' MIDI music.
• OS X Gatekeeper compatibility.
• Many bugs fixed: see below and the list of detailed changes.

• remove_special_event_handlers: use bindings subsystem for all event processing
• qt_for_command_line_arguments: fixes broken parsing on Unix
• automatic_updates: stage 1 completed, PGP signatures available
• jpeg_support and removed libpng as direct dependency
• support_hexen_1.0: game mode “hexen-v10”, 4 player colors, intermissions
• refactor_engine_into_a_shared_library: started work on the proposal by adding libdeng1, relocating Smoother, Str, StringPool, Writer, Reader, garbage, concurrency, memory zone
• fluid_synth_for_midi_playback: SF2 support when using FMOD (Mac/Linux only)

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Doomsday, please note the following:

• To conform with the standard behavior of command line applications, relative paths on the command line are now relative to the working directory at startup. Previously they were interpreted relative to the -userdir. If you launch Doomsday from the command line or have set up your own scripts for this purpose, you may need to update the paths to reflect this change.

• Closed bugs for the 1.9.9 milestone
• Known issues: list of open bugs in the Bug Tracker

The following issues are known but have no bug report presently:

• Windows XP: fatal error starting in windowed mode (last line in doomsday.out is “Initializing Fonts collection…”)
• Windows XP: main window does not open as the topmost window (taskbar appears over it)
• Windows: closing a text-only console window (dedicated mode) using the close button results in instant exit

• detailed_list_of_changes_in_doomsday_version_1.9.9