This article lists the important changes in 1.9.8.
Fixed bugs
Audio
Hexen: Environment Wind sounds (e.g. Map01). There was a sound prioritization issue at map start.
Priorities defined in Sound definitions are used to determine when a sound can stop a previously playing sound from the same emitter (e.g., Cyberdemon and Mastermind alert sound is not cut off by their footsteps).
Heretic: Flying creatures would sometimes get stuck. 3495787
Hexen: disallow warping while dead to prevent zombification.
Graphics and resources
Detect support for non-power-of-two OpenGL textures and don't try to use them if support is not available. Fixes the problem of the game UI/infine background textures being fully white, while the console is drawn ok.
Detail texture contrast normalization is now taken into account when rendering. 3496778
Hexen: The demo IWAD was not being recognized. The buggy version of the demo IWAD is now supported as a separate game mode.
Added variable input-sharp: all input events are processed only on the “sharp” 35 Hz ticks to comply with the behavior of the original games.
New and improved input device axis position/delta filtering. Replaces the old mouse filter (input-mouse-filter has been removed).
With the Sidestep (strafe) control, mouse/joystick axis positions were interpretered incorrectly. 3510109
Multiplayer
Hexen: setclass should not be immediate, now only takes effect after respawning.
Fixed crash when using items from the inventory. 3496874
Hexen co-op: weapons for all player classes should be spawned. 1572194
UI and menus
The game's main menu should never scroll up and down.
Shift+Esc would not always open the Control Panel, sometimes only the Menu: now Shift alone does not activate the game menu.
Deleting the default Return binding of “menuselect” is no longer allowed in the Controls menu.
Changing the binding of the Delete key is not allowed any more in the Controls menu.
The auto aim menu option was changed to “disable autoaim”.
In the menu, sound effects were played twice simultaneously when toggling “yes/no” options.
Hexen: title in the skill level menu is way over to the left.
HacX: skill level menu goes off the side of the screen.
Unix
make uninstall failed to remove the snowberry directory.
launch-doomsday and the .desktop file must use the paths defined in the build configuration.
Changes
Audio
Use audio interfaces from multiple audio plugins. E.g., SFX from FMOD and Music from winmm (for MIDI). See isfx, imusic, icd.
Added variable sound-overlap-stop (default: 1) that allows only one sound to be emitted at a time by a sound source (to comply with original Doom engine behavior).
Default reverb strength is now 0.5 (previously 1.0).
Console
Console half/fullscreen mode is now toggled with Alt-Tilde. (The ~ character can be typed with Shift-Tilde.)
New command apropos_cmd that summarizes all information containing a specific search term. Looks up variables, commands, aliases and games. For instance: apropos sound
New commands setwinres and setfullres that set resolution and window mode at the same time.
If shutting down during startup, don't write config files if they haven't been read yet.
Gameplay
Doom and Heretic: added variable game-monsters-floatoverblocking to allow flying creatures to float upwards over things that block their way.
Graphics and resources
Qt-based window management.
Game window can be resized dynamically (in windowed mode).
Default binding for F11 is to toggle fullscreen mode.
Built-in support for detecting and changing display modes.
Optimized resource subsystem performance for a faster engine startup.
Removed fixed upper limit of 768 defined models in use.
Added variable vid-vsync: enable or disable vsync. Also available in the Control Panel.
Added variable vid-fsaa: enable or disable full-scene antialiasing. Also available in the Control Panel.
Multiplayer
Saving during a multiplayer game is disabled. This feature will be restored in a future release.