As many of you might know, brightmaps are an alternate graphic drawn on top of a sprite in-game to control the minimum brightness the sprite will be displayed. With a good brightmap, your monster that looks like it has glowing eyes, will have glowing eyes! We're still working, but thanks to Sandypaper, many Beastiary monsters now have brightmaps! I've uploaded several updates over this last week to some of the more popular monsters, and I'm not even finished yet with uploading all of them!

So go ahead and grab some of these, and brighten up your dark areas!

Caleb26 has just released his Heretic project Masters of Chaos - brilliant news if you ask me. It features a total of three new episodes with ten or eleven maps each, new weapons, new monsters, lots of new stuff but staying close to the original saga. The maps feel pretty good, look nice in terms of detail and they carry the usual Heretic atmosphere but also giving the whole thing a nice twist with all the new things to discover. If you are a Heretic fan and if you want to support the few projects released for this amazing classic game, give it a go. You can download the mod over at ZDoom.org.

Growing up in the 90's makes you experience a lot of classic releases. People who know what I mean simply love these games, others might absolutely not be able to understand what's so "special about pixels and 8-bit". One of the greatest hits in these times has been The Secret of Monkey Island. For everyone who agrees, Arch has just released his first version of Pirates Doom over at Zdoom.org. It's actually a mixture of Monkey Island and Doom featuring hand drawn graphics, nice cartoony textures and fitting music in a perfect caribbean atmosphere. Give the Scumm Bar a try!

The great website DRD Team, which hosts many sites and services for Doomers including the SVN builds repository, the file space, the Risen3D source port, popular mods such as KDiZD or Stronghold, the SVN system for the HPack project, the Hacx forums, and many more useful things for the community, has lost its stable backing.

You can help it stay alive by making direct donations if you can. If you do not have credit cards or other means of online payment, you can try visiting the DRD frontpage and clicking on the Project Wonderful ads, when there are any, to encourage advertisers to keep buying space here (the frontpage is the only part of the site where ads are shown).

QZDL is the C++ rewrite of good old ZDL (specifically, ZDLSharp). It is backward compatible with existing ZDL .cfg and .ini files. People who experienced certain UI bugs with ZDL will be happy to know that this time, the layout can be resized. If you used ZDL before, you might want to try this beta. Download from the official site and read more details here.

Expert speedrunner Looper created a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of Doom II in nomonster mode (including map 31, but not map 32). The demo can be downloaded from the Doomworld thread here and a split screen rendition can be seen below.


The tricks are impressive, if disorientating. The robot players move perfectly, turn instantly, and do anything to get a little speed boost, including getting shot or thing-running against each other. The grand finale against the Icon of Sin is as glorious as it is hilarious.

We've just added an Editing News section to the R667 forums! It's a place where helpful bug fixes, features, action functions, actor flags, etc. in source ports, as well as news about the editing tools we've come to rely on are posted! Expect it to be put into terms ordinary modders with very little source knowledge can understand.

It's readily available for people who are looking for this kind of news, but out of the way enough so it doesn't clutter the place up for people who really don't care about this kind of news. As long as the rules are followed, it's free for people to post helpful news in!

I was shocked, how could I miss that?! MaxED has released the first version of his DoomBuilder 2 fork called "GZDoomBuilder". It's actually the same as DB2 but features numerous GZDoom abilities that are directly rendered in the 3D Editing, like dynamic lights (currently, only "standard" light (with EdNum 9800) is supported) and MD3 models visible in 2D and 3D modes. Planned features are all GZDoom dynamic light types, parse and render lights defined in GLDEFS, add color picker window to set light properties quicker, add color picker window to set sector light color quicker (UMDF mode only), add list view with all Things/Sectors, which have tags and many more things. This is an ambitious project that will definitely help a lot when working on GZDoom maps in the future, so check it out and support the programer!

Two more days and we will start the development of the ZDoom Community Map Project 2 - it almost feels like christmas to me. All the mapping slots are filled, only 3 more slots left for the detail- and gameplayslots, people are gathering resources, preparing the armory and discussing the final rules. So far I can tell everything is running exactly the way I hoped for. If you are interested in joining us, you can still consider this until the beginning of Phase 2 (what is on 26th of May btw). For those of you who only are interested in playing this as soon as it is finished, it would now be the perfect opportunity to replay the first ZDCMP. Otherwise, just follow the development, stay tuned, feel free to give some feedback and let's hope we will have better luck this time - even though I have a real good feeling.

For those who are actively developing the map, please make sure to read the Readme again here, as it is high essential to follow the guidelines and make sure you do not interfer with the rules. Keep in mind what we are aiming for, keep in mind how this is supposed to turn out and what are the main goals to achieve - and I am sure this one will have a great impact on the community - again.

Good luck friends,
Dan