Just spotted a new project in progress over at ZDoom.org with the title Evil Ideology by Lexus Alyus. Some of you might have never heard of him before but for me it's a well-known name and you might already have the chance to listen to his music in Stronghold. Exactly, he prepared some of the original tracks for the mod, and that's about almost 10 years now since that happened. He is still working on music but also a project where the music fits in well. The style of this is going to be a mixture of Ultimate Doom classic episode 2, 3, 4 and some Doom 2 styles, all with hiw own little twists. He's not aiming to make super detailed maps here, just maps that are fun to play and quite doomy. Lexus has already got the concepts for all 33 maps sorted so the project is pretty deep in development now. Wanna see some screenshots and music? Check the thread and give him a bit feedback.

A few days ago Dragonfly has finally released his long-awaited megawad Eviternity. It is a megawad comprised of six 5-map episodes (called Chapters) plus two secret maps. This project exclusively uses OTEX, a brand new high quality texture pack by ukiro. Eviternity's six chapters explore a series of unique and varied themes, each featuring classic gameplay with an interest in making each map hold its own unique identity and personality. The themes are "Medieval", "Techbase", "Icy Castles", "Industrial / Brutalism", "Hell / Gore / Alien" and "Heaven". This project was created as a birthday gift to Doom, which is celebrating its 25th birthday on the day this was released. The texture pack used in this project, OTEX, was also released on the same day - so please do not use Eviternity as a base for your wads & mods. While mostly being a "Dragonfly project", with 24 maps being made or heavily worked on by himself, he presents to you a mighty lineup of well-known guest mappers who have crafted beautiful and fun levels. Get it now!

A few days ago DragonFly has released the first RC of his new masterpiece Eviternity, a megawad comprised of six 5-map episodes (called Chapters) plus two secret maps. This project exclusively uses OTEX, a brand new high quality texture pack by ukiro. Eviternity’s six chapters explore a series of unique and varied themes, each featuring classic gameplay with an interest in making each map hold its own unique identity and personality. The themes are “Medieval”, “Techbase”, “Icy Castles”, “Industrial / Brutalism”, “Hell / Gore / Alien” and “Heaven”.

This project was created as a birthday gift to Doom, which is celebrating its 25th birthday on the day this was released. The texture pack used in this project, OTEX, was also released on the same day. While mostly being a “Dragonfly project”, with 24 maps being made or heavily worked on by myself, he presents to you a mighty lineup of well-known guest mappers who have crafted beautiful and fun levels. Check the official page for more information.

Exorcist is a Total Conversion mod for Hexen: Beyond Heretic, set in the land of Kimberline where you play as the Exorcist. Travel to different places and fight tainted warriors and horrific beasts from a hellish dimension. Make sure to read the manual in the zip file and the Story section in the main menu.

"The hellish minions left to wander in the aftermath of Korax's defeat during the battle of Cronos have now scattered across Parthoris looking for fresh meat, and a new realm to call their own. Beings of chaos roam freely, causing disarray in the realm. The citizens of Parthoris have barely had time to rebuild their lives in the wake of D'Sparil's reign of chaos, which was put to an end by a yet-unidentified outsider."

Faithless is a 9-map hub for Heretic with new textures, classic gameplay but ready for GZDoom 4.0.0 with a lot of nice surprises. It currently can be downloaded as releasre candidate but it's very close of being finishd, so give it a shot and help Jimmy polishing his work to the max.

The devil is in the details, is what people used to say. This also rings true for Doom.  For such an old game it is no wonder that shadow generation is not one of its strongest suits, especially when it comes to monsters. For some time for (G)ZDoom users an alternative existed for quite some time, called GShadow, originally made by sonic_HD87. This gave every actor (monster) in the game its own dynamic ''blob'' shadow. Because it consisted of pure DECORATE and ACS code, it didn't break the bank on your graphics hardware and it was also available for ZDoom. Other ZDoom based implementations however fell short, however.

Modder TDRR,  who you may know of the TDBots project picked this up and has now released GShadow Resurrected. A significantly refined implementation of the original that can now also run on the Zandronum port. But there is more. You can stick with the regular ''blob'' shadow, or you use one of the socalled ''shadowpacks''. These packs change the shape of the shadow to be more realistic - So far all vanilla actors, including DoomGuy, are properly shadowed. And it runs both on the software and hardware renderers.

Do note that not all gameplay mods are supported, only those that leave monsters and decorations intact. Only exceptions include DUBG, if you enable Dehacked Compatibility, and possibly MetaDoom. You can disable it mid-game by setting the gs_enable CVAR to 0 or FALSE. You can also disable shadows being casted outdoors without any nearby light source with the gs_outdoorshadow CVAR.

All in all, GShadow Resurrected gives modders and level designers an easy but powerful tool to add shadows to their works, without impacting your hardware too much. Head over to the thread to read how to implement GShadow support in your works!