One peculiar thing within Doom involves the use of voxels. These are, to put it bluntly, the equivalent of sprites in three dimensions. Since late December, developer GRAU of RDW Studios is hard at work at the RDVOX/RDDVOX voxel pack. What it sets out to do is to provide a complete voxel pack of the objects that are present in Doom, so enemies, weapons, to enhance the depth and richness of the scene yet still looking like classic Doom, as opposed to a 3D model. As such, the pack targets software rendering in 8 bit, though it also does work in 32 bit and GL modes. As Doom's favorite friend The Lost Soul in the screenshot shows, the results can be quite amazing.

Though its not the main focus, the pack also includes a few sprites, code for new effects, light definitions for software renders and a new palette. The pack is presented in two versions - RDVOX, and RDDVOX. The first is for ZDoom based ports and will work starting from ZDoom 2.8.1 and descendants (QZ/GZ/LZDoom). The latter is a version compatible with developer JVAL's lesser known but highly advanced port, DelphiDoom. Though the stable version does not yet have support for voxels and the kind of dynamic lights used here, a WIP development build is provided. And now that you have read enough mumbo jumbo, head over to the main thread and be amazed at a criminally underutilized feature of modern day Doom.

Ever wanted to play all the official Doom releases as one WAD without having to exit and launch your favorite sourceport again? Now it's finally possible, thanks to the efforts of JPL. His tool WadSmoosh combines all the data from every available official Doom release into one huge file and even combines the Final Doom Evilution Map31 fix or does not include the Master Levels and No Rest for the Living, if Doom 2 isn't present at all. So get your copy, collect your IWADs and merge them together for full lazyness and 9 episodes of Doomin'.

Just spotted that the mapper Ed has released the first public beta of his one-map project Warp House at Doomworld. Before whining "Oh only one map, that's boring", stop and continue reading, as this is one of the most impressive maps that I have ever played when it comes to level design (I had the special opportunity to play it already two weeks ago for testing purpose, so I know what I am talking about). Warp House is Shores of Hell inspired, heffer of a map. EdI intended to make something true to the original Doom, but the inspiration from the 2016 game carried it to completion. It only uses resources from the original game in the map structure and an original MIDI OST. No fancy lights, story sequences or any of that horse shit. Just a lot of monsters, secrets and 20,000 sectors to explore.

Making Doom look sexy by only using doom.wad stock textures? Still possible, and Ed_C is proving exactly that. His project Warphouse demonstrates this very efficient. It is already in development for about 2 years and nearing completion. If you want to see more of what I am talking about, check the milestone blog from the author, definitely worth looking at.

After almost 6 years of being in development, we reached a special milestone today for Blade of Agony. With the latest commit on Tuesday, November 10th, 2020, the mod is fully playable, which means: all chapters can be played through from start to finish.

Because any of us in the dev team lives several thousands miles apart from each other (not to mention COVID-19 restrictions), we had to celebrate this with some good old German beers in our chat group, exchanging a few photos and videos to make sure everyone was drunk to celebrate this glorious moment - well it wasn't that glorious anymore after beer number then but... well, we had some fun, now on to the news people are waiting for.

In the middle of the year, we were certain that a release in the fourth quarter of 2020 was realistic. But during our own playtests, a large number of issues came up, and we needed to adress those first. This was also the reason why finishing the maps took us longer than expected. We fixed game-breaking bugs, we improved the storytelling, and we added new content to the first two Chapters - we polished like crazy.

Now that all of the maps are done, we will start to balance, fix, and finish the mod in order to make the best possible experience available for all you players out there. This also means that we need to spend some more time on the mod in order to achieve that. As of now, we are confident that a release in the first few months of 2021 is a reasonable target. Until then, we will make sure to keep you informed and entertained when it comes to Blade of Agony.

I recommend subscribing to our YouTube channel and checking our project webpage. We will be posting some interesting content on our YouTube channel over the next few weeks for those who are really impatient. Until then, stay safe, and have a good time.

Today several emails reached me asking for what happened to the Realm667. According to my hoster, the page was moved to a different server, explaining the 503 downtime of the past few hours that I didn't even notice as I was sleeping. Such downtimes are nothing unusual and happening once in a while, but in connection to recent events on Doomworld (more on that at a later stage when things cooled down), people got a bit nervous which is somehow understandable. There is no need to fear anything though: The Realm667 will stay online and serve as host for sharing and organizing resources as long as it is possible for the team and myself to do this. Personal issues and pride pushed aside, the page always served as a base and host for creativer ideas for the many, and that is what counts.

Though there have been questions: "What happens if the page gets lost and with thalt all the resources?" Even though I have backups and feel responsible for keeping this place running, even I don't know what might happen. "Community efforts must be preserverd" - therefore I just put online a complete file dump from the site, including every single submission. The download link (948,8 MB) includes the complete set of all submissions available up to today and will be available for exactly 14 days from now on, so enough time to get the content and have some kind of a 'location-independent' backup. Share it!

It's already been a while since our last feedback concerning the Blade of Agony project we have been working on the past months. One thing I can tell you: We are still working on it and we are close to one or two little surprises that might happen in the next few weeks - or even days. At the moment, doomjuan is concentrating on the final tuning for chapter 1 and improving texts for proper language and story-telling, Ozymandias is taking care of various model conversions from sprite bases, DoomJedi is doing some fancy sprite magic that I can't tell you anything about and me, well - mostly doing the final mapping and gameplay fixes and beyond taking care of a good presantation page of our project. Why that? The ModDB entry is useful, Facebook is nice, the Realm667 project page is doing its duty but concerning the complexitiy and scale of Blade of Agony, it was clear in the past few weeks that some kind of information page is essential - and that's what I am working on atm. So good, so far - stay psyched!