News
ECWolf 1.3 Finally Released + More 2014-05-26 07:07:56
ECWolf 1.3 is finally released! Once you go through the highlights you'll find that this is a fairly major release for the project for more than one reason. Surprisingly, I was able to keep more or less full backwards compatibility with mods this time around. There are a few corner cases where things still break, but for the most part this is mod and save compatible with the 1.2 series. I do know that this won't be the case for all future releases, but it's cool to see this happening already.
First I would like to announce that Wisdom Tree has endorsed a new release of Super 3D Noah's Ark. The new version using a rebranded version of ECWolf, and I highly encourage anyone with slight interest in the game to purchase a copy (if you don't have one already that is). It is a very under rated game. Most of the purchase price goes to ECWolf and the licensing fee Wisdom Tree offered is a fixed amount (so if you choose to pay more than the suggested price it will all go to ECWolf). If that isn't enough to encourage you, to celebrate the release, the minimum price for the game will be $3.49 for one week two weeks! For the purists, the release does come with the original DOS binary.
Because of the above, ECWolf now defaults to the GPL license option. Highlights for this release:
- Mostly complete support for Super 3D Noah's Ark. (Needs additional wad for music.)
- The highly requested automap! Similar to the one Super 3D Noah's Ark, Rise of the Triad, and Mac Wolfenstein.
- Spear of Destiny shows map names from hint book.
- Performance increase on many systems.
- 64-bit Windows builds are now officially available since I noticed a performance increase with them while testing S3DNA.
- Improvements to Steam auto detection including virtual fixing of Spear of Destiny data (so that it actually works).
- Changes to file locations. See the table here for transitioning. Also fixed issues with foreign characters in file paths.
- Gamma correction with F11.
- Support for backpacks, map revealers, secondary fire, zooming, reloading, ripping projectiles, among other decorate features.
- Support for sound sequences.
- Function points in the first state of an actor is no longer ignored.
- Map lighting can be finely tuned in MAPINFO instead of requiring the ROTT mapping features.
- Demo loop sequence can be modified.
- Fixed that annoying cosmetic issue where status bar graphics were scaled off by one.
- Fixed health for Otto and Fatface on Death Incarnate
- Mostly fixed the issue where wide screen resolutions increased the size of enemy hit boxes (still need change it to real geometry, but for now it's only off due to precision issues).
- Improvements to 3D sound positioning.
- Experimental support for Rise of the Triad elevators.
The Android version will be updated very soon.
Now to give an update on the future of ECWolf. Some of you may already know that I've been accepted into Google Summer of Code. My free time this summer will be limited because of that so I do need to change some of my projections, but since it just started I can't announce those changes just yet. One thing for sure is that a 6-month release schedule is too much to keep up with, so expect 1.4 to come out about a year from now.