With the Development cycle for the latest and greatest version of Skulltag nearing its completion a preview was naturally needed! As most people know this version has had an entirely different and far more open development process than previous versions of the port. The dedication of the internal testers was far beyond our expectations and this latest version truly was made by the entire community, not just the development team. (Although Carnevil and Torr still deserve major props for their work!) You all should feel proud to be members of the best community on the net and to have helped create such a fine port.




And the detailed list!
Skulltag 97D Features:

Stability

Virtually all crashes have been eliminated. Skulltag has always had a stability problem in the past and it brings a great smile to my face to say that the port is now stable. Special thanks to all our testers for this.

Heretic Support

Yes, that's right! Skulltag now officially supports Heretic for all gamemodes. You can now play Heretic Invasion, Co-op, Survival Co-op, Last Man Standing, Capture the Flag, Skulltag, etc... without any bugs at all! I expect lots of new pwads for this game soon!

Hexen and Strife Support

Skulltag now supports online play of both these fine games. Hexen and Strife support have been significantly increased and while I'm not confident enough to say that Strife is 100% bug free or anything just yet, it's very playable now and fun. Give it a try if you haven't already. Hopefully we'll see some Hexen Invasion wads in the near future.

Hundreds of Bug Fixes

Yet again, this is a result of the work the entire community put into this version. The number of bug fixes is simply astronomical and there are far too many to list here. The fixes range from problems with some Decorate functions all the way to some maps not resetting correctly in survival mode. Expect to spend several hours reading the complete changelog when we finally release it.

Improved ZDoom and GZDoom Support

Skulltag is now based on the absolute latest SVN revisions of ZDoom and GZDoom. Support has been added for all the great new functions and features that these 2 ports developed. The end result of this is that almost all of the latest and greatest wads developed for either of these 2 superb ports will work online with Skulltag!

3D Goodness

In addition to the highly anticipated support for 3D Floors, 3D model support has also been significantly enhanced. Rotating models are now supported and colour translations as well. Player models will turn transparent when you pickup an invisibility sphere and their colour will change in the same way player sprites do. Model animations are also a lot smoother now.

Better Skins Support and New Announcer

No longer will you be frustrated because nobody can see the skin you're using because the server doesn't have the wad. Everybody who has the skin will be able to see it even if the server doesn't. There is also an entirely new default announcer for Skulltag which we hope you'll enjoy. For those who are attached to the current one, don't fret - a separate announcer pack will be available for download with all the old announcers.

Better Linux Support

Linux users can now play in OpenGL mode! Let the celebrations begin. They will be able to enjoy all the wonderful features that this brings. We welcome all our new Linux users and hope you continue playing Skulltag for a long time to come.

New Netcode

Skulltag 97D has completely new netcode for monsters. They should now look a lot more natural (similar to single player) while moving and use a lot less bandwidth while doing so. Player movement was also modified so that you never get the 'jackhammer' effect while moving up or down certain Hexen-format lifts. In addition to this a new feature was added to Decorate which permits wad authors to specify that something is only to be executed on the client and not the server end. This permits them to use lots of special effects like lightning, sparks, or shell casings without having to worry about causing lag online!


Final Comments

Working on this latest version of Skulltag has really brought the entire community together and shown what we can accomplish if we put our minds to it. We plan on continuing our open development policy for the next version of Skulltag and hope the community continues to help us create the ultimate Doom experience. There are big plans and many terrific feature suggestions for the next version and we'll need all the help we can get.

Oh boy!

Very nice video , whats the music from? *couldn't finish buffering it because of internet issues*

Awesome work!

Amazing. Bravo Rive.

Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile
Disc 1 (Left)
07. Just Like You Imagined

NP dude, it was really all the Dev's & other coders work, that has made 97D almost done , we only gave the feedback needed, but yeah, most of the Skulltag Testers did an amazing job, like no rest until the end of the day, and there's a lot of suggestions that have been made into this version

Gonna say a few things about the features, too, altrough that's not my duty


Also means that all the freezes that were happening on Windows in the BETA versions are being fixed, if not already, which I remember that it was an issue with X thing , Torr said that the Linux freezes must be further tested than we did, that's why I'm gonna grab my own copy of Ubuntu when I'll get my new PC


I must point, that, specially, all Skulltag testings I've done with other ST testers were 99.99% precise about this fact, which was a really good job, done by all the enormous feedback that was made, for example, with the tests that are still being made with WADs, like NeoDoom(remember that one, pals?)


I'm sure that almost all the feedback & requests that us, ST testers, made, we're useful to bring this amazing upcoming 97D version of Skulltag

Looks good!

Cool to see one of my maps in there a couple times.

Great work guys. I've been waiting for this forever and its finally almost here! You guys have really worked your asses off and I want to thank you guys for that.

Kudos to Skulltag! [/hatsoff]

Nice video Rive, it was pretty epic. The credits song almost made me cry a little.

Yea booyii!!

Excellent stuff !

^ What they said

Wow, this is really something big!

Good job team.

You mean to say that Skulltag was instable? I've never had any problems.

He's talking about the abundance of server crashes beta 4.1 had.

Wow, that's pretty fucking badass. I can't wait for Skulltag 97D to be released.

Well, all I can say is: Not to mention, thank god you didn't put dwango 5 on the trailer.

I can tell that those Heretic, Hexen & Strife supports are going to be Epic. I cant wait for the release.

Hopefully this will mean the return of those precious working skyboxes too.

From what I've seen, this is excellent. Great work, Rive. Unfortunately, it seems to be giving me some bullshit about no longer being available for some reason.