New maintenance release for Tartar Stage 3 is almost there news

Which more recent WAD-s, you may ask? Well, since the release of Stage 3 in 2022 Tartar could load "Ancient Aliens" without that many issues, and also had partial support of "Jumpwad", "Eviternity" and "Avactor" maps. With the new maintenance release it will be possible to load all of the maps from these wads.

Additionally, handling of taller than 255 pixel images has been debugged and minor geometry glitches fixed and the chains look right now in "Imperishable" as well as these rotating diamonds:

If you want more fresh meat to try on your capable DOS machine with Tartar, consider "Boomer" or "2022 A Doom Odyssey". For the latter a "helper" WAD is included to make all levels reachable despite lack of UMAPINFO support in Tartar.

Tartar's own MAPINFO format has been slightly extended again to show static "outtro" images - similar to floating Deimos image in Ultimate Doom Episode 2 - but after any map. While this was done with 2022ADO in mind, adding end screens to Mac versions of Wolfendoom episodes wads seems a logical next step - the "helper" WAD-s are included with the new release.

Full list of changes is documented below.

Menus

• Loading game from empty slot is no longer possible
• When entering the name for a saved game, player is presented for editing with the name currently saved into the slot instead of a blank name. There's no longer a need to type in the name of the game from scratch every time the game is saved with the same name. Entering the name of a game being saved into an empty sleep slot starts with a blank name as before
• Empty savegame slots are shown as numbered by default
• Load and Save Game screens layout yas been adjusted, so that if a patch of non-standard height is used for their title, names of saved games are not offset from the corresponding save game slot graphics. This in particular improves the looks in Mac versions of the Spear of Destiny, Original Missions and Nocturnal Missions from Wolfendoom series by Laz Rojas
• Option to control slime trale removal at level start has been added to the options menu

Bugfixes

• Loading of DeHackED patches no longer stops when a line starting with '\0' character is encountered. This allows loading Mac version of Portal PWAD from the Wolfendoom series by Laz Rojas
• Bugs have been fixed in loading of tall patches, building in-memory tall patch structures for mid textures, rendering of tall patches in skies, map objects and mid textures. Most apparently this results in giant chains now being drawn correctly in Eviternity MAP21
• Bugs have been fixed in the tall patches workaround function for top, bottom and 1s mid textures. The scyscrapers in MAP02 of Jumpwad render without glitches now.
• Workaround for tall textures is no longer applied to textures of less than 256 pixels. This condition existed previously, but was coded wrongly, resulting in rendering artifacts on some of the normal textures
• Bug has been fixed in offset computation for segments loaded from extended ZDoom format data. The most apparent change is that animated diamonds at the start of MAP03 of Jumpwad are rendered correctly
• Bug in handling of huge node tables has been fixed by extending segment number reference from 16 to 32 bits in the subsector structure. As a result maps on the scale of MAP32 of Eviternity have their geometry loaded and displayed correctly now
• Finishing 5th map of any Doom 1 episode no longer takes players to episode end. This behaviour is retained for Chex Quest (it was in fact only intended for Chex Quest originally)
• force_load <slot> CCMD has been added that takes advantage of original MBF code to override savegame compatibility checks when loading a level
• Opening automap in maps of extreme extents (e.g. MAP04 of Boomer) no longer renders gibberish nor causes subsequent sporadic crashes while playing or saving/loading games.
• Zooming out in automap in very large maps no longer causes the map to disappear.

System

• DeepSea 32 bit format for NODES, SEGS and SUBSECTORS is now supprted, so all maps of Avactor (including MAP09 and MAP10) can be loaded
• Slime trale removal is back on by default and can be overridden from the Eternity Options menu
• New MAPINFO property endpic has been introduced. When set it causes a static Doom format graphics to be displayed after the tally screen and "Entering..." part of the tally screen will not be displayed. Unlike similar UMAPINFO property, setting endpic to the lump's name will not result in the game ending with the level completion nor will Doom 2 character cast be skipped.

Here is an example of how MAPINFO is used to show an ending screen before proceeding to the character cast

[level info]
endofgame=true
endpic=END1

Extras

• WAD that disables slime trail removal for PLUTONIA.WAD (through OPTIONS lump) is included by default under FIXES\PLUTONIA

• Helper WAD for 2022ADO.WAD is provided under GOODIES\TAPE. It enables alternative Mega-WAD-style progression for the PWAD with playthrough starting at E1M1 and ending with E5M8 completion without players choosing a starting episode. The recommended way of starting Tartar for this is:

  TARTAR.EXE -IWAD DOOM2 -FILE DOOM.WAD 2022ADO.WAD -NODEMO

• More helper WADs for WolfenDoom PWAD Collection are included under GOODIES\TAPE. This time episode completion graphics is added to the following Mac versions of the PWAD-s to mimic behaviour of the DOS versions running with a customized source port:

  • Original Missions: Escape from Castle Wolfenstein - escape.wad
  • Original Missions: Operation Eisenfaust - faust.wad
  • Original Missions: Die, Fuehrer, Die! - fuhrer.wad
  • Nocturnal Missions: The Dark Secret - secret.wad
  • Nocturnal Missions: Trail of the Madman - trail.wad
  • Nocturnal Missions: Confrontation - confront.wad
  • Spear of Destiny - sod.wad

Additionally Tartar pre-packaged try out version (the Tartar-portable.zip) has been updated:

• Previous build of DOSBox has been replaced by the Enhanced Community Edition build for better stability
• MIDI playback is now via FluidLiquid with soundfont included with the zip
• Fixes directory has been reorganized and Chex and Hacx DEH files have been added
• Bugs have been fixed in doom2.cmd for both single file and directory drag and drop scenarios
• ETERNAL.BAT has been added to conveniently launch Eternal Doom. Drag it onto dosbox.cmd once you have Eternal Doom installed into ETERNAL directory. ETERNAL directory also has a patched ESHELL.EXE modified specifically for the directory layout of Tartar-portable.zip