Everybody else is doing it, so why can't we? news - Doom 3: Redux mod for Doom III

It has been a long while so I'm going to start with the essential : Redux isn't dead and though near three years of silence about the status of its development may have indicated that no progress has been made since the winter of 2017, its actually quite the opposite. Before dwelling on that, though, I feel that an explanation is warranted for the few people that followed the progress of the mod while it was actively updated.

The "hiatus", its reasons and me looking at you with puppy eyes

The initial reason for the mod going on silent mode, at the time for a few months, was that I fell into the ever so common trap of the feature creep : the release of the version 0.95b went quite well, attracting some attention and granting me access to a good amount of useful feedback. I immediately started working on 1.0, originally intended to be little more than a hotfix, but soon went on to delay that release when the amount of completed texture sets and WIP features accumulated enough that I started planning on a more ambitious content update.

One of these features, which I discussed here at the time, was the addition of a full support for select custom maps : with the authors agreement, these would be bundled up in a secondary installation of the mod and easily launched through the main menu. I also planned to assign all text contained in the maps files to translatable strings, fix compatibility issues where I could find them and update the custom assets where it felt necessary. Most of that actually got worked on, and those of you who followed the mod back then saw the first results :

With other parts of the mod being revised and the features stacking up, however, the workload got a bit too heavy for its own good and things got delayed just a bit further. I eventually dropped some of these planned features and made enough progress to warrant a meaty 1.0 update, but life got complicated and did so for some time. Development went on and off since, and a few friends got to play the latest dev versions, but I never committed to a release build and didn't feel like making any announcement untill I had something to upload, which was obviously a mistake and eventually dragged on for almost two years. Please accept my apologies in this regard.

Current status and the upcoming pre-release of Redux 2.0

So the bad news is that I could have released a fully featured and stable 1.0 version two years ago but didn't. The good news, however, is that the amount of work done in two years has far exceeded the scope of that release. Redux 2.0 is planned to release this year and I'm very happy with it. I will go on a more details about what has been changed and added further down the line, (in part because I never keep track of anything and will need to compare all my dev builds to write a changelog) but for now you can expect :

• A major visual overhaul: I have to rely on looking at the file count of my work folders at the moment, so take that with a grain of salt, but we're looking at an estimate of 500+ textures either added or updated since version 0.95b. Hell and Delta in particular have been considerably improved while some areas that were previously untouched and fared quite poorly are now almost completely revamped. The HUD, PDA and loading screens have also been redrawn for 1440p and 2160p resolutions along with various in-game UI elements.

• More modularity: I've received a lot of feedback from people who wanted to get rid of the admitely quite loud weapons sounds, so I've done that ! Pretty much everything sound related that isn't strictly vanilla, with a few unnoticeable exceptions, will now be its own optional module and will not be enabled by default. This includes weapons, Pinky, Commando and Zombies sounds from the E3 2002 build.
  

• Better widescreen support: With the crosshair assets being double the resolution compared to the previous version, I can now pre-scale them to compensate for the horizontal stretching that occurs when displaying the game in a widescreen resolution. This will also apply to loading screens, which will now exist in three separate versions each made for 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios.

• Fixed bugs and inconsistencies: I've now separated Sikkmod's compiled code from the main (or "stable") version of Redux. This won't actually affect the user at all, save for the loss of fullscreen screenblood and frost accumulation, but for now it has allowed me to clean up some of the nastier bugs that come with it, such as objects sometimes floating around corpses and the hercule effect not wearing out after returning from Hell for the first time. Along that, expect several minor issues from both vanilla and Redux such as typos, alignment, texture and sound assignment to be fixed in 2.0.

There's a lot more still, including the Sikkmod rendering now being completely optionnal, but I will save some of it for later. I plan on uploading a pre-release test version this month in preparation for the full release that should be closer to late 2019. I don't need much more testing done at this point and this will be missing some features, so it's more of a little something for those in a hurry to replay Doom 3 this summer. In the meantime, I have uploaded a few screenshots showcasing some of the updated texture sets in 2.0.

I really enjoyed all the feedback that 0.95b got and to those of you that reached out to ask for news and propose changes, know that I appreciate your comments and have taken them into account. The mod got better for it and you will see the result of that in some form by the end of the month. I hope to see you all soon !