After being worked on (on and off) in the background for 4 years, SLADE v3.3.0 is finally ready for it's initial beta release!

As with previous beta releases, it is likely to have plenty of bugs and issues, so please make sure to save your work frequently when using it, and report any bugs and issues when found. Also, as it uses different configuration files than previous versions of SLADE, it is safe to use alongside a stable release and they should not affect each other at all.

See the release notes below:

Modern OpenGL Rework

• All OpenGL functionality (gfx view, texture editor, map editor, etc.) has been updated to use more modern features, now requiring a minimum of OpenGL 3.3. This should improve performance and compatibility with newer hardware
• For systems that don't meet the requirements (or have other issues with OpenGL), software-rendered fallbacks are now also available for everything except the map editor. If OpenGL fails to initialize, these fallbacks will be used, or they can be forced by setting the use_gl_canvas cvar to 0

General

• The Preferences dialog has been redesigned, replacing the left side tree with a simpler list of sections. Also reworked the layout of some of the individual pages to be a bit cleaner
• The Start Page has been redesigned and is no longer a web page, with a more minimalist look
• Removed the embedded documentation browser, docs will now be opened in the system default browser instead
• SLADE now keeps a program sqlite database which tracks various useful info, and will be expanded on in future releases
• For each archive opened, certain UI state is now remembered between sessions:
  • Entry list column widths and visibility
  • 'Run Archive' settings
  • Map editor game/port configuration
• Configuration text files (user and internal) are now in JSON format instead of the previous custom c-like format
• Improved DPI scaling on all platforms
• [Linux] SLADE config files have been moved from ~/.slade3 to ~/.config/slade3 following best practices. Previous configs will be migrated here when converted from the previous SLADE 3.2.x format(s) to JSON
• Various UI fixes and improvements
• Lots of under-the-hood rework and code cleanup to improve performance and stability

Game Formats & Features

• Added support for opening and saving 7-Zip archives
• Added support for opening Outlaws LAB archives (thanks @SupSuper)

Resource Editor

• The map preview can now be panned and zoomed via the mouse(wheel), similarly to the map editor 2d view
• Maps in zip archives can now be previewed and opened directly from the entry list, rather than having to open the map's wad file in its own tab first
• Added basic support for editing ANSI screens
  • Edit tool - allows (multi-)selecting cells and changing their foreground/background colour and character
  • Paint tool - click(+drag) to apply the currently selected foreground/background colours and character at the mouse cursor
  • Text tool - click to select a cell and type text at that location using the selected colours
• The entry list view can now be toggled between tree/list on the fly via toolbar button
• Added a button to reset the gfx view panning
• Various improvements to the audio player:
  • Added ability to seek during MIDI playback
  • Switched from dumb to libxmp for improved module playback
  • Improved the layout and controls
• Added an option to display a 'minimap' scrollbar for the text editor. This can cause slow performance on large text files so is disabled by default
• Added options for additional padding and monospace font in the data grid view

Scripting

• Changed the lua binding library from sol2 to luabridge. For the most part this has no effect on compatibility with previous lua scripts, with one exception:
  • Editor scripts now must return a function that takes the appropriate parameter, rather than defining an Execute function

Map Editor

• With the OpenGL rework, the 2D map view has also received an upgrade, with nicer looking lines and things. Performance has also been improved significantly
• 3D mode has also received an overhaul with the OpenGL rework, and is now significantly faster (most maps can be rendered in full at high framerate) with various improvements and changes:
  • The camera now works differently - instead of the mouse cursor being permanently locked into panning the camera, the pointer can now move freely to select walls/flats/things. Holding the right mouse button will now pan the camera view. This has the advantage of allowing the UI to be accessed while in 3D mode and avoiding some issues that could come with locking the mouse cursor to the window the whole time 3D mode was active. The previous 'always mouselook' behaviour may return as an option in a future beta depending on feedback
  • Improved support for 3D floors
  • Support for previewing dynamic lights
• When deleting an item, the relative index of all other items should now be kept intact (eg. deleting vertex 5 will move all vertices above index 5 down by 1)
• Various improvements to the properties panel
  • Modified properties are shown in bold text
  • Colour properties are now only shown if they have a non-default value set
  • Empty groups are now hidden
  • Basic line flags are now always shown
• Added support for UDMF moreids properties for sectors and lines

Another month, another 3.2.x bugfix release. Here's SLADE v3.2.12 which fixes a bunch of bugs including yet another issue with unicode user directories in Windows, and another PNG transparency related issue.

Full release notes below:

General

• [Windows] Fixed yet another issue with unicode file paths, this time causing the configuration not to load
• [Linux] Fixed crash on exit
• [Linux] AppImage release is now built with wxWidgets 3.3.1 for better OpenGL support on Wayland
• Fixes for various reported crashes

Game Formats & Features

• DEMOLOOP entries are now recognised as JSON text
• Fixed detection of certain Quake II wal textures in the re-release

Resource Editor

• Fixed transparency being removed when exporting/converting multiple pngs at once

Text Editor

• Fixed loading of custom text style sets

Map Editor

• Fixed an issue with the wrong texture being used in certain cases with texture resource wads/pk3s loaded

SLADE v3.2.11, A small bugfix-focused release - is here. I know 3.2.10 was meant to be the last of 3.2.X, however it had a few fairly major issues, particularly to do with PNG image handling. So now, this should be the last before 3.3.0. Hopefully.

Release notes are below:

General

• Fixed circular references in TEXTURES causing a crash when trying to view the affected textures anywhere in the program

Resource Editor

• Fixed a crash on loading PNGs with higher than 8bit colour depth
• Fixed wrong transparency when writing a paletted PNG
• Fixed ROTT fullscreen images being drawn upside-down
• Fixed ANSI viewer not updating when switching between multiple ANSI entries
• Fixed a possible crash on closing an archive after/while an ogg entry is open

Texture Editor

• Fixed patch offsets changing after replacing a patch in a TEXTURES texture

SLADE v3.2.10 is now released! A fairly minor update overall which fixes a bug related to unicode filenames that was a blocker for some, plus a few other small fixes and improvements.

It's probably about time to really get stuck in to finishing up 3.3.0 for an initial beta release, and as such this will likely be the last 3.2.x release of SLADE (unless any particularly nasty bugs pop up).

Release notes for 3.2.10 below:

General

• [Windows] More fixes to handling of unicode file paths
• Crash reports can now be sent directly from the crash dialog, without the need to post to GitHub (though the option is still there, and preferred)
• [Linux] An official AppImage release is now available
• [Linux] Fixed SLADE launching another copy when opening archives via a file manager if SLADE is already running
• The clipboard is no longer cleared on exiting SLADE

Resource Editor

• PNG format handling has been reworked to use libpng instead of wxWidgets. This should fix some issues related to PNGs saving with compressed palettes
• Heretic+Hexen widescreen raw gfx are now correctly recognised and displayed
• Fixed a freeze when using "Check Duplicate Entry Content" maintenance tool with lots of duplicates

Texture Editor

• Offsets are now kept when exporting a TEXTURES texture to an individual image

Map Editor

• Fixed a crash when saving a map to a location without write access (thanks @sulewicz)

Hot on the heels of 3.2.8, here's SLADE v3.2.9. It's mostly a bugfix release as 3.2.8 introduced a few fairly significant bugs and crashes.

See the full release notes below:

General

• Improved setup experience for new users by auto-detecting paths to external executables (node builders, source ports, etc.) where possible
  • On Linux/macOS, the PATH environment variable is used to search for them
  • On Windows, certain tools (nodebuilders, png optimizers) are now bundled with SLADE (in /Tools) via the installer, and automatically detected if not already set up
• A soundfont is now included with SLADE, which will be used as the fallback soundfont for MIDI playback if none is set up in preferences
• Improved OpenGL initialization to hopefully fix issues some users were having with graphical views
• When saving a zip archive with duplicate named entries, added a prompt to auto-rename the duplicates
• [Windows] Fixed frequent crashes introduced in 3.2.8 related to the main tab bar (some issues within wxWidgets were causing this)
• Fixed various possible exceptions on startup or opening an archive

Game Formats & Features

• Dark Forces graphic formats can now be viewed again
• Fixed EDGE-Classic thing type definitions (thanks @elf-alchemist)

Resource Editor

• Improved speed of "Convert All" function in the Gfx Conversion dialog
• Fixed blank palettes on colour remap for paletted PNGs
• Fixed loading of alphamap PNG images (alPh chunk)
• [Linux] Fixed acc compiler output not showing
• Fixed potential crash if fluidsynth failed to init (thanks @heinzfridolin)

Texture Editor

• Fixed broken texture properties layout

Map Editor

• [Linux] Fixed 3d mode camera spinning on Wayland (note that this fix requires a new enough DE with the relevant Wayland protocol implemented) (thanks @joanbm)