Version 1.5.0-rc1 of Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion (uHexen2) is released: This release candidate is a major update since the previous 1.4.4-pre11 beta version. Major focus is on the background music handling, which is done properly along with ogg, mp3 and wave formats support, as well as sound and cdaudio updates. Changes since the previous 1.4.4-pre11 beta version:

- added support for ogg, mp3 and wav external music files to be played instead of the original midi files.
- added interface for music streams to the sound layer, dropped SDL_mixer dependency. many changes in sound and midi layer. imported libtimidity into the source tree and applied several fixes.
- unix midi: reimplemented through the new music streams interface using timidity.
- windows midi: ignore midi hardware volume adjustment capability under windows vista/7 which fixes music volume control messing with the main volume.
- software renderer (C-only): fixed a segmentation fault with Crusader´s ice mace.
- added new cvar sys_throttle in order to throttle the game loop just a little bit and run cooler on new fast systems. the default sys_throttle value is 0.02, acceptable values are between 0 and 1. changing it to 0 disables throttling.
- handled several map quirks thanks to careful works by Thomas Freundt and Keith Rozett.
- fixed trigger_crosslevel problem with spawnflag 8 (thanks Keith Rozett.)
- bumped the hexen2 engine version to 1.23, and hexenworld engine version to 0.23. bumped the gamecode version to 1.20.
- added support for external entity file loading which makes it easy to handle map quirks. ent files are accepted only if they come from the same game directory as the map itself.
- revised lit file loading. lit files are now accepted only if they come from the same game directory as the map itself or from a searchpath with a higher priority.
- tested compilation using Visual Studio 2010.
- source directory layout reworked, repository moved from cvs to svn.

Along with the full sources, we also posted win32, win64 and dos binary packages, as usual. Mac OS X packages will hopefully follow shortly. We´d appreciate any feedback.