HEXEN II community work and discussion

[Seven]

Ciao Ragazzi è parecchio tempo che non passo di quì!
Ho piacere che apprezziate i miei lavori per Hexen2!
Spero di riuscire un giorno, quanto prima, di rilasciare l'ultimo Mission Pack!
Un caro saluto a tutti!

Ciao Rino,
Grazie per il vostro grande lavoro.
Non vedo l'ora di vedere più di voi.
Tutto il meglio per il 2017e nuovo anno
Il tuo amico,
Seven

[Bloodshot]

Is UQE Hexen 2 supposed to be using glide? it keeps looking for glide2x, and i only got it to run by installing nglide, which makes no sense at all.

And it only runs at the default res

[Henry]

Delete opengl32.dll that shipped with Hexen2. Come on Bloodshot you should know this by now.
This will force the engine to use the GL library installed with your card's drivers. It is even written in the tech help.

[Bloodshot]

Sorry about that, it was an old install and I didn't think to double check that, plus HoT doesn't require you to delete it

On a related note, hexen 2 doesn't get enough love, so I'm making a minimod for it using Game of Tomes as a framework, and using ericw's compilers. Hexen 2 may not support bsp2 but the extended limits are a godsend and that was the main thing holding me back in the first place


I'm adding a few enemies and decorative/expansion things, and changes to weapons, for instance the paladin's sword now does a 3 anim combo instead of the same swing









[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr1mOvTwSVE[/ame]

<older vid>
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fml90HdEHo[/ame]

[Mathuzzz]

Bloodshot, this...looks...incredible! In recent days I was actually slowly converting my unfinished Hexen 2 maps to Quake to finish them there but Quake simply lacks too many features I find fun, despite those great SMC and AD mods. But when I see this, I have urges to join forces with you and finish it in Hexen. What would you say?

About BSP2, doesn't FTEQW support it?

[Bloodshot]

It does, but FTE also seems to have missing/glitchy effects, and overall it doesn't feel like Hexen 2 support is finished. I'd rather hold off until hexen 2 support is more complete and well rounded.

I'd be willing to help for sure You gotta weigh it though. Hexen 2 can't do sprawling outdoors, or too large areas in general. The only reason my map can look so nice is because despite the extra limits with ericw's compilers, I split everything into areas that are VIS'd so it doesn't go over the (temp? active? idk the terminology) entity limit ingame and start making projectiles freeze and other weird entity glitches.

So basically you gotta ask what kind of map you wanna do/have done, and if it's something that will work in hexen 2, or something that will need compromises, and if so are you willing to compromise it?

[Mathuzzz]

No worries Bloodshot, I have my experience with Hexen II mapping, hitting every possbile limit, I had to undergo several optimizations with my maps, which reflected on both visual side and fun factor of the maps, but I´m still willing to finish them as all the time I spent with it would be in vain.

As for the maps, some of them are smaller and partitioned, some are more spacious. I used same compilers as you, but entity limit was the one which blocked me the last time. It was ridiculously low. For one of my bigger maps it was enough for lightning and door and that was it.

As for FTEQW, it improved heavily in Hexen 2 singleplayer support, but is still left with some issues. Maybe we should ask Spike, whether he has plans to sharpen it?

[Spike]

Regarding bsp2, if you release a decent map pack where there's a few later maps (25% or so) as bsp2, then you can draw in other engine devs and then hit them with a reason to upgrade their engines! Either take a stand or continue making compromises - yay politics. Really though, you can't expect other people to care until there's a good reason for them to do so.

regarding entity limits, are there no cvars you can tweak to boost them?

regarding fte, this is the particle config that it uses for hexen2:
https://sourceforge.net/p/fteqw/code...cfg?format=raw
Yes there's some missing things in there, and a few assumptions too, unfortunately I don't play hexen2 often enough to notice.
If someone wants to write up a (short) list of things for me to look in to (probably in some other thread), then I'll certainly look into it. Just be aware that I'm not going to copy+paste lots of hexen2 code over, so it probably still won't be 100% perfect in every situation.

[Bloodshot]

My goal was actually to possibly garner more interest in hexen 2, since i think if anything it is a good base for straight up fantasy stuff, and it could be a good companion game for quake modding since you can literally use QC from quake right in hexen 2 with very small changes needed, sort of like how Hexen 1 is to doom.

I figured if i did a small project that was decent maybe it would attract more people and there would be a reason for engine devs to expand their stuff, as i don't think one or two dudes wanting bsp2 would be enough

I'll check fte out when i find some time and maybe make some comparisons of effects and missing features. No need to copy paste code if you don't need to, especially if you know of a more efficient/better way of making the same effect.

Also i don't know for sure, but i think the Hammer of Thyrion dev(s?) may have stealthily upped the entity limits or something, I'm running into a lot less entity related issues than I was last time i tried this a few builds ago, where i had to split my already short unfinished map into 2, whereas now my current map is more than 3x the size of that one.

[Mathuzzz]

Spike, no need to copy paste Hexen 2 code, I will give it a quick playthrough and notify you about possible bugs.

Bloodshot, I loved to play those so called megawads from Doom community. They were mostly for Doom and Heretic, unfortunately not for Hexen. I have always been willing to create or participate in such a project. There were more people involved in hexen 2 mapping in the past, but all the projects were probably abandoned, I have always thought because of the same reason we are discussing now. Right now I have 6 maps in progress, with Trenchbroom, the mapping is more practical, quicker and funnier than it was with older map editors. Are you creating the whole hub?

[Spike]

http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/uhexen2_bsp2.zip
(see, I'm not just pushing bsp2 because of my own engine being the only h2 one that supports it! still, it was fun while it lasted...)
I did have some fun with the asm (multiple copies of unreadableness...), but that build should be able to load up bsp2 maps okay, in addition to regular h2 ones. both gl and sw win32 renderers (cross compiled from cygwin, others will need to do an svn checkout from uhexen2's sauceforge rev 5812 and then apply the included diff before compiling).

I've bumped and inadequetely tested some other limits too, just because if you're going to have a limit-breaking map, you're probably going to be breaking more than just bsp limits.

anyway, bsp2, because working around limits sucks. enjoy.

[Bloodshot]

I was confused at first as to where this engine came from before I remembered HoT was a rebrand

Holy FUCK
I just tested it by loading up my retrojam map



Holy fuck dude, you are god.

I'm now gonna go back and add more detail and entities in every area in my first map that i can in celebration

[Shadesmaster]

Well that's some good news; btw I have a map that's half done I can contribute, too, if you wish.

[enderandrew]

http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/uhexen2_bsp2.zip
(see, I'm not just pushing bsp2 because of my own engine being the only h2 one that supports it! still, it was fun while it lasted...)
I did have some fun with the asm (multiple copies of unreadableness...), but that build should be able to load up bsp2 maps okay, in addition to regular h2 ones. both gl and sw win32 renderers (cross compiled from cygwin, others will need to do an svn checkout from uhexen2's sauceforge rev 5812 and then apply the included diff before compiling).

I've bumped and inadequetely tested some other limits too, just because if you're going to have a limit-breaking map, you're probably going to be breaking more than just bsp limits.

anyway, bsp2, because working around limits sucks. enjoy.

I believe Darkplaces supports bsp2 but sadly doesn't support Hexen II at all. I don't want to take away from all the other great source ports, but I tend to use DP for all things Quake because I love SMC, and SMC uses DP-specific extensions.

In a perfect world, I'd love to run H2 in DP someday with a H2-version of SMC. I could potentially work on code for a SMC-fork for H2, but I wouldn't be able to produce textures, models, etc. I'd also have to identify the DP-specific features and either strip those out or rewrite them to get it to work in another engine that does run H2. Though, I do hope DP gets H2 support someday.

[Spike]

@bloodshot
loading q1-bsp2 instead of h2-bsp2 isn't really supported - players will work but most of the monsters will be screwed. I only really added that feature because it was easy and meant I could test it with larger bsp2 files than one I could knock-up myself. so be sure to compile your maps with the appropriate -hexen2 argument to tyrutils-ericw's qbsp util.
that fork/patch was just a day's worth of effort (would have been less if it was not for the asm). It also hasn't been tested too well, so expect bugs (it feels as though there's some lightmap extents bug somewhere - stoopid [ab]use of floats - but I can't see how that would be specific to bsp2).
hopefully szo or someone will merge my patch, but having a fully working test map would make it more palettable for him, if only so that he has confidence in my changes not screwing up other stuff... like I say, its not well tested.

@enderandrew
porting smc's changes to work with hexen2 would be a huge undertaking. Anything that's dp-specific is kinda insignificant next to that.
on the other hand, fteqw can run smc well enough too - once you fix smc's bugs (namely monsters being positioned in the ground and q3 shaders not conforming to q3 standards).
So dp not having any support for hexen2 really shouldn't be stopping you.