Heretic SP - Curse of D'sparil [RELEASED! 2010 01 12]

Are you going to make some titles/names for each of those maps?
And will there be any new background music?

I'm very impressed by those screenshots. The only thing that's upsetting is that this WAD might not be compatible with the Doomsday port.
(I've got ZDOOM, but it's just a lower priority to me.)

But either way, I'm gladly looking forward to playing this.

Indeed, Doomsday only supports voodoo dolls in the Doom games. It doesn't support them in Heretic.

If thats the only issue then worry not, I'll implement support for voodoo dolls in a future release of jHeretic.

kristus: Have you - by any chance - discovered a way to make voodoo things in Heretic start by moving? Heretic has those pushing sectors, but they can't move something non-player unless that was damaged.

printz said:

kristus: Have you - by any chance - discovered a way to make voodoo things in Heretic start by moving? Heretic has those pushing sectors, but they can't move something non-player unless that was damaged.

I believe there was a Heretic map that did this by having a crusher blow up an exploding pod at just the right distance to do 1 damage to the thing that was to be moved.

Yeah, naturally this isn't ultimate. But I'm only using them where I absolutely have to. Also, Zdoom, Vavoom and Eternity does apply the current at start anyways. So it's really only for HereticP (and possibly JHeretic?) That this will be an issue. But to make sure no ghost effects occur, I've decided to give the voodoo doll a crystal vial.

DaniJ: Thanks. BTW... why wasn't it there already?

DarkJedi: All the maps have new titles. (except in HereticP) But I'm not bothering telling them to you. I think it's better you find them out as you play.
Also, there will be no new new music. I personally quite love the Heretic music, and I want to keep it feeling as much as Heretic as possible. So I've rearranged music from Heretic for all the maps.

I'm curious what boss will be there... D'sparil? And no other.

kristus said:

DaniJ: Thanks. BTW... why wasn't it there already?

I don't honestly know. I've looked back as far as our svn history goes and can find no indication as to why voodoo dolls are only currently supported in jDoom. I'll try to address this for the next release.

It would be mega useful if I had a couple of mods that relied upon Heretic voodoo dolls to test support with. Any suggestions?

DaniJ said:

It would be mega useful if I had a couple of mods that relied upon Heretic voodoo dolls to test support with. Any suggestions?

Yes: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15524

I'll be uploading a demo map of the scripts I'm using in this mod in a few days. Though they are a bit different. They are essentially based off of the Hcount.wad scripts.

EDIT: Here it is:
http://www.doglike.org/temp/hconvdem.txt
http://www.doglike.org/temp/hconvdem.zip

EDIT2:
Updated first post with more recent status report for mappahge finazahge.

Updated WIP with 3 new screenshots:
http://wadsinprogress.info/index.php?a=listwads&wad=1162

EDIT: Wow, WIP really compress the shit out of those screenshots.

The new screenshots are looking great Kristus. I'm still looking forward to playing this :)

Thanks. Although I've intentionally avoided the areas I think is best, since I don't want to waste that on screenies.

Good to see it's still progressing. Looks great as usual.

Because I am bored and starving for attention, I decided to post a little notice here that I've now started work on all the maps for this little mini opus of mine.

So for those of you keeping score:
Map by map status:
Map01: 99% Ready für beta!
Map02: 96% (Gotta work more on the game play)
Map03: 96% (Gotta work more on the game play)
Map04: 85% (It's so close)
Map05: 10% (I've started making a starting area)
Map06: 99% Reddy fehr betta!
Map07: 15% (I've made a starting area)
Map08: 99% Rayday fihr betty!
Map09: 99% Betty for Ready.

So with that in mind. I'm at ~77.5% completage in the mappage departmage. Who knows, might be out before my birthday in august.

I want to play this! And yes, release it on your Birthday - I did just that with the HeXen WAD, Necrosis. I like the look of this because it has an 'authentic' Heretic feel without the detail levels being too bland; they're spectacular!

I could be pretentious and release it on 9/9 -09 though.

Progress for the win. :D

So for those of you keeping score:
Map by map status:
Map01: 99% Ready für beta!
Map02: 98% (Gotta make a successful test run in Skill 4)
Map03: 98% (Gotta make a successful test run in Skill 4)
Map04: 98% (Gotta make a successful test run in Skill 4)
Map05: 10% (I've started making a starting area)
Map06: 99% Reddy fehr betta!
Map07: 75% (I've made a lot)
Map08: 99% Rayday fihr betty!
Map09: 99% Betty for Ready.

Total: 85%

Takes a while to test them. Map02 takes me about 40 or 50 minutes to play through in skill3.

EDIT: I've started beta testing of this now. The first four maps and the secret map has been sent out to Udderdude and Khorus. Fingers crossed that they love it. :p

Turns out Map04 ended up a bit too juicy for HereticP. The blockmap anyway. Has been cutting and doing shit to it to fit. Still not quite there yet. Anyway, long story short. There'll be two versions of that map in the wad. One for HereticP (and any port that I can't set up with some form of Mapinfo to run the other version) and one for ports.

I've made some progress.
Map04 is now playable with HereticP. The blockmap is below allowed limits. This however required a lot of cropping in the map and as a result I've decided to house two versions of the map. One for HereticP and one for any port that supports specified episode structures (Like Mapinfo for instance, which means pretty much any port except Legacy)

There's not much else in terms of progress, quite busy with life and shit.

Looks like it is progressing nicely. :)

It would be totally awesome if both this WAD and the Treasure Chest WAD get released simultaneously. :D
But somehow I doubt that such a coincidence is likely to occur. :(
Oh well. I'll play them both regardless.

I don't think so. It's usually best for releases of similar material to not be released at the same time so they won't have to fight each other for the public attention.

kristus said:

It's usually best for releases of similar material to not be released at the same time so they won't have to fight each other for the public attention.

Based on my observations, the amount of decent Heretic WADs is so scarce compared to the amount of decent Doom WADs.
So chances are most likely that both your WAD and the Treasure Chest WAD will receive equal attention from the hungry and starved fans.
I would gladly download both of them within the same day, despite being able to only concentrate on playing one WAD at a time.
I'd rather download both at once so that I wouldn't need to worry about coming back to check later. ;)

A bit of devblogging. Mostly for my own sake, not because I think many people will find it terribly enlightening. Helps me think.

The level set is quite close to being complete. But I'm running into a couple of a road blocks with it. One of the two maps I got left to build. It's funny really. Because the previously built parts of it I made in more or less 2 days. Now I am a bit stumped for progress however. I'm not lacking much. But I've not quite figured out how I want the progression to run in it. (It's a bit different IMO)

The map I am currently spending most time with is Map05. It's gonna be a rather small map compared to the others (Map01 05 and 08 are all comparably small) It's a rocky canyon with lots of lava flowing around. Not exactly what the engine is best suited for. And it's a bit of a drag to build. Not as rewarding as some other constructs. But I plan to make it rather hereticy in it's game play and I wanted a map like this for this very reason. Hopefully it'll pan out. It's not looking anything like I originally intended it.

Where I from the start, was planning a maze like landscape with decently tall rock walls that the player could travers over to skip the labyrinth, however would likely be dragged down into on occasion, having to fight his/her way out. It's a bit of a drag that I never made it like that. But I didn't really have the patience to build that. So I went for simple.

It's very much up in the air at this point. There's really no plan so far. Just that it's gonna be pretty easy and fast action.
The episodes layout is a bit that of two mini episodes. Where 1-4 is the first and 5-8 is the last. And the secret level wedged in between the two.

Another road block is the testing of the levels. I'm playing to get possible 100/100 runs without savegames. And because of the levels sizes, I keep putting it off. Tuning it becomes a bit of a chore on most of them. I had a test of a few of the maps sent out to two people to test. And the response was pretty much black and white between the two.

Heh, I hate doing rock and other "natural" scenes, they're mostly just stamina tests instead of design exercises. If possible, I try to get a nice detailed texture so I don't have to do as much construction detail myself, and let the texture do the work for me :P

Yeah. I would've done that too. But I got this stupid idea in my head that I won't be using custom textures. For better and worse. :p

It's kinda my challenge for this one. Though I have added some textures. The only completely new texture is the sky texture. The others are either just slightly remodeled texture lump features for compatibility sake. And in one case I made a flat into a texture also.

kristus said:

Where I from the start, was planning a maze like landscape with decently tall rock walls that the player could travers over to skip the labyrinth, however would likely be dragged down into on occasion, having to fight his/her way out.

I don't know if you've played Halo, but your description reminds me of the second to last mission ("Keyes") in which you start out in a capital ship but end up fighting in and around a series of caverns (and in and out of the damaged ship). That may be a strange association, but there is the similar idea of trying to stay above the fray but ending up having to deal with parts of it...

I did play through Halo once. But I can't say I entirely recall that scenario. (I do remember a damaged Alien ship. :p )

The last month there has been a total of zero progress on this project. I ran out of steam a bit, and now I started school about a week ago an it's taking up time. Not that I got the steam back yet though. Anyway. I was expecting to have it done by now actually. But obviously that isn't gonna happen.

We'll see when it gains momentum again. It definitely will, just a matter of when. Right now, I am pretty much just using the computer to check on stuff for school and my Youtube subscriptions...

If people want though, I could possibly start dealing out the levels one by one though, and then later release as a complete episode. Would be a first for me. Food for thought.