Heretic DEHACKED editing and port support

Well, I've read this thread from 2007. And this thread from 2006. And this one from 2002. And this NewDoom thread (click at your own risk). Anyway, the things I've read there didn't sound much favourable to my intentions. Since the threads are old, I'm asking if anything has changed till now.

I can work with DehackEd and WhackEd to make DEHACKED patches for Doom and mess with various things to change texts, but also make new monsters and weapons etc., which will consequently work in all Doom ports.

I'm looking for a cross-port compatible way to do the same in Heretic.

It doesn't have to be DEHACKED, but I'd like it to work with various ports, maybe except vanilla and Chocolate Heretic itself, but preferably including at least the latter.

What are my possibilities?

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=utils/exe_edit/hhe11.zip ?

As far as I know, there is only one way to have actor changes in Heretic that are cross-compatible: duplication.

So you'll have some HeHackEd for Chocolate Doom. But then you'll need to add the same thing in a different way for ZDoom (DECORATE) and Doomsday (DD_DEFNS). I don't think Heretic support in Eternity is finished but maybe there's enough already to put your actor changes in EDFROOT and hope it'll work in the future.

What about the rest?
DelphiDoom: I think you're out of luck, though its author comes here from time to time (jval).
Doom Legacy: unless what you want to do could perhaps be approximated in a super-hacky way by FraggleScript, you're also out of luck
Hexetic: AFAIK, nobody still uses it

^Alright, I understood, it's better not to do what I wanted to do, because I'd have to code it manually at least in 4 different scripting languages, some of which are completely foreign to me, and still have no assurance that it would work everywhere. Staying with Doom is better.

Yeah that's unfortunate.

On the plus side, relatively simple dehacked-like changes should be relatively easy to create in any language; and you can get help from Vermil and DaniJ for the Doomsday part, and from Quasar from the Eternity part.

Gez said:

relatively simple dehacked-like changes

Hehe, if only you knew what I did, and to what extent... If you ever wanted a massive bunch of massively elaborate and gimmicky DEHACKED wads, perhaps for testing purposes, feel free to contact me. During years, I've been preparing dozens of ambitious wad projects and never got further than preparing resources, but as an enthusiastic coder, I've spent dozens up to hundreds of hours making very thorough DEHACKED changes to everything, exploiting usage of custom sprite names, editor numbers, reassembling all codepointers, reassembling all states and things to make new monsters and weapons and more, always with a mega-cool-and-whatnot project idea in mind. I've never released anything of that, because it's literaly useless work without new maps created with the completely changed content in mind, but the wads (40+ in total, 20+ of them have a DEHACKED) are functional (sometimes unfinished) and each one is different, some are simpler, some are insanely elaborate.

I'm having trouble with HHE.EXE. After a lot of trial and error, I've been able to configure and run it properly, but the "String mode" (F7) seems bugged. It shows only about 50 strings and the texts consist of random nonsensical characters, the rest of strings (numbers 1860+) are empty. I only wanted to change a few sprite names (as the strings). Any easy workaround?

How did you configure your .ini? HHE always seems to fail to find heretic.wad while finding the actual .exe located in the same folder, i have to change the version # from 0 to 3 or something? (i did what the author wrote here for the 1.3 version but it still does not want to find the .wad).

p.s: just for clarity i DID change the varius editname,pathname,etc... to match my used folder.

I merely did what README.txt said when configuring the .ini. Pathnames should use backslashes in a format like this:

editname = c:\HHEd\herehack.exe
normalname = c:\HHEd\heretic.exe
wadname = c:\HHEd\heretic.wad
pathname = c:\HHEd
patchdir = c:\HHEd

Avoid directory names longer than 8 characters, just to be sure. I always do it with old programs, though maybe it's redundant.

I've put Heretic.wad and Heretic.exe into the c:\HHEd directory (I've taken them from Steam). I've also manually made a copy of Heretic.exe named Herehack.exe.

I've launched HHE.EXE directly in my Windows 7, without DosBox. It worked (I had to press Y, respectively Z on my Czech keyboard), but I've seen corrupted texts in some tabs. With DosBox, it didn't work at all and HHE crashed upon startup.

Shameless plug; while there's more stuff I could cover here (I haven't actively worked on it that much since it's of limited relevance due to lacking port support and the utility itself being a bit janky), maybe this info is of use to you.
http://ettingrinder.jimdo.com/heretic-hexen-etc/heretic-hack-editor-hhe/

Ettingrinder: i'll take a look at it thank you.

scifista42: umm, i use my father's old copy, and now seems to work! don't know why it does not work in dosbox... i'll try something out now.

EDIT: it works wonders for me! maybe is becouse i am using xp?