DeHacked\Bex help requested

Anyone remember Chex Quest? A little Doom-based game released in boxes of Chex for a while, before Ralston Foods sold Chex to General Mills. It contains no blood, violence or language, and recieved an 'all' rating from the RSAC. I'm currently working on a little Bex patch to allow the chex quest wads to be played properly in modern Doom 'source ports'. I actualy opened up the executable into a hex editor to find the offsets needed to load it into DeHacked to find just what differences there are - a bit more work than it was worth, but I digress.

I'm having trouble emulating one little alteration they made which didn't get inherreted through my copying endevor: Nobody drops anything. No dropped clips (mini zorch recharges), no dropped shotguns (large zorchers), no dropped chainguns (rapid zorchers).

I've made one attempt at this: Swapping Thing numbers between the guys that drop stuff (Trooper, Sargeant, Chaingunner and SS in Doom) and stuff that can't be killed (I tried to use the Dead Trooper, Dead Sargeant, Dead Marine, and Dead Lost Soul in doom) Unfortunatly, it failed. I can walk right through them, and can't kill (oh, sorry... 'zorch') them. (Testing with ZDoom)

If anyone can point me in the right direction (or better yet, code a solution for me! :) I would be most apreciative.

Also, if anyone can help me with other aspects of this endevor, like letting me know of a way to use longer cheatcodes, how to read the cheats in the binary, telling me about a way to end an episode on level 5 instead of 8 (doesn't necisarily have to be through Bex), or clueing me in on an easy way to combine Wads with seperate recourses (I'm kinda hoping to merge the entire Chex Quest trillogy into a single Wad), I would apreciate it.

Oh, and a somewhat related, un-important question about Deh\Bex: Is there any way to make *more* things drop stuff? I would absolutely *love* to have that kind of control.

It would seem that you'd have to change the bit values of those things (in addition to the thing numbers: which to me would mean changing each of the starting frames of each thing to the ones of whatever thing you want to chance them into, thus turning, for example, a lamp into an imp), to make them killable obstructions.

DEH has limits in respect to the length of text changed (probably cheats included, I never checked), but BEX probably doesn't... Have you been checking boomdeh.txt? Anyway, changing the cheatcodes is a waste of time... it annoys players (who will cheat nonetheless if they really want to, since they can check the BEX patch or whatever); furthermore, if you attempt was to turn the cheats into funny puns or something, keep in mind most players won't even check them out.

You can't normally change the episode lengths with DEH or boom's BEX, though I'm sure some engines allow this by some means. Mbf (thus eternity) has a feature that allows you to make a thing's frame spawn something, just like you are asking. I don't think other DEH supporting executables allow this.

Here's a Dehacked patch to do just what you want.

http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/NODROP.DEH

the way i think about cheats is, i will use them if:

1. your wad has a bug and gets me stuck.
2. your wad sucks and i just want to get out of the damn thing.

if i find a dehacked patch has changed the cheat codes, this will not help relations between me and your wad.

a Dehacked code pointers list. a Dehacked tutorial. the Dehacked grabbag.

WNivek said:

Oh, and a somewhat related, un-important question about Deh\Bex: Is there any way to make *more* things drop stuff? I would absolutely *love* to have that kind of control.

In Eternity, SMMU, MBF and JDP you can make things to "Drop" things when they die assigning to his death frame the SPAWN codepointer. Then use the UNKNOWN fields in dehacked to set the thing you desire to spawn (e.g a bakcpack, rocket launcher, another monster, etc).
This not apply to projectiles.
Read the documentation coming with Eternity or MBF. It's not that hard.

CYA!

Okay, thanks for all your help, everyone! Sorry to gum up the forum with my newbie-ness.

Upon reading up on the new code pointers in MBF, I'm still slightly baffled. It keeps refering to

"The misc1 and misc2 fields of the code pointer's frame (indicated by "Unknown 1" and "Unknown 2" in DeHackEd)"

I can not for the life of me find the fields anywhere in DeHackEd, nor do I know the syntax\location for manualy inserting them.

Would anyone be so kind as to point out where they are (I'm using DeHackEd v3.1, btw) or explain to me the apropriate syntax\location?

[Later...]

Okay, I just figured out the syntax on my own. Thanks anyway.

WNivek said:

Upon reading up on the new code pointers in MBF, I'm still slightly baffled. It keeps refering to

"The misc1 and misc2 fields of the code pointer's frame (indicated by "Unknown 1" and "Unknown 2" in DeHackEd)"

I can not for the life of me find the fields anywhere in DeHackEd, nor do I know the syntax\location for manualy inserting them.

Would anyone be so kind as to point out where they are (I'm using DeHackEd v3.1, btw) or explain to me the apropriate syntax\location?

[Later...]

Okay, I just figured out the syntax on my own. Thanks anyway.

It's not necesary to use dehacked.
Simply edit the .deh file (in a text editor like Notepad or Edit) generated by dehacked and find the section with the frame you want to edit. Maybe looks like this:

Frame [number]
duration = 8
sprite number = [number]
next frame = [number]

etc..

so, just add in this section the following lines:

Unknown 1 = [number]
Unknown 2 = [number]

don't remember exactly, but i think the number in Unknown 1 must be the number of the thing you wanna spawn and Unknown 2 refers to the z coordinate where it spawns.

Cya

That's what I meant I had figured out.


Here's another question, for a different little quasi-project: In Eternity, is there a way to get more that 3 different player-weapon projectiles? (the 3 of which I speak are objects 34, 35 and 36 - Rocket, Plasma and BFG normaly) I seem to remember that monster\object code pointers don't work in weaponry, and I don't see any new weapon mnemonics mentioned in the eternity docs. I had a faint glimmer of hope for Spawn, but trying to use it in a weapon crashes the game because it is, after all, intended for game objects and not weaponry.