Porting a Gameplay Mod to Another IWAD

Sometimes one can get very lucky with the benevolent kindness of high-achieving mod-authors and their widescale integration of compatibility into any given project, such as Heretical Doom, Guncaster, Trailblazer and Kriegsland II. 

For other projects, however, the ones that don't have such built-in compatibilities, how would one go about porting such gameplay mods to other iwads?

As a start, my current desire is to play Final Doomer with Hexen. Where would I begin?

I don't think it is possible. I think you would have to recreate the mod from scratch, or maybe contact the creator and ask them to change a few things around. 

First, you have to replace Hexen items with Doom items. You can do it with Decorate. Here is an example what I did for The Adventures of Square.

Second, you have the issue of different palette, so you have to convert the graphics from paletted to PNGs. Do it with Slade, or maybe you can get away with just loading Doom-in-Heretic from here.

Then you would load the created Decorate file, the file with converted graphics, and Final Doomer.

2 minutes ago, m8f said:

A lot of smart stuff I didn't think about

I stand corrected. I also think this topic should go into the DOOM Editing Sub-Forum. I was a bit confused seeing it here in DOOM General.

On 9/27/2020 at 8:53 PM, m8f said:

First, you have to replace Hexen items with Doom items. You can do it with Decorate. Here is an example what I did for The Adventures of Square.

Second, you have the issue of different palette, so you have to convert the graphics from paletted to PNGs. Do it with Slade, or maybe you can get away with just loading Doom-in-Heretic from here.

 

Then you would load the created Decorate file, the file with converted graphics, and Final Doomer.

Dang is DECORATE intuitive! I used your template alongside looking at Xim's Star Wars Doom's Decorate, made the replacements, and it worked! I didn't even have to futz with the pallet of the images. It plays great!

I'll post the textfile for what I did in decorate here in case anyone else wants to pop it in FD and try it out.

Right now, Doomguy plays as a bit of a glass canon. He doesn't seem to want pick up any of Hexen's armors, so I've replaced armor with additional ammunition and an occasional bonus quartz flask. It's definitely not perfect, but I enjoyed my test-run through Deathkings of the Dark Citadel with the Plutonia loadout and found it difficult but not impossible. The lack of any backpacks kind of balances out just how doggone powerful many of Final Doomer's weapons can be. It almost gives Hexen a bit of a Residental Evil vibe, solving puzzles with powerful weapons that have a limited ammo supply.

Any-hoo, thank you so much for the guidance, @m8f. This is my first venture into anything coding related, and it was quite a fun exploration :)

Maybe now I can finally try making that Heretic/Hexen monster mod for Doom...