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kristus

HexenP modfication possibilities.

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I'm as some of you know working on a Hexen expansion called Curse of the lost gods. It's a sequel to my Heretic expansion called Curse of D'sparil, much in the same way as Hexen is a sequel to Heretic.

However. I am struggling with the Mage class. His weapon 1 and 2 balance is very iffy as the sapphire wand is in virtually all situations superior to the frost shards.

So I am heavily considering making a modification of it. The sapphire wand that is.
This would have been a rather easy thing to do had I been aiming at Zdoom or Doomsday compatibility alone. But I am also looking at supporting HexenP (though with all the things spawned by monsters in Hexen, it tends to run rather slow when emulated in Dosbox)

Anyway. Since I am not willing to give up this support and I don't want to make the changes different across ports/exes. I am looking at including a .crk file so people who use HexenP can make the adjustment to that Exe and essentially get the same experience.

To do this at all, I would require help though.
There are a few different ideas I have to nerf the wand.

1. Make it ranged, like the other chars starting weapon. It could be limited in range, however not as limited as the others. But the wand projectile could be limited to a distance of about 128-192 units.

2. Make it not ripp. That is, make it less powerful against mobs as it will only hit the first target and not do the railgun and go through them all.

3. 1 and 2.

4. Give it ammo, probably something that recharges itself.

5. A variant of 4. But you make it require Green mana instead. It wouldn't challenge the usage of the shards (which it would if it used blue), while still having a finite amount of usage. Once you get the Arc of Death, you will most likely be more prone to using the ammo for that weapon instead since it's quite powerful even compared to the sapphire wand. Problem here is that the Mage gets vulnerable if he doesn't have any artifacts or mana at all.

6. Reduce it's firing speed by 2.

Anyway, what do ye hackers say/think?

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1,2 and 6 can be done by modifying the state/thing table - at least to a certain degree.

4 and 5 are pretty much impossible without recoding the attack functions.

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kristus said:

Anyway. Since I am not willing to give up this support and I don't want to make the changes different across ports/exes. I am looking at including a .crk file so people who use HexenP can make the adjustment to that Exe and essentially get the same experience.


What are those .crk files? Some sort of Hexen dehacked? It seems to me that by choosing to support HexenP, you're ditching support of ZDoom, Doomsday, Vavoom...

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Sure you could. It's not entirely satisfying, though. For example, Eternity hasn't finalized the custom weapon specs, so the mod couldn't be made compatible with future versions of EE.

About limiting the attack range, keep in mind that the fighter fist's range is 128 units, and other melee attacks are 64 units. Even 192 wouldn't make it better than the fighter, given it deals less damage and does not have the three-hit combo.

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Graf Zahl said:

5 are pretty much impossible without recoding the attack functions.

Yeah, but it's doable with Dehacked for Doom, so I'm guessing it should be possible by simple hacking as well.

Gez said:

What are those .crk files? Some sort of Hexen dehacked?

No, they are just text files that the program cracker.exe use to edit exe files. It's what was used to make DoomP, HereticP and HexenP.

printz said:

Bundle with DECORATE, MAPINFO, .DED anyone?

Exactly what I was planning in that case. To answer Gez problem. I don't think he needs to worry about that. Once EE got that functionality added I can easily make an update to support it. At the present time it's unfortunately not possible, but it will also not support Hexen before this functionality is added anyway.

Gez said:

About limiting the attack range, keep in mind that the fighter fist's range is 128 units, and other melee attacks are 64 units. Even 192 wouldn't make it better than the fighter, given it deals less damage and does not have the three-hit combo.

Well if that is the case then it would be adjusted to measure up. Besides, the cleric's melee weapon is a lot weaker than the Fighter's fist, so it's not that big of an issue. The problem I am really having is that the Mage is overpowered with his start weapon and it makes him less fun to play with because the weapon isn't very fun to use, but you end up using it anyway since it's usually the best tool for the job.
But balancing and testing would be part of it. Naturally. :)

entryway said:

Removing MF2_RIP flag make 1st mage weapon almost unusable :)

000C5C01: 21 20

I'll try it out. And I assumed it would be the easiest mod to make, but the ranged wand would probably be the one I would prefer. Thanks for this though. :)

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Don't lie to him, kristus, we all know CRK files are a type of virus that attacks the ZDoom, Doomsday, Vavoom, or Eternity executables, turning them into Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera MP3s!

Is 6 satisfying? It seems like the easiest and simplest solution.

The one involving ammo may do weird shit because of the weapon preferences. When other weapons run out of ammo, the player switches to the default weapon, and it would be useless, dropping and coming up each time fire is pressed. Besides, what would he do then? Run and use inventory items?

The others might have harder-to-judge effects on play.

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Well. Personally I have an issue with how it lets the mage stand back and just bore the monsters to death with the wand. Slowing it would definitely make that even more boring, but the tactic would still be valid.

For me 2. would be the most satisfying as that would force the Mage to engage the enemies. While still keeping the interesting mechanics of the wand intact. For instance being able to stun a pack of centaurs to then deliver a flechette or two is a rather gratifying experience.

I just tested the No ripping mod that Entryway supplied. It certainly makes the wand weaker. But it still lets the mage keep safe distance. And it gets rather tedious. :/

myk said:

Don't lie to him, kristus, we all know CRK files are a type of virus that attacks the ZDoom, Doomsday, Vavoom, or Eternity executables, turning them into Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera MP3s!

Heh, but then he'll not be fooled to try them. :p

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Limited range gets my vote, maybe 192 units so that he doesn't have to go right in like the fighter/cleric.

kristus said:

Heh, but then he'll not be fooled to try them. :p


That won't stop him, since most ppl do try them :/

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It seems like you've set the start of your mod up for the other two classes and because you can't immediately think of how to set up the start for the Mage, that you want to alter the mage to play more like the other two classes.

Unlike the Cleric and Fighter's first weapon's, the Mages wand doesn't go through scenery mobj's. Maybe some clever use of additional scenery mobj's when playing as the mage could make him get closer. For instance, if the Mage is attacking some Chaos Serpent's behind barrels, the wand will hit the barrels, whilst the Serpent's because of their height can fire over them. Of course said barrels will also block the Mages other weapons.

Flying bad guys are also harder to get in a line to take advantage of the wands ripping ability, so maybe a larger number of them for the Mage might make add more variety to playing as him.

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Or alternatively, improve the Frost shards by making them faster to throw, faster moving and/or more damaging (especially more damaging, to be on par with their mana cost).

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Vermil said:

It seems like you've set the start of your mod up for the other two classes and because you can't immediately think of how to set up the start for the Mage, that you want to alter the mage to play more like the other two classes.

No. this has always been a problem with the Mage. Hexen and DK deals with it mostly by making really annoying layouts. Like narrow hallways in mountains and so on, and you're still ending up using mostly the wand. I want to get away from that and create a more dynamic experience.

Vermil said:

Unlike the Cleric and Fighter's first weapon's, the Mages wand doesn't go through scenery mobj's. Maybe some clever use of additional scenery mobj's when playing as the mage could make him get closer. For instance, if the Mage is attacking some Chaos Serpent's behind barrels, the wand will hit the barrels, whilst the Serpent's because of their height can fire over them. Of course said barrels will also block the Mages other weapons.

I can't do that, it'd be really annoying. Besides, anyone using "autoaim off" could easily shoot over that crap. It would only make the other weapons useless since the Arc would stick to everything regardless. And the frost shards would get nerfed even further by a lot of them not making it across as well. It's just a really annoying way to plan your game play, on the behalf of one weapon. I want it to be fun to play. :p

Vermil said:

Flying bad guys are also harder to get in a line to take advantage of the wands ripping ability, so maybe a larger number of them for the Mage might make add more variety to playing as him.


No, they're not. This doesn't work at all. The mage is the best char at taking care of the afrits for instance since he is the one that can reach them from a distance. The more there are of them, the easier it is to use the ripping ability as well.

printz said:

Or alternatively, improve the Frost shards by making them faster to throw, faster moving and/or more damaging (especially more damaging, to be on par with their mana cost).

I'd rather nerf the wand than boost the shards.

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The Mage's wand goes through enemies?

Anyway, the wand is pretty weak, it takes forever to kill stuff. May as well improve the frost shards or leave things as is.

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If there's 1 enemy, it is indeed weaker/slower to kill with. If there are 30. It's extremely powerful.

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kristus said:

If there's 1 enemy, it is indeed weaker/slower to kill with. If there are 30. It's extremely powerful.


I never got past the first level, the one with the bell tower you can hit, I only get lost.

Maybe you can call up the Hexen creators and ask them why they made the wand the way they made it, if they remember.

On the note of slowness in DosBox, you could go native and install 98 on a system or just DOS. Although if you do plain DOS you might need to find a sound card driver. If you can't do this you could try setting up a virtual machine with virtualization support (along with your computer supporting it) so it can run mostly native. However, using virtualization with 98 with QEMU at least will fail until after you completely set it up.

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I did not play hexen with mage at all, because it is pretty tedious and unfair a little. I played only with fighter and once with cleric. Probably you do not need any tweaks. If somebody prefers easier ways, then it is his choice.

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I can unfortunately not do that for myself though. If I know of a way that isn't cheating that will give me an edge. I will use it, regardless of if it's boring. Because I can't reconcile to myself how silly it is to use worse tactics when I can sit back and safely pick them off with a railgun weapon. Especially when I am trying to make a challenging game play that will require careful consideration to your artifact and weapon usage.

I think the mage has the possibility to be a great character. But to become that, the Wand has to become less of a crutch and more of a last resort.

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kristus said:

I can unfortunately not do that for myself though. If I know of a way that isn't cheating that will give me an edge. I will use it, regardless of if it's boring. Because I can't reconcile to myself how silly it is to use worse tactics when I can sit back and safely pick them off with a railgun weapon. Especially when I am trying to make a challenging game play that will require careful consideration to your artifact and weapon usage.

I think the mage has the possibility to be a great character. But to become that, the Wand has to become less of a crutch and more of a last resort.


Maybe you can replace the wand with a wimpy melee weapon since the mage is so weak and dies so damn fast.

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What do you mean with "make it ranged"? Something like that or what?

What precisely Graf meant with "it can be done by modifying the state/thing table"? If you or Graf know which states should be changed and have difficulties to put it in EXE, then I can help.

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Indeed exactly as in your video; he means making the projectile only travel a certain distance.

It can be done without code modifications in source ports that allow editing the state table, by changing the missiles two looping states in to a single one that destroys it'self instead of entering another state.

Given that the wand missile has a speed of 184 unit's a tic, making this single state 1 tic, would mean the wand would have a range of 184 unit's.

Adjusing the actual speed of the wand missile would allow one to fine tune the distance, but would increase/decrease the ripper damage it causes (because the missile would be inside a mobj for less/more time).

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Vermil said:

It can be done without code modifications in source ports that allow editing the state table, by changing the missiles two looping states in to a single one that destroys it'self instead of entering another state.

Can you write a patch for chocolate-hexen?

I tried to modify this line
{SPR_MWND, 32770, 4, NULL, S_MWAND_MISSILE2, 0, 0}, // S_MWAND_MISSILE1
but without a luck

EDIT:
Something like that?
{SPR_MWND, 32770, 4, A_Explode, S_NULL, 0, 0}, // S_MWAND_MISSILE1
and
50 * FRACUNIT, // speed

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I'm not familar with editing the source code.

I tested using Dday's ded's (hence why I said any source port that allows one to edit the state table):

State {
ID = "MWAND_MISSILE1";
Sprite = "MWND";
Frame = 32770;
Tics = 1;
Next state = "NULL";
}

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Vermil said:

State {
ID = "MWAND_MISSILE1";
Sprite = "MWND";
Frame = 32770;
Tics = 1;
Next state = "NULL";
}

000B5A98: 04 01
000B5AA0: 54 00
000B5AA1: 05 00

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entryway said:

What do you mean with "make it ranged"? Something like that or what?

Yeah, that's it. But maybe have it travel about 2x (or possibly 3) that range?

Vermil said:

State {
ID = "MWAND_MISSILE1";
Sprite = "MWND";
Frame = 32770;
Tics = 1;
Next state = "NULL";
}

How is that appended to a PWAD?

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kristus said:

Yeah, that's it. But maybe have it travel about 2x (or possibly 3) that range?

Use values from my previous post.

Or probably something like that:
000B5A98: 04 02 ;tics
000B5AB4: 04 02 ;tics
000B5ABC: 53 00 ;NULL nextstate
000B5ABD: 05 00 ;
000C5BE6: B8 5C ;speed
000C5BF4: 02 01 ;damage

It is similar to:

State {
ID = "MWAND_MISSILE1";
Sprite = "MWND";
Frame = 32770;
Tics = 2;
Next state = "MWAND_MISSILE2";
}

State {
ID = "MWAND_MISSILE2";
Sprite = "MWND";
Frame = 32771;
Tics = 2;
Next state = "NULL";
} 

MT_MWAND_MISSILE::Speed = 92
MT_MWAND_MISSILE::Damage = 1
You can play with tics and speed values for any ranges

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Many thanks Entryway. :)

BTW:
Does these lines mean you changed the speed and damage of the weapon?

entryway said:

000C5BE6: B8 5C ;speed
000C5BF4: 02 01 ;damage


The Speed characters I can't really make any sense of. When i try to convert them to Ascii they turn into , and ?. Unless they're translated to decimal values of course. (which do make sense of course... :p)

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kristus said:

The Speed characters I can't really make any sense of. When i try to convert them to Ascii they turn into , and ?. Unless they're translated to decimal values of course. (which do make sense of course... :p)

They are. 0x5C = 92.

The normal values are speed 184 (0xB8), damage 2, and the two states last 4 tics each and loop. Remove the loop, you get a range of 1472 units.

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Yeah, that's great. That means I can play with the values a bit if I want to.
Gez: Could you do me the favor of whipping together the decorate counterpart for this? Or maybe I can just check out Zdoom's resources and I might be able to figure it out myself.


EDIT: Would this be correct?

ACTOR MageWandMissile : FastProjectile
{
	Speed  92
	Radius 12
	Height 8
	Damage 1
	+RIPPER +CANNOTPUSH +NODAMAGETHRUST
	+SPAWNSOUNDSOURCE
	MissileType "MageWandSmoke"
	SeeSound "MageWandFire"
	States
	{
	Spawn:
		MWND CD 2 Bright
		stop
	Death:
		MWND E 4 Bright
		MWND F 3 Bright
		MWND G 4 Bright
		MWND H 3 Bright
		MWND I 4 Bright
		Stop
	}
}
EDIT: It seems to be working.

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kristus said:

Yeah, that's it. But maybe have it travel about 2x (or possibly 3) that range?

How is that appended to a PWAD?


Shove it in a lump called "DD_DEFNS" as is. Or you can place it in "Data/JHexen/Auto" in a pk3.

To adjust the range, you would play with the tic length. 1 tic is 184 unit's. 2 tics is 368 etc.

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