Blasphemer v0.1.3 Released; New Website

Blasphemer v0.1.3 has been released. It also has a new, much more usable website, where you can find screenshots and downloads: https://code.google.com/p/blasphemer/ This new site should make it much easier to submit work.

As always, contributions are valued. All textures and music are complete, but we still need many sprites, maps, and sounds. Most urgently needed are weapon HUD sprites and player sprites, which would make Blasphemer a fully-capable multiplayer game.

I'm actually thinking of contributing to this project.

For those of us that wish to contribute maps, what are the guidelines to follow?

• What should the overall map length be in terms of play time? Does it vary throughout the episode?
  
• Is there a set progression for which items the player should have available to them at certain points throughout each episode?
  
• What locales should be portrayed in each episode? Is there a story to supplement this?
  
• This should work under the original Heretic executable, correct?
  

Does it work with the Blasphemer palette now? Or is it still using the Doom palette mistakenly?

Tried running it. All the colors are messed up. I tried running it with my heretic wad and all the colors were messed up only on the Blasphemer resources and were showing up correctly on any resources which were from my wad.

I figured that the colors were set to another palette. And with what Gez said in the post before me, I went to run it with Doom.wad as a pwad. And that made the graphics draw properly.

same problem here...

Yeah that's my fault, apparently not all versions of DeuTex handle palettes the same way and I hadn't bothered to test it properly. Anyone who downloaded 0.1.3 should throw that away and get 0.1.3b instead.

As for maps, there's not really a lot decided yet. Maps can be limit-removing but shouldn't use extra features that are specific to one port, e.g. no ZDoom stuff. There's a rough draft of a prologue story that I wrote up one night but beyond that not much. As far as level themes, I can say what I was thinking when I drew up each sky;
E1 - Castles, towns, dungeons; not unlike Heretic's e1 themes
E2 - Wastelands, deserts, volcanoes, desolate places, ruined temples
E3 - Alien world (think Lovecraft, not Star Trek)
E4 and E5 have been pushed to deathmatch slots as it is currently. If a lot of people end up wanting to make maps sometime later, that might change.

Wow, this looks pretty good! Downloading now to get a closer look.

Sorry for the double post. Ok, well I played around the levels and it looks awesome. I'll DEFINITELY like to contribute as a mapper.

I've played around with this a bit and it's got a pretty strong own artistic quality to it. But there are a few things that bothers me with it.

1. It's lacking color. Even the color palette is less colorful than Heretic's making it even more obvious.

2. The pickup items don't stand out enough. They tend to melt into the surroundings.

3. Some of the stuff is simply too jittery. Like the Celtic textures and the small gray stones.

4. Some textures have been changed in their dimensions (Green stone texture, Mosaic textures, switch textures) and as a result any wads that use texture lumps based on Heretic will get misalignments when ran with Blasphemer.

5. All the stained glass textures should be replaced.

i like the fact that the palette is kinda dark. i think the original heretic palette is too bright.
But kristus is right when saying some textures are a bit jittery.
and i do not agree with the swamp/mud texture. But otherwise GREAT work! Keep it on!

kristus said:
1. It's lacking color. Even the color palette is less colorful than Heretic's making it even more obvious.

Intentional; pretty much as Fenriswolf says.

2. The pickup items don't stand out enough. They tend to melt into the surroundings.

Not sure what to do about that... glowing auras maybe?

3. Some of the stuff is simply too jittery. Like the Celtic textures and the small gray stones.

By "jittery" do you mean grainy, or that it pixelates weirdly at a distance?

4. Some textures have been changed in their dimensions (Green stone texture, Mosaic textures, switch textures) and as a result any wads that use texture lumps based on Heretic will get misalignments when ran with Blasphemer.

This is something we're aware of. It's the result of a compromise made in the beginnings of the project between Jute wanting to make a Heretic clone a-la Freedoom and my wanting to do something a little more freeform. My argument was that once you start looking at stuff that adds in new graphics, they're going to be geared towards meshing with the Heretic graphics (hopefully) and won't look right with any other graphic set without going dangerously close to the originals anyway. Given that there's only a few out of a few Heretic sets that do this, it didn't seem worth putting unnecessary strain on the art direction so long as basic vanilla .wads pretty much worked right. It also allowed tweaking the palette a little more freely (which is also an issue to wads with their own graphics now). So the path we decided on was "vanilla .wads with no nonsense should be reasonably expected to work, anything else is at your own risk." It can be brought back up for argument, of course, or someone can do their own "fix" as they please, but as of the current time it's not planned to change it.

5. All the stained glass textures should be replaced.

Yeah, they do kind of suck. But I have no clue how to make stained glass that looks any better than that, so if it's going to improve, someone else has to do it.

Fenriswolf said:
i do not agree with the swamp/mud texture.

You mean the grey-green slime that plays prominently in E1M3? That'll probably be slated for replacement too, it's not the first time issue's been taken with it. Maybe with something darker green.

Yeah, they do kind of suck. But I have no clue how to make stained glass that looks any better than that, so if it's going to improve, someone else has to do it.

I really liked the original stained glass textures. They were kinda more filigree than the ones you used. Maybe you should do something like this...?
Another thing of that i think it could look better was WALL500, please check on this one.
And yeah that was the slime texture i was talking about. Should be darker imo.

Stilgar said:

Not sure what to do about that... glowing auras maybe?

Glowing auras would work on only the objects that are fullbright in their rendering frames to begin with. On anything else, it would look awkward, and most of Heretic's sprites don't have a lot of fullbright frames. A single-pixel wide, solid-color outline stroke around items would work, but it could interfere with the art direction.

...the path we decided on was "vanilla .wads with no nonsense should be reasonably expected to work, anything else is at your own risk."

You can never, ever count on a "no-nonsense" PWAD. Even seasoned authors will attempt to cobble together linedefs and dummy sectors to create a "new" wall graphic. It is one of the difficulties with making a replacement of this nature.

I think you need more organized structures for pushing this forward. The new website is a little bit low on information, what is needed. There should be a list of things needed, so that if someone wants to pick up one of the things to finish, you could assign them to this guy.

cybdmn said:

I think you need more organized structures for pushing this forward. The new website is a little bit low on information, what is needed. There should be a list of things needed, so that if someone wants to pick up one of the things to finish, you could assign them to this guy.

That's kind of the point of the new site.

It probably could still use some work in that respect, though. The old FreeDoom site had a list of what was complete, in progress, unclaimed, abandoned, etc., which was useful and might be worth adopting for Blasphemer.

jute said:

It probably could still use some work in that respect, though. The old FreeDoom site had a list of what was complete, in progress, unclaimed, abandoned, etc., which was useful and might be worth adopting for Blasphemer.

This is exactly what is needed for any kind of project. Without any kind of strict direction, all projects are doomed to fail or stagnate. There always has to be an available guideline plus a director or directing party to make final decisions.

You are essentially remaking Heretic. That alone is still a great undertaking, but without direction and an enumerated list of what needs to be done, the project loses focus, and will never be done.