[Heretic] Lost and Forgotten

[Dreadopp]

Huzzah!

 

Over the past couple weeks, I've been collaborating with @Lord_Z on a Heretic release. Here it is! Lost and Forgotten is a two map release for Heretic's E1M1 and E1M2. Heretic+ and GZDoom were used for testing.

 

Let us know if there are any issues that need addressing. Don't forget to save often! As always, feedback is greatly appreciated. :)

 

Screenshots

Spoiler

 

Download

I've included two download links below. The first includes the Medieval Textures pack so everything is within the same download/file. The second is without the texture pack in case there are those of you who already have the texture pack.

With texture pack included:

Lost and Forgotten

 

Without texture pack:

Lost and Forgotten

Edited February 9, 2022 by Dreadopp

[Lord_Z]

It was interesting to create a Heretic map again. It feels quite a bit different from Doom.

 

Let's hope there are no bad bugs, haha!

[WH-Wilou84]

Pretty cool mapset, thanks for sharing. I've just completed it with ZDoom 2.8.1 and didn't notice any bug.
I usually don't like ice/friction effects but fortunately you didn't use them too much here.

Nice ending fight. :)

[Manhs]

Thanks, i will play it! ^^

[Komenja]

Always nice to see more Heretic! I liked both these levels, the atmosphere was great and the fights were fun. Didn't encounter any bugs in GZDoom.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

It's good.  ETTiNGRiNDER stamp of approval.  Good use of the MEDIVLTX resource, too, there's some stuff in that pack that can look really tacky but they were well-chosen here for the most part.  I liked the arctic/winter theme used here, not quite "standard Heretic" but still very fitting.  Same goes for the music choices.  If I had to be dissatisfied with anything, it felt a bit easy, had to check afterwards that I was really playing on Smite-meister or not.  Would rank it about like the harder levels of E3 or the easier ones of E4/E5 on difficulty overall I suppose.  Found hellstaff ammo but no hellstaff, I assume it was only placed in secrets since I didn't find all those. Only died twice, at the very end (cornered once, slipping on ice messed up my dodging a strong attack the second time), and only had one other moment that things got really tense on the second level when I got caught in a whirlwind and ended up right in the lich's face.  Neat use of tricks like the key completion sigils in the first map and the staggered teleporting of monsters in the second.

 

Played with Plus.  Had it crash once on the second level, somewhere outside the building with the red windows.  Spat a whole lot of garble, looked like a VPO possibly but can't be sure it wasn't something else corrupting, I don't know how stable the hacks in Plus really are.  Crashed again quickly when I went in again, but after a reboot and reloading the last save there were no more issues so I'd chalk the second crash up to the system being messed from the first one.  I appreciate that it can be played this way.

[Dreadopp]

Thanks for all the comments, guys! And thanks for playing through the maps. :)

 

8 hours ago, WH-Wilou84 said:

I usually don't like ice/friction effects but fortunately you didn't use them too much here.

Interestingly, they weren't set to be friction until much later since I didn't want it to be too frustrating to play. I tried it out a bunch and it didn't seem to be as bad as I remember so we decided to add it in to (hopefully) add a little bit of challenge.

 

3 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Played with Plus.  Had it crash once on the second level, somewhere outside the building with the red windows.

Thanks for the report. I can take another gander at that area and see if I can reproduce it. I didn't have any issues when I was testing it in that port.

[PVS]

Grand canyons, large areas, this is some kind of long winter journey under suitable music - I like the atmosphere, which has turned out. I am glad, that there are no tons of monsters, in my opinion, this is completely unnecessary, the balance of weapons and ammo is quite enough for this atmosphere of travel.

Thank you guys for these two vanilla maps, although being late, but this is a good present for the last Heretic birthday, who was in December. It would be interesting, if you continue - add some vanilla maps in this style, maybe can go down into these rock-mountains, where will the cave castles? Or vice versa - go upstairs? heh, well, of course, if you yourself like and have a desire for this.

I'm use vanilla engines for play this maps, here needed limit-removing, so these are: Heretic-Plus, Crispy Heretic, little modified Chocolate Heretic and some others engines - they all have problems on E1M2, crash near the beginning of the map, as said ETTiNGRiNDER. I sometimes work with game source, a small personal interest, sometimes I observe similar problems of the original Heretic engine, undocumented, incomprehensible crashes without visible errors, is always happens only on custom maps. My attempts to understand and find these problems in the game engine are so far unsuccessful at the moment.

For this E1M2 crash happens for me near/in sector 1288, two crystal vial here, player can look towards the castle. This crash happens only with monsters, problem thing 297 - fire gargoyle in sector 1239. If delete this thing 297 or move it below, for example in sector 1205 - the problem disappears. If anyone is interested - look at this strange situation guys, how far are these sectors from each other, why does the engine crash and where to look for it in the source code - I have no ideas.
 

[Vermil]

Played through in Doomsday with no bugs.

 

To say the opposite of PVS, I believe the maps where far too open for the amount of bad guys (I played on skill4, only found the crossbow and dragon claw and didn't find the maps to be that difficult).

 

I would consider replacing the enchanted shield on the first map with a silver shield at most, switching the dragon claw and hell staff around (i.e making the dragon claw the secret weapon and the hell staff the weapon in plain sight) and removing the phoenix rod.

Edited January 8, 2019 by Vermil

[fabian]

19 hours ago, PVS said:

Heretic-Plus, Crispy Heretic, little modified Chocolate Heretic and some others engines - they all have problems on E1M2, crash near the beginning of the map, as said ETTiNGRiNDER. 

 

Does it do a hard crash, e.g. like a segmentation fault, or does it exit with an error message?

 

Edit: Never mind, it was an intercepts overflow, fixed in GIT.

Edited January 8, 2019 by fabian

[Dreadopp]

Thanks for the additional feedback, guys. And thanks for looking more into that crash!

 

On 1/7/2019 at 12:50 PM, PVS said:

For this E1M2 crash happens for me near/in sector 1288, two crystal vial here, player can look towards the castle. This crash happens only with monsters, problem thing 297 - fire gargoyle in sector 1239. If delete this thing 297 or move it below, for example in sector 1205 - the problem disappears.

I was experimenting with this, but I found that even if I removed that Gargoyle, I would get the crash again if I clipped back up from the boss arena and ran back to sector 1288 after waking up all the enemies there (not standard player behavior, sure, but still :P).

 

11 hours ago, fabian said:

Does it do a hard crash, e.g. like a segmentation fault, or does it exit with an error message?

Sounds like you may have already fixed it, but for me it simply closed the game without any error message. Thanks for checking it out though! :)

[PVS]

fabian
Thanks, I see your solution. Previously, I did not pay attention to MAXINTERCEPTS define in Heretic, now I see that there may be a problems, sometimes. I'm test this now in my little project and see that crash on this E1M2 map comes from the P_SightBlockLinesIterator function.

A small question - do you plan to leave this decision in this form in the Crispy Heretic? I see in your Doom source more difficult decision of this situation. This is not a very important, I just would like to know that I will have compatibility with at least one engine around, in such overflows situations, what may be important for playback/recording vanilla demos. I don’t think, that this situation will be interesting for Chocolate project, although, adding some error exit messages here, would be better for them too, maybe.

Dreadopp
It's weird, yes. But in reality now, on this E1M2 map there is no way for the player to return to the beginning from the final boss area, right? And if your current changes on the map do not lead to engine crashes at the beginning, as in a normal situation, then maybe - leave in this state? This is better anyway.

When I was looking for a problem on this map, I found what I said, saved it with these minor changes, and nothing else. I even recorded a slow max demo for this E1M2, which normally playback on Heretic-Plus and Crispy Heretic without latest fix. Now I tried once again on my modified map version, made the max and returned form the boss area to the beginning with cheats - engine does not crash anyway, in a sector 1288 area. In next try, from the beginning I'm use god mode, looked around sector 1288 and immediately go to the boss area with no clip - caught the excess overflow at the moment when I fell into the boss area, again from P_SightBlockLinesIterator function, now I can see it. This is strange, of course.

In any case, I think, need try to change something in the final boss area, and map will be compatible with Heretic-Plus, maybe someone will advise what exactly try to change, I have no ideas, at this moment.
 

[fabian]

5 hours ago, PVS said:

A small question - do you plan to leave this decision in this form in the Crispy Heretic? I see in your Doom source more difficult decision of this situation.

 

In Doom, the intercepts limit has been removed (in Crispy) and some of the effects of the intercepts overflow are emulated (which is inherited from Choco and PrBoom+). I don't plan to do anything similar for Heretic. If the intercepts limit has been reached, no further intercepts will be added. This circumvents the crash that you experienced, nothing more. I am not sure if there are any obscure demos available as for Doom which would justify any further effort (these demos would currently crash any recent engine, anyway).

[PVS]

16 hours ago, fabian said:

If the intercepts limit has been reached, no further intercepts will be added. This circumvents the crash that you experienced, nothing more.

Ok, I was interested in precisely this. I have another example of a crash problem in Heretic, I will write in your topic.
 

[Gez]

Played through it, it was a great couple of maps, kind of disappointing there weren't more.

 

I didn't notice any bug, though I would want to suggest a way to backtrack in the final area of Forgotten. Perhaps just a teleporter near the exit. For the completionnists out there who notice they've missed an item or a secret and don't want to noclip back up the drop :)

[Dreadopp]

That's a fair point, Gez. I'll see about adding a teleporter for the next version.

 

Thanks for playing through the maps and providing feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed the set. :)

[ShadesMaster]

Giving this a BUMP because this is my next youtube pursuit! Gotta say from the screenies, it looks promising!