Pig-Branch: Chocolate Pigs (Now Released!)

[Quasar]

Update!

"Pig Branch" is now available for download.

http://eternity.mancubus.net/chocolate-hexen-pig.zip (Win32 binaries)
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pig-branch.diff (Apply to strife-branch head revision to build your own EXE)

The Story:

Korax's minions came in the night, torching the countryside with aught but contempt for every living creature to cross their path. When they reached the farm where you lived many a peaceful year rooting about the soft earth and wallowing in your favorite mud pit, nothing was spared. They hung the farmer from the old tree, and then set it and everything else on fire.

At first you ran for your life mindlessly, certain that the fiends were following you. But soon you realized that you were all alone, forced to fend for yourself for the first time in a dangerous world. Looking up in awe at the looming buttresses of a hall of winnowing, you wonder if a mere pig could ever make a difference in such a cruel existence...

Mechanics:

The pig gains experience and levels up by defeating his enemies. The pig gains abilities and stats based on his level:
* The Pig's bite attack grows stronger with every level gained.
* Every 10 levels earns the Pig 1 AC
* At level 15, the Pig learns how to use mana and can cast a Frost Shard spell from his snout. His cold breath also freezes monsters when he bites them.
* At level 20, the Pig learns Dragon Breath, and will use it in preference to Frost Shard if he has green mana.
* At level 30, the Pig can absorb mana by biting his foes.

Enemy Experience Chart:
Pig: 25
Affrit: 80
Stalker: 90
Wendigo: 120
Stalker Leader: 140
Ettin: 175
Centaur: 200
Chaos Serpent (Brown and Green): 250
Slaughtaur: 300
Bishop: 520
Reiver: 600
Death Wyvern: 1920
Maulotaur: 2500
Menelkir, Traductus, Zedek: 8000
Heresiarch: 10000

* Note that kills acquired by a Dark Servant will count toward your experience, but enemies killed by other enemies will not!

------------------------------------
For fun I started work on a minor project. It is a fork of Chocolate Hexen that I have lovingly entitled 'pig-branch', and it adds the Pig as a full-fledged fourth player class.

Player-class pigs differ from morphed pigs in the following manners:

• 100 health, vs 30, so you have a fair shot
  
• Jump height is the same as a normal player so you can't get stuck
  
• Flechettes are the Cleric's instead of the Fighter's so you can stun enemies and escape sticky situations a bit more easily
  
• You can pick up items
  
• You cannot be morphed, obviously.
  
• Mystic Ambit Incant - when used, this will morph all other players in the effect radius into pigs temporarily ;)
  

The pig still cannot use armor at all, however, and has an intrinsic AC of 0, giving him the worst defense of all.

Some other changes have been made, all minor, and some of them affect morphed pigs as well (mostly additional sounds).

I may or may not add additional weapons for the pig class, it depends on what people would like to see out of this mod.

Once I feel it's ready I'll be releasing both an EXE and the source code. It could sorta use some graphics resources too, such as a player class selection BG (he uses the fighter's right now, which is accurate only in terms of speed).

[DuckReconMajor]

This is beautiful. If you could play through the whole game with pig I'd probably give it a shot.

[Mithran Denizen]

Well, this certainly brightens my evening. I always knew Hexen was missing something, but until a moment ago, I couldn't quite put my finger on it...

[DuckReconMajor]

GREETINGS, MEATBALL

[Gez]

DuckReconMajor said:

GREETINGS, MEATBALL

ARE YOU READY TO FRY?

[GreyGhost]

<checks calendar>

That's an interesting concept. Will porcine players be allowed to use the Wings of Wrath?

[Quasar]

GreyGhost said:

<checks calendar>

That's an interesting concept. Will porcine players be allowed to use the Wings of Wrath?

Yes, because in fact morphed players can already fly in Hexen. A joke about "when pigs fly" would definitely be in order.

[Xaser]

DuckReconMajor & Gez said:

GREETINGS, MEATBALL

ARE YOU READY TO FRY?

Once this branch is released, I am seriously making a wad that does this now.

Might replace "meatball" with "bacon" though, for maximum swinefood accuracy.

[hex11]

Piggy needs some stealth skillz if he's going to survive. Maybe permanent partial invisibility (easy enough with dehacked, maybe also possible via class features in the engine code). Maybe he can pick locks too...

[Quasar]

hex11 said:

Piggy needs some stealth skillz if he's going to survive. Maybe permanent partial invisibility (easy enough with dehacked, maybe also possible via class features in the engine code). Maybe he can pick locks too...

Actually at this point I'm wondering if it's not too easy, at least on the lower skill levels.

Projectile-throwing enemies all aim over the pig's head, and thus are no threat at all. Centaurs can be taken out with the gas clouds.

At this point Ettins are actually the greatest threat because they can back you into a corner and mob you, and unlike the other classes the snout-only pig has no means to push enemies back away from him at all until he gets discs of repulsion :P The snout bite attack inflicts virtually no thrust on monsters.

[printz]

Quasar said:

The snout bite attack inflicts virtually no thrust on monsters.

Actually, due to Hexen's rules, it won't thrust.

[_bruce_]

Gez said:

ARE YOU READY TO FRY?

Hahaha

[Use]

Hexen64 deathmatch always eventually boiled down to flying, icon of the defender'd pigs.

[SteelPH]

This is the best idea anyone has ever had about anything.

[Quasar]

Bumping the thread to make the subsequent edit to the first post more obvious - the mod is released.

[GreyGhost]

Quasar said:

Yes, because in fact morphed players can already fly in Hexen.

That I didn't know. Downloading. . .

[Quasar]

I'd love some feedback if anybody has actually played this. My intention was to improve the balance based on such input if found necessary.

[cbronson]

Sorry I can't really give a technical insight, because I never went really far in Hexen (I got stuck in the second world thing and gave up).

But I've played a bit last night, it was fun! Reached only level 3 (as in, the pig's level 3) so far. Playing normally I think it's pretty well balanced (I played in the middle difficulty), there seems to be enough flechettes around, and I really could notice that my bite was getting stronger at every level up. Also, I love the pig's speed!

At one point, I started speedrunning through the level, got surrounded by ten of those bastards and then I fell into a lava pit and literally fried to death. I'm gonna continue tonight when I get home. Hopefully the pig will finally give me the light I needed to finish Hexen!

[Quasar]

cbronson said:

Sorry I can't really give a technical insight, because I never went really far in Hexen (I got stuck in the second world thing and gave up).

But I've played a bit last night, it was fun! Reached only level 3 (as in, the pig's level 3) so far. Playing normally I think it's pretty well balanced (I played in the middle difficulty), there seems to be enough flechettes around, and I really could notice that my bite was getting stronger at every level up. Also, I love the pig's speed!

At one point, I started speedrunning through the level, got surrounded by ten of those bastards and then I fell into a lava pit and literally fried to death. I'm gonna continue tonight when I get home. Hopefully the pig will finally give me the light I needed to finish Hexen!

Cool, I am glad to hear you have enjoyed it so far. My interest will be to see how you may react to the attack spells that the pig gains later. I still feel the "Dragon Breath" might be overly powerful, not per shot so much as because you can just spam it really fast - I might have to limit the attack rate somehow...

Lava is pretty deadly to the pig because he bounces when it injures him, and he ends up hopping along getting burned repeatedly ;) I consider it a character weakness.

Getting cornered is also tough for him until he gets his spells later.

[WhiteMagicRaven]

Did i can run it on GZDoom?

[Gez]

No, since it's a different exe.

[Quasar]

The changes required could probably be converted to a DECORATE, though I am of the personal conviction that it would actually require more effort than it did to implement in native code.

Either way I have no objection if someone wishes to do as such. Just give me credit for the idea and make sure all source code (ACS scripts etc.) are open-source.

[Spleen]

JokeWADs are old, it would be interesting if this starts a trend of joke sourceports instead.

This is amusing =P

[Gez]

Spleen said:

JokeWADs are old, it would be interesting if this starts a trend of joke sourceports instead.

Like that April Fools one which mirrored all maps, so what used to be on the left was now on the right and vice-versa? Heh, it was Chocolate Doom too.

There must be something about the chocolaty approach that compels people to make it do weird stuff.

[Quasar]

I will say that while this is obviously humorous due to its basic nature, it was also intended seriously as a mod and not just a joke, and I did spend a good deal of time tweaking the balance and the new leveling mechanics.

This is something I had the idea for a long time ago when I noticed that the pig was implemented as a player class inside the game engine, and always wanted to see it in action ever since.

I used Chocolate Hexen because it is the simplest, purest port of Hexen to Windows with the highest stability within its compatibility class, and I was already configured to build it courtesy of working on strife-branch.

I am a bit sad that I am getting next to no feedback on it; I have to assume people aren't interested in playing it :/

[DuckReconMajor]

I've played through some of it and I like it. I like the decisions you made with the leveling up as opposed to armor/weapons and whatnot. The only thing was that I'd just bought the Valve pack and was playing that right before you released this so I probably won't be playing through the whole game anytime soon I'm sorry :(

That said the next time I play through Hexen it will probably be as pig, especially since the mage respawn crash bug is still unfixed.

[Quasar]

DuckReconMajor said:

I've played through some of it and I like it. I like the decisions you made with the leveling up as opposed to armor/weapons and whatnot. The only thing was that I'd just bought the Valve pack and was playing that right before you released this so I probably won't be playing through the whole game anytime soon I'm sorry :(

That said the next time I play through Hexen it will probably be as pig, especially since the mage respawn crash bug is still unfixed.

Is that a problem in Chocolate Hexen? First I've heard about it. Any clue what it's about?

[DuckReconMajor]

Here's the report I filed a while back. I've since gone to Windows 7 64-bit and the problem is still happening.

One time I tried debugging the exe in Visual Studio and got this error

Unhandled exception at 0x002cd7e1 in chocolate-hexen.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xaeb0161a.

It happens in both the latest binary version as well as the latest svn built in cygwin.

[wesleyjohnson]

Does Chocolate pigs require having Hexen wad, because I am missing that ?
Is there a substitute Hexen IWAD, that could be downloaded ?
(Also I run Linux, with an old Win98 on the sidecar)

It is middle of summer here, on cold winter nights there is more Doom activity. Keep it visible for a few months, a patch or two around October.

[Quasar]

DuckReconMajor said:

Here's the report I filed a while back. I've since gone to Windows 7 64-bit and the problem is still happening.

One time I tried debugging the exe in Visual Studio and got this error

Unhandled exception at 0x002cd7e1 in chocolate-hexen.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xaeb0161a.

It happens in both the latest binary version as well as the latest svn built in cygwin.

I can't replicate it in debug mode. Do you have to do something special first?