Blasphemer discussion

[june gloom]

Give Blasphemous Experiments a try. It gets hard as nails but it's doable. I would also recommend Chris Lutz' Icebound, which is probably the best Heretic level I've ever played.

[MrFlibble]

3 hours ago, june gloom said:

Give Blasphemous Experiments a try. It gets hard as nails but it's doable. I would also recommend Chris Lutz' Icebound, which is probably the best Heretic level I've ever played.

Hey, thanks! I just gave Blasphemous Experiments a spin, seems to work fine in Heretic128, and it looks very good! I suppose it could go as a shareware episode right away.

[MrFlibble]

I've found a nice water dripping sound that could work as a replacement for AMB3 (the current sound is a bit odd and has some background hissing):

https://opengameart.org/content/ambient-water-drips

 

I mean the very first one, amb_waterdrip_1.flac

 

It's licensed under CC-BY-3.0 though, which I'm not sure if it is a compatible license? Can this be used in Blasphemer?

[Catoptromancy]

Can be a placeholder until someone makes one from scratch.

[MrFlibble]

On 7/2/2023 at 2:46 AM, AntonR said:

I was doing some sounds for the snakes, having fun with metallic noises, and I ended up redoing a bunch of the sprites too, still wip but I think it's coming together

@AntonR, do you plan on finishing the not-Ophidian updates?

 

BTW, back when @raymoohawk started working on Freed∞m sprites, the early version of the Serpentipede replacement looked like this:

Perhaps these could be somehow useful to you?

[AntonR]

Try this, made it today

amb3.zip

[AntonR]

1 hour ago, MrFlibble said:

@AntonR, do you plan on finishing the not-Ophidian updates?
 

yes, but I haven't had a lot of time to, although it might be a fun thing to do while I'm sick. I have Mono right now :/ so I am very idle most of the day

Improved the facing of the head, far less static, along with a new attacking sprite

[Craneo]

4 hours ago, AntonR said:

yes, but I haven't had a lot of time to, although it might be a fun thing to do while I'm sick. I have Mono right now :/ so I am very idle most of the day

Improved the facing of the head, far less static, along with a new attacking sprite

hmm, what if it was less shiny?

 

[june gloom]

I feel a less shiny appearance overall makes it look a lot better. The 90s CGI look really stands out against the rest of the bestiary.

[Craneo]

maybe replace the chest with the one from the old "notundead knight" dark elf... ended up also changing his face here lol, gave it fangs n such, made the expression appear more "angry"

[AntonR]

I was kind of into the idea of them being made of metal, as they are so extremely tough (made sounds along those lines as well) but yes it does look a bit 90s.

[Vita93]

I think a way forward to address the problem of many of the levels being horribly unbalanced is to one-by-one replace them with single levels from other mods which are known to be good and then make incremental adjustments.

[MrFlibble]

@AntonR, get well soon!

[MrFlibble]

When playing in Heretic128, I noticed that Blasphemer is missing some rather important bits like the menu sliders and savegame slot backgrounds, presumably because neither is used in GZDoom and that's what everyone seems to use to play.

 

I quickly threw together their replacements:

Download WAD: <file removed>

 

Update from 2024/07/29: new versions of sliders and save slot available here.

 

The savegame slot art is derived from character powers menu background in Flare: Empyrean Campaign (game data is CC-BY-SA 3.0), and the golden slider is from the same game. The purple slider background is made from the menu background in Widelands (game data is GPL).

 

I'm not sure I'm very happy with the sliders, but they're likely to be palceholders anyway because of the different licenses (?).

 

I also thought that while there are no episode maps in Blasphemer, perhaps some artwork could be used as an intermission screen? It's still better than having the next level's title just overlay the previous level's tally screen:

Again, this is from Flare. I made two screens out of three that are included there, not sure how well they fit Blasphemer's level settings:

Edited July 29 by MrFlibble : removed the obsolete file

[AntonR]

How do those intermission maps work? It would be fun to make custom ones but that sort of requires all the levels and their succession to be set in stone.
Love that work though, very nice and fitting with the menus, the art pieces could be custom made down the line I feel!

[Catoptromancy]

New sounds, menu graphics, a new map. A quick update. Submitted stuff should be in a .wad, will make it much easier to add.

 

Changelog:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer/master/FORK_Changelog.md

 

Quick Update:

blasphem-fork-004.zip

Edited July 15 by Catoptromancy

[Craneo]

14 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

I also thought that while there are no episode maps in Blasphemer, perhaps some artwork could be used as an intermission screen? It's still better than having the next level's title just overlay the previous level's tally screen:

Again, this is from Flare. I made two screens out of three that are included there, not sure how well they fit Blasphemer's level settings:

would be better if they were just per episode, fitting a "general theme" or "mood" for the episodes, Episode 1 is mostly graveyards for example IIRC

[MrFlibble]

I was not entirely happy with the titlepic, in particular because the obviously round pentagram stretches vertically because it was not adjusted to the 4:3 aspect ratio. I tweaked it a bit, and pasted over the E3 skybox. I think the result is quite fine:

I also made rotating skull replacements for the menu from the skull thingy included with @Amuscaria's CC0 Hell-Forged resources. It is already being used for the Doom II boss spawnbox in Freed∞m. It has exactly the number of rotation frames (six) that are needed for the skull animation, and I only scaled it down in Paint.NET.

 

PWAD: blasmain.zip

 

14 hours ago, AntonR said:

How do those intermission maps work? It would be fun to make custom ones but that sort of requires all the levels and their succession to be set in stone.

8 hours ago, Craneo said:

would be better if they were just per episode, fitting a "general theme" or "mood" for the episodes, Episode 1 is mostly graveyards for example

Yes, these are per episode, not per map -- I think custom loading screens for every map are not possible without fiddling with the binary itself (or maybe via some advanced scripting that only some ports support).

 

The episode map is a single 320x200 picture, with the player position markers being shown after each level. I think those are hardcoded in the EXE. It works exactly as in Doom, except the art is completely pre-rendered.

 

The easiest way around is to just put a 320x200 placeholder image until the episodes in Blasphemer are indeed fleshed out thematically. Then perhaps someone could draw some landscape art corresponding to each episode's theme.

 

Today I threw together placeholders in the same way as the title screen, using episode skyboxes (somewhat inspired by the Duke Nukem 3D loading screen):

These are included in the WAD above in case you decide to add them to the project.

[Craneo]

speaking of Hellforged, I wanted to submit Amuscaria's sword and a projectile (also from HF), but this whole license thing makes me artist brainy hurty so...
btw, on the subject of skies I actually made a sky for Episode 3, idk if it will be included, more of a personal prefference thing I guess, made from photos I've taken:

[MrFlibble]

On 7/15/2024 at 7:49 PM, Craneo said:

speaking of Hellforged, I wanted to submit Amuscaria's sword and a projectile (also from HF), but this whole license thing makes me artist brainy hurty so...

All assets in the HF-CC.WAD are licensed under CC0, which is very similar to public domain, AFAIK. This is compatible with most libre projects so you should not worry. The actual license is CC BY-SA, my bad! Kudos to @GeorgePieVG for pointing this out, and apologies for the mistake!

 

However, the rotating skulls that I used for the menu are from the Demon Eclipse art pack (again, kudos to @GeorgePieVG for tracking down that file!) that @Amuscaria has contributed to Freed∞m a while ago.

 

I have to note that there are some derivative textures that are based on those from Doom in that WAD though, but the sprites at least seem fully original.

 

What weapon would you intend to replace with the sword? I'd rather keep it for Zauberer, the current player arsenal in Blasphemer seems pretty complete.

Edited July 18 by MrFlibble : Fixed Hell-Forged art license info

[Craneo]

the staff, personally I feel it's kinda weird in general, specially how it completely changes shape when powered up (it becomes a completely different weapon, which you also lose when it runs out of power), just me tho I guess

[Catoptromancy]

E2M8 might need to be replaced. Rebuilt nodes and fixed eureka warnings and It still crashes vanilla limit removing ports and likely heretic-plus for DOS. Not sure what else is crashing it beside size.

[Craneo]

to me, in Crispy Heretic, it tells me a texture is missing or something while crashing

looking inside the .wad file, WLCRAT02 is indeed missing from the textures def, the patch is in the wad file, it's the small crate wall, funny as I was asking some time ago why there was a small crate flat and no small crate texture for the walls, I'll send a fix on the Discord in a bit
EDIT: yeah that fixes it.

Edited July 15 by Craneo

[MrFlibble]

3 hours ago, Craneo said:

the staff, personally I feel it's kinda weird in general, specially how it completely changes shape when powered up (it becomes a completely different weapon, which you also lose when it runs out of power), just me tho I guess

I don't know, it clearly looks very similar to the unpowered version. After all, there's some magic involved, so it could change the appearance slightly. I'm not a huge fan of the "baltucs" (which is apparently what the weapon was originally called by the author), but they seem to fit much better than a sword wielded by a very muscular man, considering that the main character in Blasphemer seems to be more of a spellcaster than a warrior.

 

On the topic of various backgrounds, I remembered that Falcon's Eye has some pre-rendered scenes for the intro, so I scaled them down and converted them to the Heretic palette. What do you think of those?

I think that at least the stairway one could be used as some kind of intermission screen.

 

NetHack comes with its own license, but I'm not sure if it covers the art in Falcon's Eye though.

[june gloom]

I do like the stairway one as it calls back to old dungeon crawlers. Witchaven II had a whole FMV intermission screen of going down a circular stairway that was honestly the coolest thing about that game.

[Craneo]

Would you guys be ok if the current stone demon statue was replaced with the gargoyle NMN made? it's CC0 so it should be compatible, I just think it looks better, personally, I shrunk it down a bit and tweaked it to fit in the current one's place.

original, for comparison:
 

Spoiler

I have also tweaked the hanging dead body texture:

once again, original for comparison:
 

Spoiler

also submitting NMN's hanged men (also CC0) as new variants for the dead body texture:

Edited July 16 by Craneo

[Protagonist Corvus]

36 minutes ago, Craneo said:

Would you guys be ok if the current stone demon statue was replaced with the gargoyle NMN made? it's CC0 so it should be compatible, I just think it looks better, personally, I shrunk it down a bit and tweaked it to fit in the current one's place.

original, for comparison:
 

  Reveal hidden contents

I have also tweaked the hanging dead body texture:

once again, original for comparison:
 

  Reveal hidden contents

also submitting NMN's hanged men (also CC0) as new variants for the dead body texture:

It looks much better than the original.

[SecularSteve]

23 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

I was not entirely happy with the titlepic, in particular because the obviously round pentagram stretches vertically because it was not adjusted to the 4:3 aspect ratio. I tweaked it a bit, and pasted over the E3 skybox. I think the result is quite fine:

I also made rotating skull replacements for the menu from the skull thingy included with @Amuscaria's CC0 Hell-Forged resources. It is already being used for the Doom II boss spawnbox in Freed∞m. It has exactly the number of rotation frames (six) that are needed for the skull animation, and I only scaled it down in Paint.NET.

 

PWAD: blasmain.zip

 

Yes, these are per episode, not per map -- I think custom loading screens for every map are not possible without fiddling with the binary itself (or maybe via some advanced scripting that only some ports support).

 

The episode map is a single 320x200 picture, with the player position markers being shown after each level. I think those are hardcoded in the EXE. It works exactly as in Doom, except the art is completely pre-rendered.

 

The easiest way around is to just put a 320x200 placeholder image until the episodes in Blasphemer are indeed fleshed out thematically. Then perhaps someone could draw some landscape art corresponding to each episode's theme.

 

Today I threw together placeholders in the same way as the title screen, using episode skyboxes (somewhat inspired by the Duke Nukem 3D loading screen):

These are included in the WAD above in case you decide to add them to the project.

 

If you're open to someone making some new title-screen art, and placeholders, I'd be happy to oblige.

 

That is, if you have nothing against it.

[GeorgePieVG]

On 7/15/2024 at 9:55 PM, MrFlibble said:

All assets in the HF-CC.WAD are licensed under CC0, which is very similar to public domain, AFAIK. This is compatible with most libre projects so you should not worry.

 

I have to note that there are some derivative textures that are based on those from Doom in that WAD though, but the sprites at least seem fully original.

 

What weapon would you intend to replace with the sword? I'd rather keep it for Zauberer, the current player arsenal in Blasphemer seems pretty complete.

The stuff from Hell Forged is actually under the CC BY SA license. It's a libre license, however it has more terms and conditions than the current Blasphemer license, so I'm not sure if Blasphemer can incorporate graphics from there. Maybe it would be better to get the sword from Demon Eclipse? Amuscaria has given permission to use resources from there in Freedoom and Blasphemer.

[GeorgePieVG]

On 7/7/2024 at 9:31 AM, Catoptromancy said:

I still havent figured out pull requests on github, hopefully soon.

Feel free to just take stuff from my PRs that you like and commit it yourself. Since development doesn't stand still, there are probably conflicts with new resources. And even I don't know how to solve them :^)