MrFlibble

I reworked the save/load slot a bit, I think this one is much better: fslot.zip

I was not very happy with how the save slot and the menu sliders came out, and besides they were based on art with different licenses, so I completely remade them using native stuff from Blasphemer plus Freed∞m skull keys for the slider indicator: slider.zip I suppose they're now much more fitting the general menu design of the game. The skulls on the sides come from a wall/door texture (WALL59). @Catoptromancy, somehow I'm unable to download stuff from geocities.ws anymore. I would not be suggesting to push these intermittent releases to GitHub at this point, but any chance someone could re-upload the file to another file hosting.

There's something very cute about this picture.

I'd even argue that AvP2 is one of the better plot-driven FPS games I've played. Not Primal Hunt though, that was a waste of time. IIRC, the original AvP came out in 1999, and the Gold Edition is from 2000. Which arguably has better FMV cutscenes, although performed by the devs and not the professional actors like in the original release. The game is top notch when it comes to creating a scary and oppressive atmosphere, it's not tied by storytelling that much and there's a charm in that too. Also I loved lots of bonus content (you can unlock extra missions for each character, doubling the total number of them, although the maps are reused from the other species' campaigns), and there are those unlockable game modes which are pretty neat as well. Also, I quite enjoyed the skirmish mode where you're swarmed with endless waves of aliens, they were more manageable on some maps than on others. There was one conceptually cool map where you need to rush to a bunker that literally looks like a Terran Bunker from StarCraft, and once you're in, aliens start pouring from all sides, they break though the ceiling and all that.

Back in the early-mid 2000s when I was a student, I played a lot of Will Rock (2003). I was not familiar with Serious Sam then, because frankly, I did not play a lot of games at all, and most of my FPS games were mid-90s stuff like Duke Nukem 3D. I was not eager to check out something newer because I had this aversion of polygonal models for enemies. Will Rock changed that. I had this demo that came on a magazine coverdisk, fired it up because I did not have much else new to try, and got hooked. Maybe it's the Ancient Grome setting, because I liked Greek myths and stuff since I was a child. Or the character animations that were really good for the time. Either way, I breezed through the demo and craved more, and obtained the full version at the first opportunity. Played it through first on medium, then on hard, and then I had another playthrough some years later when I was finishing my thesis. It's a shame this game is not available for purchase nowadays. It's a lot more than just a Serious Sam clone in a Greek/Roman setting. Although that alone makes it quite worthwhile, since the scenery was often created with references to actual historical sites. It has a very decent arsenal and monster roster, varied settings and quite good pacing, balancing exploration and combat. It's not the kind of game where you will meticulously hunt for secret areas, everything is fairly straightforward, but the scenery is very nice, the music soothing, and the combat encounters quite fun.

Corridor 7 was not shareware (none of the Capstone games were, these were purely commercial, box-on-the-shelf titles), but it has several (I think three) demo versions one level each, two of them being pre-release and having certain differences from the finished game. Indeed, how could I have forgotten that one! Also there's Unsung, which I think is partially based on TW code, and features music by Bjorn Lynne.

Definitely check out The Orb of Dilaaria.

I'm not sure what your stance is on public domain assets. Suppose someone takes a public domain/CC0 (or any other CC that is not NC, for that matter) sound effect and either uses it directly or as a base to replace a sound that is not exactly suitable, but was made specifically for the project, will you consider this some kind of an undesirable contribution? I mean, not everyone is able to record good quality sounds on their own (for example, one will probably need a good mic for that). For example, some of the current (not @AntonR's) monster sounds seem to be very similar to one another, being more or less generic moans and growls, which is in a rather stark contrast with Heretic where each monster has a distinguishable idle sound that allows players to easily determine which monsters they are facing, even when those are not in sight. I would argue that any replacements that make the sounds more different (but still fitting the monsters' visual design) should be welcome, regardless of whether they were created from scratch or derived from existing sources with suitable licenses. It's cool that there are contributors who have the skill, equipment and ability to produce completely new sound effects from scratch, but I'm finding it a bit of a very strict demand to require unique sound effects produced for the project, especially considering that Doom, Heretic and many other games of the era took most of their sound effects from commercial stock sound packs. IIRC, native support for MIDI music was added to the DMX sound system at some point, but I'm not sure if this applies to Heretic. It's no problem either way, because there's a MIDI to MUS converter available (created by id, AFAIK), which works well in DOSBox: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/sound_edit/midi2mus

To tell the truth, there has been Zauberer discussion in this thread in the past; but indeed there's a separate Zauberer topic too. I fully agree that at this point, a good chunk of Zauberer assets could be just made from Blasphemer placeholders, and there is nothing wrong with it IMO. On a separate note, @raymoohawk did post some textures in this topic that are not included in the Freed∞m attic, intended either for Blasphemer or Zauberer: I had to use the Wayback Machine to recover them, thankfully all or most of the images have been preserved. I believe that all of these were made from scratch. It could be a long-term goal to be kept in mind. I believe that a major success for the project would be if generally more mappers were motivated to produce quality levels specifically for Blasphemer on a consistent basis. Blasphemous Experiments is a neat mapset, as far as I can tell, but I'm afraid the difficulty is a little bit too high for the first episode, and it can very well overwhelm new players (and personally I'm not a fan of fighting huge crowds of monsters either, but that's just me). I suppose it could go as the fourth episode? It seems like a very polished E1 mapset that showcases interesting locations and compelling gameplay could be a nice demonstration for the project (yes, I'm quite on the idea of making a shareware IWAD release).

Hey, back in the late 90s and early 2000s I also tinkered with making maps (and even campaigns) for StarCraft and then some for Warcraft III (albeit with much less passion, and less output). I even bought a cheap mic sometime around 1999 to record my own teenager voice for a StarCraft campaign, but with the limited storage capacity of my PC back then I had to drop that idea. (I did record a few dialogues, they sound ridiculous, honest :)) Recently, videos started popping up in my YouTube suggestions from a guy who plays StarCraft and sometimes StarCraft II custom campaigns with newly supplied AI voice-overs (made with Elevenlabs or whatever that's called), and hey, they're pretty fine! At least, for non-commercial projects like that. Of course, I will always remember The Antioch Chronicles as probably the best custom campaign for SC, complete with awesome voice acting by the creators themselves, but many mappers just don't have the time, skill or equipment to do something of this kind, and having voices just expands the experience a bit.

Personally I think there should be nothing wrong with having some extra decorations that only work in ports that support such enhancements -- provided that the base game is still accessible to users of other ports too. In fact, the project could have several IWADs with different campaigns, or at least different port-specific versions, and indeed a version with various enhancements on top of the base game could be closer to the coveted "its own thing" discussed above. On the other hand, a DOS-compatible version could be also useful, if only because one could play it in the browser (like this), thus potentially bringing the project to a wider audience. At any rate, I think it is a good idea to expand the texture set, much like Freed∞m does, and actively use the new textures in maps.

Thankies!!! ^_^

It is true that different design can do wonders in changing the look & feel of a game. Some curious mapping tricks can also do a lot to make it more unique. And I'm totally for these things. However, I just wanted to point out that such changes alone will not suffice to make the project more like a completely new game -- especially if PWAD compatibility is still a goal. Potentially breaking PWAD compatibility, if only in a handful of cases (but I'm not sure if caves and caverns are all that rare in Heretic maps, especially since the number of available themes is rather limited, as you have pointed out), for the sake of an extra decoration that will likely not be used in every map anyway does not seem like a particularly reasonable tradeoff to me. It is really a pity that the vanilla engine does not allow to add new decorations, but I suppose that GZDoom should? Maybe add these trees and possibly other extras to the IWAD as new decorations that can only be used in source ports which support this feature? That way you would not be limited to just one tree and a broken trunk (not very good for creating a convincing group of more than two trees), but also use other trees like those from @Nmn's CC0 decorations (for example). Ideally, it would be nice to be able to put GZDoom-specific decorations in a map and still be able to use it in vanilla/limit-removing ports, with these extra additions just not showing up. But that is likely not possible (?), or perhaps you could do that as some sort of maphacks? I think EDuke32 allows this kind of stuff, although I'm not sure on details, but external alterations of maps seem possible in that engine. Thank you for the clarification! Concerning the source images, did you try to use stuff with a particular license and/or public domain, or anything that you felt suited your needs, regardless of licenses?

Apologies for the bump, but is this made from scratch?

I'll be very honest with you, I don't like the idea of replacing stalagmites with trees that much (as I've already mentioned in my reply to your PR). It will end up with dead trees somehow having grown inside lava caverns in at least some of the custom levels. In fact, this will be the case in the very first level in the aforementioned Blasphemous Experiments, a level set that has been created specifically for it: Of course, one might argue that PWAD compatibility is of secondary concern, but you'll have to agree as well that the current scope of the project does not really allow it to become a truly "standalone game", because it still uses all of Heretic's weapons, monsters and items, even if they appear and sound differently

I was primarily concerned that your gargoyle seems to be wider and taller, possibly resulting in a clipped sprite in some PWADS (?). I'm all for reimagining decorations as something else, within certain limits. Perhaps you could make a version with the wings not spread, to reduce height and width? On another note, I was just browsing the Heretic/HeXen resource thread, and it looks like this post by @DooMAD appears to be about textures intended for Blasphemer (?): https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/1883159 UPD: A newer version of the pack is on the next page: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/1891140 Looks like most of the images these are based on were sourced by Googling, with exact provenance unclear, making them unsuitable for the base project, sadly. There are also some from-scratch textures by @ETTiNGRiNDER here. Not sure if those could be useful somehow? (again, maybe for Zauberer?)

I actually like the pixel art mountains, but oh well. BTW, anyone else think that the fonts could be replaced with something more readable? I wanted to suggest the retired menu font from LibreQuake, but it has upper- and lowercase letters like Doom, unlike Heretic. Speaking of the gargoyle, I was trying to remember what the actual Heretic sprite looked like, and apparently it is not a gargoyle at all, but some kind of small pillar (which I guess what SMPL stands for): The simplest solution, if only a placeholder, would be to reuse a similar pillar from Freed∞m, by @Cascade (IIRC). I just put together a very quick palswap/recolour (and reduced its height by 3 pixels to match the dimensions of the original thing): The gargoyle would be a cool (and much needed) addition to Zauberer though.

I really have no more say in this than anyone else. I just wanted to correct the aspect ratio of the logo on the title screen, and added a background from a skybox for the lack of any artistic skills. Would be nice to have some nice title screen art instead, so if you're willing to give it a try, please go ahead! The old armour looks kinda cool, but it's for a knight or something, while the protagonist here is more of mage or warlock (?). I was going to suggest a change as well, and I would actually argue that a helmet perhaps would be a better choice for the armour pickup appearance than a cuirass or other kind of body suit. (I also don't think that the original Heretic's shield was a good choice, but at least its appearance telegraphed the notion of "armour" well).

The new gargoyle looks good, but to be very honest, I appreciate the original one as well, if only because it was created specifically for Blasphemer (AFAIK). Aww, yes, you're right! Somehow I misremembered the license details -- sorry! I'll fix that in my previous post ASAP so as not to spread false information further. Thank you for the link to the file! I was recently trying to locate @Amuscaria's archive which was donated to Freed∞m, but only found this topic with the dead link, and an older Demon Eclipse package that contains different versions of many art, including weapons. Anyway, the rotating skulls that I used for the Blasphemer menu animation are in the new DE package so they should be usable for the project anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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:

@AntonR, get well soon!

@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?