Difference between .deh and .bex

What is the difference between .deh and .bex? Are they both dehacked patches with a different file extension or are they actually incompatible?

Can Zdoom handle both(assuming they're different things)?

BEX means the Boom extensions to DeHackEd, therefore BEX is a superset of DEH, meaning it can do everything DEH can and more. ZDoom supports both.

Bloodshedder is correct. It is worth pointing out that DEH files can be totally generated by the dehacked program.

The Boom EXtentions were added for the source port BOOM. These extentions allow a number of things that were not possible with the original deh files or provide alternative (often more flexible) ways of doing things. They literally extend the funtionality of a dehacked style patch, and were specific to BOOM, but now other ports support them and may have also added their own options (eg Zdoom has added a lot - perhaps they should be put in zex files :-))

If you start adding BEX options to your DEH file, you do it in a text editor - manually adding your entries. These entries were devised after developement work on dehacked had stopped, and so adding them makes the file incompatible with the original dehacked program. As a minimum, dehacked will complain about errors in your file, and will remove the extra entries when you save.

Using the BEX extention in your file name is merely a convention to indicate that the file has some bex style entries in it. Both DEH and BEX files are text files. If the author has followed the convention, a deh file should contain only infomation that can be generated and read by the dehacked program. A BEX file may contain information generated by dehacked, but will also have bex specific information added using a text editor.

Thanks guys.