Hexen : Curse of the demon lord. (A sequel)

God I hope you're still working on this. A sequel to Hexen, as I'm working on a prequel to Heretic. :P

I'm looking forward to this. Kristus maps and Hexen maps are two of my favourite things.

Hopefully they'll mix. ;)

I feel like this is the first time anyone has really, truly, mapped for Hexen. Even the official levels were just somebody's practice maps that got released to the public. Now, someone is finally tapping into Hexen's potential, and I'm going to get to play it for real.

So, this project has kind of stagnated for the better part of this year. I've been fiddling with it a bit here and there, but no real work has been done since sometime this last spring.

Though I have started to pick it up again. I've made some progress on Map03 which is turning out to be my biggest map ever. In terms of sidedefs used anyways. I'm afraid I don't hjave a good plan lain out for it. But since it has gone over the limit of what most ports can handle I've cut it in two and I'm connecting them using a hub. So it'll play like a single map.

Still, I don't think the project will be playable on HexenP in the end though.

But here's some good news. I uploaded some screenshots for you to look at. I hope you all enjoy. They're a small assortment of development shots I've made while working on this. Most of them are of areas made last spring.

http://www.doglike.org/temp/Screenshot_Hexen_20110218_191940.png
http://www.doglike.org/temp/Screenshot_Hexen_20110218_140505.png
http://www.doglike.org/temp/Screenshot_Hexen_20111024_212947.png
http://www.doglike.org/temp/Screenshot_Hexen_20111024_213850.png

This looks absolutely fantastic, the last shot especially.

The paletted fog in shots 2 and 3 looks a bit icky to me, but I'm hard to please where fog is concerned :p

Well, that should be a non issue since there will also be support for GZDoom and Doomsday. Where the fog is true color.

Awesome shots, great to see your still picking away at this. :)

Creaphis said:

I feel like this is the first time anyone has really, truly, mapped for Hexen. Even the official levels were just somebody's practice maps that got released to the public. Now, someone is finally tapping into Hexen's potential, and I'm going to get to play it for real.

One catch: he's not mapping for Hexen, but rather a couple advanced ports. That is a rather significant difference, and PWADs that don't run in hexen.exe cannot be fairly compared to those that do. The engines simply don't have the same level of potential.

Personally, I don't see anything that interesting in the first three shots.

The position of the player in first one makes the maulotaur statues appear to be different sizes. The new texture looks out of place.

The second shot doesn't show anything particularly interesting, though it looks pretty attractive.

The third shot doesn't look particularly nice; the arch textures look much more detailed than anything else in the shot. They make the whole shot look underdetailed (as I'm sure you know, a consistent level of detail is in many cases more important than ammount of detail). I'd also say that those pillars don't look thick enough against the bottoms of the arches.

Though obviously not every area can be a set piece like the forth shot looks like it might be.

Well, that's true. But the only advancements used is the increased limitations of the original. There was originally at least going to be Hexenp support (which is vanilla, just with hacked removal of visual limits). But currently I am not feeling up to the task of keeping the maps below the blockmaplimit imposed by keeping that goal.

Though to be frank, that is mostly because the maps end up running so slow with HexenP in Dosbox anyway. It was an issue with slower machines in Curse of D'sparil on some maps. But it's a lot more evident here where it even slows down my old desktop. (Not sure about my upgraded desktop though)

Anyway. The gain of keeping that goal is currently not proportional to the work required to make it happen.

I really like it! The fog in screenshot 3 was custom made? It seems to have a light blue tint.

Vermil said:

The position of the player in first one makes the maulotaur statues appear to be different sizes.

That's an odd criticism if I ever saw one. Don't worry, you can move around in the map when you actually play it. :p

Vermil said:

The new texture looks out of place.

Which one of them, there are several. I'm just being silly. I know which one you are referring to.

Vermil said:

The second and third shots don't show anything particuarly interesting. Though obviously not every area can look like the forth shot.

Well, I don't personally agree. But I didn't pick shots that all picked out the most smashing areas. But I instead tried to show shots that was representative of the project as a whole. I did this for mostly one simple reason, because it's nice to keep a few surprices for when you actually play the project. To be honest, I wasn't even sure if I should show that one last shot at the end. But I did, because I am that kind of guy I suppose. ... :p

printz said:

I really like it! The fog in screenshot 3 was custom made? It seems to have a light blue tint.

Yeah, made that with XWE. :)

Couldn't come up with another word besides Curse? :) (joking)

In all seriousness, this is looking excellent! Your architecture is impressive as always, and it'll be exciting to see what ideas you'll come up with using Hexen's bigger bag of tricks.

Oh wow, everything in this looks absolutely amazing!

I've always loved heretic/hexen styled gameplay and feel, and you've added so much more to it.

I can't wait for the finished results.

kristus said:

Which one of them, there are several. I'm just being silly. I know which one you are referring to.

Isn't that a naked ancient basrelief? Won't some people get alarmed over it?

I don't care what people who get alarmed over naked people think about anything. :p

They should just be glad I didn't include some of the more homoerotic art of the era. ;) As I am sure those same people are homophobic as well, I'm sure it would disturb them greatly.

Is there any naked woman art from that era as well? Would be nice to those engraved in stone too. But I guess I'm biased because I find women more aesthetically pleasing than men. :P

Also, here's an artwork that you could use; if I ever undertook a Heretic map again I'd try find a way to include this picture.
http://s232.photobucket.com/albums/ee101/NecroMolester/?action=view¤t=2wd58iu.jpg

Creaphis said:

I feel like this is the first time anyone has really, truly, mapped for Hexen. Even the official levels were just somebody's practice maps that got released to the public. Now, someone is finally tapping into Hexen's potential, and I'm going to get to play it for real.

I thought the expansion was the practice maps, I didn't think it was the main game.

You can browse Hexen Beta resources, you will find some new graphic element that never seen before.
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=28369
Awesome Project

DeathevokatioN said:

Is there any naked woman art from that era as well? Would be nice to those engraved in stone too. But I guess I'm biased because I find women more aesthetically pleasing than men. :P

Also, here's an artwork that you could use; if I ever undertook a Heretic map again I'd try find a way to include this picture.
http://s232.photobucket.com/albums/ee101/NecroMolester/?action=view¤t=2wd58iu.jpg

well,, I haven't used just any old resourse for this. There are special reasons for featuring that.

The Herisarch whose castle it is, is a flasher?

Well, it seems the world of the Serpent Riders has alot of demons in bathrobes.

Bad attempt at being funny I know.

Always great to see some progress. :)




@Vermil: o_O

Update:
A few days ago I put up a short video of Map03 and posted about that in the Doom video thread in the general forums.
You can see that here.

I put up a promo picture at the top of the thread.

I'm also currently uploading a video of me making the base for that promo image. But my upload is slow so I'll post that when it gets up.

Here's the video of the modeling process. Playing at 4x speed iirc.

The Heretic episode you did is a masterpiece, This will be an insta download for me.

Map03 video looks great.

I see you play the same way I do - keep axing the walk-a-lot's even when have their shields up :P

Mudbox video was also interesting. Looks like the program uses brushes similar to Photoshop's "liquify" filter? I may have to give it a try.

That Map03 video looks amazing...

...I really need to play Hexen one of these days. :P

It's coming together well. :)