HYMN: A Heretic Community Project!

A.Gamma said:

While trying to give a more "nature overruns castle" feeling to my map, I noticed that while we have lots of lovely hanging vines, we have no overgrown grass textures (like this).

So, should I go and add similar textures to the pack?

Or is it only me who feels we need them?

I like that idea. While your at it, could you add a white 'sheet ice' texture. There is a white 'sheet ice' flat, but still only a blue 'sheet ice' texture in our pack. This has been bothering me, since every time I see a frozen lake in Heretic i think it was frozen in a blue toilet. :p Ice is white, not blue! I don't even know how they could have made that mistake!

edit: Don't forget to remove decals from the liquid animation textures!

HYMNTEX4

Here is the updated texture pack, besides the grass texture and the corrected liquid animations, I added a couple doors and some extra textures, all taken from cc4 and Baker's Legacy.

Egregor said:

I like that idea. While your at it, could you add a white 'sheet ice' texture. There is a white 'sheet ice' flat, but still only a blue 'sheet ice' texture in our pack. This has been bothering me, since every time I see a frozen lake in Heretic i think it was frozen in a blue toilet. :p Ice is white, not blue! I don't even know how they could have made that mistake!

edit: Don't forget to remove decals from the liquid animation textures!

Heh, I always thought that Heretic's ice was blue just to have a little more color in the game. (and also since lots of 90's games had blue ice).

Also, while I added the white ice textures I figured we will need some snow, so I added a snow flat; but then I thought "One thing I hate about snowy levels are that flats don't look snowy enough". So i grabbed GIMP and made a quick edit (which surprisingly, didn't turned out to be crap).

Should a make a little more edits so we can have better snowy levels? Or am I just going overboard now?

A.Gamma said:

Should a make a little more edits so we can have better snowy levels? Or am I just going overboard now?

More like 'snow-verboard' :p . No, I feel that if there is a real lack of texture (that can't be found in Baker's, Medieval, or otherwise) and you know how to create it, you should. I hope that if this project rounds out well we can use the HYMN texture pack for future installments of the HYMN series. We should break it in though, fix any textures that are having compatibility issues, which we have been doing, and get rid of anything that isn't absolutely necessary. The problem with the Baker and Medieval texture packs are that because there is SO much material that Heretic looses its feel, consistency wavers, and bad textures clutter the palette, slowing down the creative process.

Well, not all of them turned out as great as I expected them
:P
So I will not be updating the texture pack until I can get them right; though if someone really wants to have snowy varieties of some textures just say so.

A.Gamma said:

Also I do not know about the other mappers but I don't even know how to use half of the shiny features Zdoom has to offer. :D

Then I missed something :) Nevermind, thanks for the info and good luck with the project. I am generally eager to see any kind of Heretic project

It's the old 'gameplay matters first, not shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features'.

Shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features don't automatically make something good.

A Vanilla Heretic project may well turn out to be better than a ZDoom, Doomsday etc specific Heretic project.

Vermil said:

It's the old 'gameplay matters first, not shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features'.

Shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features don't automatically make something good.

A Vanilla Heretic project may well turn out to be better than a ZDoom, Doomsday etc specific Heretic project.

Woah, It's true that this project is closer to vanilla than anything, but with that said, I personally am by no means a 'vanilla purist'. I feel that what Zdoom does, and ultimately what Tormentor does is great for the doom engine and the community surrounding it. Frankly, in many ways DECORATE, and other Realm667 extended resources and features Zdoom provides keeps Doom (and Heretic) relevant. There are many valid ways to approach mapping.

Vermil said:

It's the old 'gameplay matters first, not shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features'.

Shiny ZDoom, Doomsday etc features don't automatically make something good.

A Vanilla Heretic project may well turn out to be better than a ZDoom, Doomsday etc specific Heretic project.

Well, of course the shiny Zdoom/Doomsday/Eternity features do not make a good wad, in fact if they're misused they can effectively make it suck big time.

Don't take this the wrong way, I like ZDoom and the other advanced source-ports and what they have to offer, but then what will be the point of joining a ZDoom/Eternity/Doomsday community project if I can't make effective use of it's features? It is a waste of everyones time to launch ZDoom and load a ZDoom map just to see it could have been easily made for vanilla.

I never meant that a port specific project is automatically bad; I just mean that shiny features in general can't mask bad basics.

Neither did I. I tried to actually reinforce what you said about shiny features not being all there's to ZDoom, and then I tried to explain why I won't join HPack.

Sorry to question the maths here, but how did we get to 35 days left? Thought submissions had to be in by 1st April?

Guys! Guys! I've found some conflicting flat and texture names that I somehow missed the other time around. The textures/flats are:

- FLAT508B through FLAT508E.

So, in order to avoid the issues we had before with flats and textures sharing a name I changed flats to:

- FLTWOD1 through FLTWOD4

If you're using any of the changed textures be sure to update your map.

HYMNTEX4a.

February submissions/updates roll call! Two months left. I have been busy with my '5 Rooms of Doom' submission, but now that that is out of the way I am working on items/enemies placement for my HYMN map. Hows everyone else doing?

so far i have scrapped 4 maps, reason: awful gameplay. we'll se what we can do :\

Cacowad said:

so far i have scrapped 4 maps, reason: awful gameplay. we'll se what we can do :\

Can I recommend that you start by creating a few isolated locations: rooms, or courtyards that have buildings within them. Build (or salvage) a few of these locations and THEN work on connecting them, with either simply a doorway, or perhaps a longer hallway. Keep in mind that as long as you haven't placed items within these locations they can be rotated. You will find that you will have much more gameplay/layout flexibility and control that way. Mix and match until the gameplay starts shaping up. Make sure to save a 'pre-connected' file in the case that your not satisfied with your connections. Turn those four scrapped maps into one great map!

Today's progress:
Serpent Riders need doors too.

My HYMN level is in the items/enemies balance phase. It is shaping up nicely. I thought there would be a little more activity here. Can I ask, who is still planning on submitting a map for HYMN?

i literally had no time to do anything, maybe i will finish my entry for blaphemer, since it is way too big for being part of the hymn project. if something change i will pop-up and post something :)

Cacowad said:

i literally had no time to do anything, maybe i will finish my entry for blaphemer, since it is way too big for being part of the hymn project. if something change i will pop-up and post something :)

No worries Cacowad, I've got submission posted. My only concern is that because the enemy count is so high your level is near-impossible to complete. I didn't even come close in any of my 20 attempts.

Egregor said:

who is still planning on submitting a map for HYMN?

Certainly hoping to have mine finished in time. Although lately I have spent a bit too much time playing Path of Exile instead, heh.

Egregor said:

No worries Cacowad, I've got submission posted. My only concern is that because the enemy count is so high your level is near-impossible to complete. I didn't even come close in any of my 20 attempts.

do you took a look at the demo i had placed inside the wad? is called demo01, and run with zdoom 2.6.1 (i think), i made it to give a proof that it can be completed. also difficulty levels are implemented, so if you can't do it in uv you can do it in a lower difficulty :)

doomad: good serpent stuff, your shots look always good.

OMG! I finally have something to show! D:

It's still not finished though, but at least I can prove that I'm actually making something!.

I'll rework my map, before submission.

I just had such a hard time getting the textures to work, once we started switching texture packs.

Since I was too inactive and almost haven't started with my map, I decided to post here some early screenshots. It's pretty basic at the moment, not enough detail, but this will be my base that I will hopefully finish till the deadline. Gotta check that texture pack too, last time I couldn't load it on doombuilder I think.

Made a vanilla compatible, walkable, fake bridge for one of the caves in my map. Need to make the ceiling a little more interesting though.

//EDIT:

On second thought, does it look better with metal supports? Seems to make it stand out a little better and also makes more sense in that a wooden bridge built over lava probably wouldn't last very long before bursting into flames, heh.

@DoomMAD I kind of like it better with wood, but then again, everything looks better with wood!

That seems to be unanimous then, everyone I've asked has said wood. Fire hazards be damned!

Yay More from me! I'm on a mapping spree :D



also @DoomMAD, if Hollywood has teach us something is that if it looks cool, nobody cares about functionality.

20 days left. Argh. Must make more progress and get this done.

//EDIT: Almost progress. Will tidy up that window later.

and suddely all my maps looks flat and orrible. keep it up!