ROP 2015: Finished!

I think you can use Heretic+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom-plus/files/heretic-plus/

is a fork of prboom+ ,to my understanding, that support limit removing heretic wads, i have still to test it doe.

Cacowad said:

I think you can use Heretic+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom-plus/files/heretic-plus/

is a fork of prboom+ ,to my understanding, that support limit removing heretic wads, i have still to test it doe.

Thanks. It's apparently not limit-removing, but only limit-raising, as the textfile states, but it still seems like the best port choice.

EDIT: It needs DosBox.

-------------------------------------------------------
limit                         : old    * k   = new
-------------------------------------------------------
visplanes[MAXVISPLANES]       : 128    * 8   = 1024
drawsegs[MAXDRAWSEGS]         : 256    * 8   = 2048
SAVEGAMESIZE                  : 196608 * 16  = 3145728
activeplats[MAXPLATS]         : 30     * 256 = 7680
vissprites[MAXVISSPRITE]      : 128    * 8   = 1024
linespeciallist[MAXLINEANIMS] : 64     * 256 = 16384
openings[MAXOPENINGS]         : 16384  * 4   = 65536
-------------------------------------------------------

Cacowad said:

is a fork of prboom+ ,to my understanding

Not at all!

It's a hack of the original vanilla Heretic exe, where the size of the static limits has been increased by simply hex-editing a higher value (what's not simple is finding where these values are!).

The only relationship it has with PrBoom+ is that there's the same person behind both. But it's definitely not based on PrBoom+ in any way.

A map for this:





http://www.mediafire.com/download/1yg32uxtc6uubn4/The_Magistrate's_Tomb.wad

Have fun!

Gez: Eh, i noticed rigth after opening it... i still have to understand how to make pwads work with it. since i wasn't around in the dos era i do not know wich tools i have to use (also i didn't find any way to rebind keys, am i really stuck with the mouse here?).

General Rainbow Bacon said:

A map for this:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/1yg32uxtc6uubn4/The_Magistrate's_Tomb.wad

Have fun!

Well, it crashed Heretic+ upon loading the map (=not on game startup, and stock maps loaded fine).

EDIT: It might not be your fault. Heretic+ refuses to launch with ROPTEX3a.wad at all.

EDIT2: You're right, I didn't launch it with the textures initially. My fault. It doesn't work either way, because of the texture pack itself. It crashes the port.

Shit, I dunno what to do about that.

E: Wait, did you load the texture pack? I didn't add the textures.

Well, we can't use that port then. Anyway, I guess my map isn't the problem. Use zdoom for now.

E3: If we can't get the textures to load in that port, we might as well screw the port and just make this a full limit removing megawad. No sense in using limitations if we're not actually gonna be limited right?

Alright, so I'm asking again: What is the source port that we should test our maps with?

Egregor said:

Rules
-Vanilla Heretic, limit removing (not Heretic in Hexen format).

Again: It's obviously neither ZDoom, nor Chocolate Heretic.

Why are we making this difficult? Let's just use zdoom for this thing.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Category:Heretic_ports

(Thanks, Gez, for this link.)

GRB, I've played your map in ZDoom for now. I think that you've done a good job, the map was very classic-Heretic-like, some of the spacious areas were actually nice, other areas were just narrow and cramped. I've been slightly lost in the start area, until I've found the spiral staircase up. The map truly caught my interest with the crusher. I didn't entirely like it, though, because it was so sudden and unexpected that it killed me. The entire room was also rather cramped and unappealing to look at, but at least I thought: Well, it's not going to be that trivial, after all. Still, the crusher gimmick could have been done better.

The water and lava flooded caves looked good. I didn't like how there was a piece of non-damaging lava in the "secret" on the eastern side with Morph Ovum in it - there could have been at least some boulders to step on to avoid damage, but not safe lava liquid. Areas around the yellow door were all uncomfortably cramped, the darkness there was annoying, on the other hand it helped to make the monsters more threatening, but still, a net of narrow corridors is nothing good in my view. The very end of the map was okay, the Lich row worked as it was supposed to, to keep the player challenged a little more, for a reasonable time.

Yeah, still some things I'm gonna fix like that lava pit. About the cramped areas, they're staying. How many tombs do you know of that are spacious? I did have a torch in the map before, but noticed that it neutered the ending where you walk into darkness so I got rid of it.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it. I'll fix those small things. I think my map would be good for a mid episode 2 map.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

How many tombs do you know of that are spacious?

It just looks very unprofessional when all your tombs are 64 units wide and 128 units tall or higher (the width matters more than the height). Plus you know, comfortable playability and stuff.

Well, the WHOLE tomb isn't like that, really just that section, but I might be able to open it up A LITTLE.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

A map for this

Thanks GRB! This is a fantastic Heretic map. Really digging the classic+ vibe. I feel Heretic really benefits from the crowd management slaughter and speed running styles that you incorporate in here. It creates game play pressure that Heretic sorely lacks. Plus there are some really clever layout and trap ideas in here. I feel this level really only needs some minor finishing work done before its solid.

In regards to the compatibility: ZDoom is the recommended port of use. With that said, I will also attempt to make this project compatible with other limit removing Heretic ports. Examples: Doom Legacy, Doomsday, GZDoom, Skulltag, Vavoom, and Zandronum. For this reason I chose to shy away from ZDoom's 'Heretic in Hexen Format', but upon reviewing them I believe all these ports support that format, so I may as well remove it. Not sure about Heretic+, but if we do change the format limitation that port may get left out.

Doom Wiki - Heretic Ports
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Category:Heretic_ports

Thanks Egregor! I still have a few things to fix in the map, but I'm glad you like it so much. I'll make another.

E: Btw, I speedmapped that in about 4 hrs.

E2: Can we bring back the brown pillars? The trees in the first indoor room don't really work. Or make those trees a pillar type object instead. I think there are enough trees, Also, why did you get rid of the stalagmites?

Probably because the trees had to replace something.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

E2: Can we bring back the brown pillars? The trees in the first indoor room don't really work. Or make those trees a pillar type object instead. I think there are enough trees, Also, why did you get rid of the stalagmites?

In the spirit of keeping the project limit removing vanilla compatible I didn't include any ZDoom Decorations. Instead, to include tree sprites I found a work around to replace the 'less necessary' obstacles with these tree sprites. Things like brown pillars and floor stalagmites can also be created with sectors, where as a stand alone tree can not (unless your into that minecraft BS).

If the trees prove to be unpopular they can go, but I feel a popular complaint about Heretic is its overall lack of tree sprites.

Well okay, but since we ARE using zdoom, do we really want to keep this vanilla at all? We really don't have enough Heretic maps and more people might join up if all limits are thrown to the wind.

Progress.

http://i.imgur.com/MM3mX1C.png

Map (not including Items/Weapons/Monsters) near half done.

Egregor said:

If the trees prove to be unpopular they can go, but I feel a popular complaint about Heretic is its overall lack of tree sprites.

The trees are good, but the brown pillars too. I can totally live without floor stalagmites, though.

EDIT: Small pillar (SMPLA0) is a more omitable object than the brown pillar, IMO.

scifista42 said:

The trees are good, but the brown pillars too. I can totally live without floor stalagmites, though.

Needs more jars/pots.

Doomsday can probably read the ZDoom Heretic in HeXen map format (i.e load the map), but it doesn't support the line specials etc etc.

I don't believe Doom Legacy supports any of the ZDoom map formats, but the last time I used that port, Legacy's Heretic support wasn't quite complete?

I also don't think Doom Legacy has support for new mobjs (note, I didn't say replacements)?

I've just found out what the problem was with Heretic+. It was obviously lack of custom sprite support, without merging all Heretic's IWAD sprites with ROPTEX. No wonder, that's how vanilla Doom works too. Unfortunately, Heretic+ doesn't support -merge command, so that the merging would have to be done either manually in SLADE3, or using DEUSF.EXE, but I'm not sure whether it's compatible with Heretic. Anyway, I've just removed the custom sprites from ROPTEX, loaded Heretic+ with -file TMTomb.wad ROPTEX3a.wad, and it worked alright.

Egregor said:

In regards to the compatibility: ZDoom is the recommended port of use. With that said, I will also attempt to make this project compatible with other limit removing Heretic ports. Examples: Doom Legacy, Doomsday, GZDoom, Skulltag, Vavoom, and Zandronum. For this reason I chose to shy away from ZDoom's 'Heretic in Hexen Format', but upon reviewing them I believe all these ports support that format, so I may as well remove it. Not sure about Heretic+, but if we do change the format limitation that port may get left out.

Like Gez was saying, Heretic+ is not actually a source port, but rather what you get when you take the vanilla binary and increase the hardcoded limits by a large factor. You'll never get ZDoom or Boom or other source port features from it. But these executables (Doom+ and Heretic+) pretty much represent the baseline for the term "limit-removing", because that's what they do and all that they do. So if you choose to leave them behind for the sake of convenience, then it's better to not list your project as a "limit-removing" PWAD, because some folks will try to use Heretic+ and get confused when it doesn't work. At the very least be clear in the TXT file about exactly which ports are supported and specify that Heretic+ isn't one of them. Or you could say "advanced ports that support ZDoom features X, Y, Z..."

@scifista42 : in theory, deutex/deusf work exactly the same for Heretic, Hexen, and even Strife as they do for Doom. From deutex manual:

DeuTex is a wad composer for Doom, Heretic, Hexen and
Strife. It can be used to extract the lumps of a wad and
save them as individual files or the reverse, and much
more.

With Chocolate Heretic (and forks that bump up limits) you can even use the built-in -merge argument instead...

Made another quick map. A gimmick map this time. Maybe could be used as a secret map.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/rz2eorr08yt7cfl/Systemshutdown.wad

Yeah yeah texture errors, blah blah blah

Although it's been said before, I think it should be re-emphasized that Heretic+ is only limit-raising, not limit-removing. This for instance will still kick it into a limit crash. If you use Heretic+, you still have to be watchful for limits, just not as watchful.

I don't mind if this is the baseline (I'd honestly prefer straight vanilla, really) but it should be understood that that's what it is.

I think my map might be considered limit removing by the time it's done.

ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Although it's been said before, I think it should be re-emphasized that Heretic+ is only limit-raising, not limit-removing.

Technically even more advanced ports are also limit-removing, because you'll eventually run out of heap space... But yeah it's more of a problem with Vanilla+, it's just that those limits are seldom reached.

Okay, so we have 3 (really 2 and a half) options:

I. Go Heretic+ compatible, map for vanilla with an extended limit, remove the custom tree sprites, leaving only custom textures/flats and be on our merry way.

II. Go for general advanced ports compatible, maps will still have to be in Heretic format, but tree sprites will work as replacements for obstacles.

A: Move the tree from brown pillar to grey statue so brown pillar can be used. All three trees remain.

B: Remove one of the small green trees, and have both remaining trees (one brown, one green) replacing both floor stalagmites.

III. Go 'ZDoom supported' ports compatible, make maps compatible with 'Heretic in Hexen' format, and make tree sprites part of Decorate. At this point it is possible to add like 50 other decorations as well. (I don't really want to do this because at this point ROP really would be quite similar to HPack!)

Right now I am leaning toward putting the trees on the chopping block and going Heretic+, but I would like to get some feedback before coming to a decision.