Hero Quest wad for Hexen

[Ixnatifual]

I've also had this idea, but (mostly) did nothing with it. Had a lot of fun playing that game back in the day.

[Ethril]

It's almost as if you enter into a boardgame that slowly gets altered by the world of an FPS that is spilling into it.

asdsfklsdjgl; I *LOVE* this concept.

[peewee_RotA]

I've been playing the boardgame recently and there's a quick note about this wad that is funny enough.

In the board game, every door basically exists as a barrier between yourself and monsters. Most of the time opening a door just shows more monsters. This door mechanic is important. Doors can never be closed and monsters can never open them. This means that monsters won't escape through closed doors when outnumbered and players can't try to block monsters in while closing doors. Beyond simple door combat, this is actually a very important mechanic of the game so that players are presented with a risk/reward and guess work on path finding. You'll find this best in Legacy of the Orc Warlord map. You are disarmed, so going the wrong way is a death sentence!

So with all that said, you can cast fireballs, summon a genie, slaughter a room, turn over every book and bottle looking for treasure, and send monsters screaming to their doom... and the monsters in the next room will never hear it. Since this is so important to the gameplay, I had to change just about every single monster in the game to deaf so that fighting in the next room doesn't trigger them. If they were not set to deaf, they would always just pile up at the door waiting for the player to change rooms, which broke the normal monster placement.

So while playing the boardgame last week this was brought up by one of the players, which led to a good laugh and this funny anecdote.

[Gez]

Well, I can counter with some trivia of my own: there are no such things as deaf monsters.


Back before the source code was released, and in the absence of id's official editing tools, the first editors were based on analyzing data and looking at what various values seemed to produce. One flag, it was found, made it so that monsters didn't seem to react to weapon sounds. The "deaf" flag was born. Except it wasn't actually the deaf flag. As shown when the source code was released, it really was the ambush flag.

Monsters aren't deaf. They hear you perfectly. However, they are lying in ambush and choose not to react until they get line of sight with you. There is one big change between a normal monster that hasn't heard you and an ambush monster that has heard you: the normal but unawakened monster can only see in front of it (the zombiemen turning their back to you at the start of Doom II's MAP01 and MAP02 are a good example of that), but the ambush monster that has been awakened has 360° vision. Take Doom II's MAP01, and change the zombiemen to have the ambush (or "deaf" if your editor calls it like that) flag. Start a game: they don't see you. Go grab the chainsaw on the balcony, and make some noise with it over there. The zombiemen still do not react. Go back to the start room: now they see you and attack, even though they were still turning their back to you.

The proper way to make it so that monsters do not hear you is to use sound blocking lines, but there is a subtlety here too: sound will still propagate through one sound-blocking line. It'll only be stopped by the second sound blocking line. Doom II's MAP01 is still a good place to study how it works. When you shoot or saw the zombies in the starting room, it'll warn the zombies and imps in the first part of the corridor, but not those in the second part, nor those in the cavern room's secret cell.

[peewee_RotA]

Interesting.

Makes sense. I definitely noticed that the monsters would agro even with their backs facing (which is how the boardgame works), but I figured that all monsters work that way. Hexen has no element of stealth to it... to the point that it was OVER emphasized in Hexen 2.

[peewee_RotA]

I think I mentioned in an earlier reply that I play Hero Quest every week. We finally got up to Bastion of Chaos. Anyway, there was a big design challenge in this map pack, and I had to be inventive to try to keep it alive.

In Hero Quest, healing is hard to come by. You can find potions, but at great risk already. Every time that you open a door, you are at risk of losing some of those precious body points. Once you run low, you stop opening new rooms. Since you don't gain levels, and there is no XP, every monster you fight is a bad thing.

Fortunately Hexen has a similar mechanic. Unless you are using weapon 1, every monster is going to drain your mana. So I was able to keep a similar type of play style going by being relatively stingy with mana. Most levels don't have enough to complete the level with only weapons 2, 3 and 4. Some of them you can only do this by searching for treasure enough times to find more mana. Although most hexen players are practiced enough to avoid the health lost in most fights, the mana loss is too great.

This leads to something else interesting. In Hero Quest, in order to mitigate this, you try to stay beefed up until you find the boss. After you find and kill the boss, blasting out spells and being reckless is ok. You can always run away since you've completed the objective. The wizard will usually save his attack spells (fire of wrath, ball of flame, and genie for this fight). But once that boss is dead, those spells fly at anything with a pulse.

You get this with mana in the map pack too. It's not immediately obvious, but the bosses are going to drain a lot of mana. Many of them will use it up completely and get you scrambling. I placed kraters of might in strategic places for this reason. So that there are a few more options when scrounging.



While I'm at this, I wanted to share an interesting strategy that I learned, and purposefully made possible in this pack. It's hard to do this in Hexen's main quest to any effect, but it totally works in the HQ pack. The closer you are to 20 AC, the less damage things do. And at 20 AC, the next attack will do 0 damage. So as a fighter, if you have 14+ armor and use 1 dragonskin bracers, or 8+ and use 2, the next hit will be completely ignored. For example, when I do a playthrough on difficulty 5 on the Fire Mage as a fighter, bracers are my first go to item. I'll try to repulse all of his shots, but it gives me a freebie on his next hit. Then I hide and use another bracer.

The strategy works well enough for cleric and mage, but the fighter can abuse the crap out of the game with this. For example, if a high sector damage trap tries to protect a section for any reason, use this trick. The fighter can ignore that first hit and usually get where he's going. I learned of this trick by accident, because I spawn in a lot of monsters right in front of the player. If you stand on top of a monster spawn, the monster doesn't appear. So I had to get really inventive to make sure that no fighters could 20AC grief away my spawning monsters.

It led to quite a bit of frustration too. I would spawn, give all, accidentally use dragonskin bracers (the item you get put on right after using give all), and then neither my sectordamage or my monster spawn would be working. I'd try again and it would suddenly work. I never realized it was this bracer grief until making quest 12. LOL

[Gez]

Hexen armor works as both amount of armor points (as the % value you see in Doom, Heretic, or Strife) and as the percent of absorbed damage (while in the other games, it's static, for example Doom's blue combat armor is always 50%). To make the value more D&Dish, however, the displayed value is divided by 5. So AC 20 is really armor 100. That means you get 100 points of armor, and absorb 100% of damage. The lower your Hexen armor, the least amount of damage it absorbs, so also the slower it erodes. The higher the armor, on the other hand, the better it protects but also the faster it gets used up.

If you use the full-screen [wiki]alternate HUD[/wiki], your armor display will show you your real armor value instead of the AC.



One thing I wanted to tell you but forgot about is that some of the levels have rendering glitches when played in GZDoom.

[peewee_RotA]

I got a message about that. Still haven't had the chance to look into it quite yet.

[plums]

Hi, I just played this, it was a lot of fun. I used to play a lot of Hero Quest, so it was nice seeing the levels represented in Hexen. Funny trying to remember where pits and such are and avoiding them.

Do you have any plans to do expansion material? There are quite a few, as I'm sure you know, and some of them are pretty interesting.

Interesting way of handling Ollar's maze. That was such a lame quest in the boardgame

[Average]

I'll have to give this a try. I only played Hero Quest a handful of times but I did play lots of Advanced Hero Quest and Space Hulk...

Ooh, Space Hulk... That would be lovely... *hint* ;P

[Ixnatifual]

For some reason the closet doors are invisible in GZDoom, but not in ZDoom. For example the room east of the starting room in The Trial where the Chaos Serpents are (Chaos Warrior in the board game).

EDIT: I found out what was wrong. The polyobject sectors are two-sided. To get them working properly in GZDoom they need to be single sides (in Doom Builder 2 just select the sectors and hit the delete button to make them single sided "void blocks.")
And of course the textures then need to be reapplied to the mid position instead of upper. Not sure why ZDoom and GZDoom behave differently here.

Not sure if you're still working on this project, but I'll probably just go through the levels and make them "GZDoom compatible" before playing further. Maybe you'll want the result.

[Ixnatifual]

You only made the polyobject sectors double sided in The Trial, but not in the other levels, so it was quickly fixed

[Hetdegon]

@Ixnatifual:
I for one would be really happy to see an update, even if unofficial. Although ,ideally, Peewee might revise it eventually.

[Dancso]

Though I've never played Hero Quest, I decided to give this a go and it was pretty good!
It's not everyday a map can bring me to my knees with just 30-50 monsters

What I found interesting is that in a board game I imagine you'd pay more attention to pitfall traps once you've fallen into them. However, in a first person experience I found myself forgetting about them over and over again at great expense to my health.

A few things to note, the text transmission between maps stopped working at melar's maze for me, and upon completing the last map, the third page of endgame text got off my screen after a few lines. (I could never figure out why it happens, as disabling text scaling doesn't seem to fix that, and I've had this in many mods before)

[peewee_RotA]

I'd love to see the fixed copy. I won't have a lot of time to do it myself at the moment. It'd be easy enough just to use that as the next version.

Dancso, it will stop showing the text in vanilla hexen. This is because Hexen only has a few hubs that show text. Zdoom has a fix for this, so that's why I targeted that client.