RETRO HERETIC MAPS / H!ZONE [Re-Upload]

[AstroCreep]

Found that the links to these on my post on Zandronum forums were no longer working, so figured I'd re-upload. Don't know if anyone's interested, but hell, why not? These are a few level packs I threw together a few years back that I used while playing multiplayer games.

From my original post:


Retro Heretic Maps for Single Player/Co-Op (Various, 1995-2001)
It's not quite fair that Doom gets all of the attention on the multiplayer servers. Heretic was quite a good game too. Because of the lack of good wads out there, I decided to put all of the crap ones together, lol. Armed with my collection of shovelware CD's, I rooted through the mounds of crap and found the best of the crap and threw them into one pk3, with a MAPINFO to link them together. I tried my best to fix exits and little things like that, but its hard to do on my MacBook since there I can't find a nodes builder for Mac and I am working on fixing a Windows computer. As a result, a LOT of these maps are broken, mostly due to shitty mapmaking. I didn't really want to mess with these too much, but I ran them on a BestEver server for a while and they worked pretty well (with the exception of the maps that wouldn't exit). Not really worth playing without people to share it's shittiness with, but still worth a look. It also inspired me to do the next collection.

Differences from original:
A few minor fixes, since apparently some people forgot to make exits
some new music (mostly from Hexen)
a few new textures
new title screen

Download(originals are located inside PK3 file, or pretty much every shovelware Heretic cd out there)


H!Zone Expansion Pack
Description:
Now this is a MUCH better compilation. WizardWorks decided in the late 90's to sell add-ons for most shooters made in that time period. In my opinion, a real dick move, but actually quite handy in the time period when dial-up was commonplace and it took about 20 minutes to download 10 MB. Most of them were shit wads (like the compilation above) downloaded from the internet by the thousands. These ones were different, however. For once, they actually made maps by themselves, and not bad ones at that. It says 12 episodes, however 3 episodes are deathmatch only. In all, about 84 single player levels. There are a few cool things not seen in other Heretic wads, such as snowy levels. And then, apparently, WizardWorks somewhere along the line lost their copyright, or something, and now all of their stuff is available to download on archive.org. Unfortunatley, every single episode replaces episode 3, which made it impossible to even play a few of them together. So I took the liberty of changing a few map names and writing out a MAPINFO to make one huge Heretic megawad! You can either start in the beginning of each episode, or start from level one and play all of the 83 levels in one go. Plus, an extra episode featuring the 22 deathmatch levels making up the last 2 episodes of the expansion pack.

Differences from original:
Took out lame replacement sprites, it's much better with the original Heretic guys.
new MAPINFO
8 player multiplayer starts for ZDoom/Zandronum
a pimp new titlescreen
some new music (from Hexen)

Download Original

[SiFi270]

First of all, the episodes had actual titles, so you can use those for the episode selection screen instead of just numbering them. Second, what's with the off-color screaming faces in the hud? I know they weren't there in the original H!Zone.

[AstroCreep]

Lol thats my face. I'm not messing with these but you can update them if you want.

[NightFright]

Here's a version with unaltered statusbar. I am sure most people prefer that.

H!Zone with original statusbar (PK7, 1.4 MB)

Changes:
- Uses original Heretic statusbar (alternate graphics removed)
- MAPINFO: H!Zone episode titles added
- MAPINFO: Return to title screen after last level of each episode (instead of directly continuing to the next episode)
- MAPINFO: Level names slightly changed from "H!Zone x-x" to "H!Zone ExMx"
- GAMEINFO added

Hope you don't mind these edits. In general, great work and thanks for providing it. I would have never even looked for this!

[AstroCreep]

Not at all. The reason I made these in the first place was that all anyone ever wanted to play on zandronum at the time was doom or mega man. i was hoping someone would come along and want to update them lol. Although I don't understand why no one likes my pretty status bar lol

[SiFi270]

I also tried to make a wad with just the new monster graphics for the curious, but for some reason the Iron Lich doesn't change despite its H!Zone counterpart being some kind of watery tentacle. It shows up right in Chocolate Heretic, but apparently not ZDoom.

But the good news is you still get the cheap Halloween costume for the Undead Warrior.

[NightFright]

One question: Were these episodes meant to have a secret level each just like the original ep.3 did? If so, these maps are defined differently. After ExM8 (with boss fight), it continues to the ninth map which was supposed to be secret and accessed from the fourth level.

Do these episodes have secret exits? If so, MAPINFO would need to be adjusted.

[AstroCreep]

I really couldn't tell you. The last time I cracked these open was 2015 lol

[Hipnotic Rogue]

Thanks for sharing and thanks for the update too.

I think I know what I'll be up to this weekend!

[SiFi270]

After nearly a year, I looked into the secret exit thing, and it seems most episodes don't have one, making M9 a standalone bonus level, but episodes 6, 7, and 9 were exceptions, having both a normal exit and a proper secret exit in M4. So there are two ways I can see this being handled in mapinfo. One would be have all the M4s with only one exit lead to M9 anyway, treating it like just another level like Hell to Pay did with its secret levels, and another would be to keep them after M8 but give them the resethealth and resetinventory flags so they'd be played similarly to how people may have played them in the DOS version.

EDIT: I did it. The second of my ideas above is the default mapinfo file for it, but the first is also included as "mapinfo-alt", so you can swap their names around to suit your preference. I also fixed the specialaction in every EXM8 to match the original episode 3, and included the wad I made with monster sprites that finally has a working "Iron" Lich.

[batos2]

When I move to another map in H!ZONE (No, I'm not using commands), my weapons and items from my inventory, disappear.

[Whoah]

When I move to another map in H!ZONE (No, I'm not using commands), my weapons and items from my inventory, disappear.

I believe that's on purpose, my man. The maps, I'm pretty sure, are stand-alone

[AstroCreep]

I can’t even begin to remember I’d have to look at the mapinfo

[batos2]

When I move to another map in H!ZONE (No, I'm not using commands), my weapons and items from my inventory, disappear.

I believe that's on purpose, my man. The maps, I'm pretty sure, are stand-alone

Sorry, I was wrong topic, I was referring to this map for Heretic:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=58679

[NightFright]

So I have made my own research regarding the secret exits in H!Zone and found that there are much more episodes with secret exits:
- Episodes 1 and 4-10 have secret exits
- Levels to enter the secret levels: E1M7, E4M6, E5M6, E6M4, E7M4, E8M6, E9M4 and E10M4
- Secret level of ep.3 (E3M9) does not have any exit at all

The fact that many secret exits are not located on the fourth map indicates that these episodes had initially not been intended for the ep.3 slot or the authors just didn't care. Anyway, in ep.2 I would probably just go to the secret level after the fourth map (where the secret level would normally be expected) and in ep.3 you might just continue after the boss map (E3M8) to E3M9 and quit the game after all enemies are dead (since there are no bosses in that map which could end the game automatically).

I still need to do a complete playthrough of all the episodes to confirm this, but I guess if no map has any linedef specials 11, 52, 197 (normal exit) or 51, 105, 198 (secret exit), there just isn't any way to end the map without any boss. That seems to be the case in E3M9 of episode 3. It might be a deathmatch only map which also has monsters to fight against, so it might not actually count towards real singleplayer maps and was therefore not really a part of the campaign. What happened in episode 2 remains unclear - maybe it was forgotten to add the appropriate exit somewhere.

BTW: The Iron Lich replacement does not work directly in ZDoom because of this sprite renaming feature. To fix it, you can either
- add a GAMEINFO lump containing nospriterename (probably the easiest solution, also maintains chocolate/vanilla compatibility) or
- rename all HEAD* frames to LICH* (e.g. HEADA1 --> LICHA1)