[WIP] EGA Hexen

[black-thrones]

Hello all. I thought I'd showcase this little project I started yesterday. It's sole purpose is to replace every single colour used by vanilla Hexen with one of the sixteen colours often found in older EGA games. The idea behind this came from finding a mod just like this for Doom on the doomworld forums, and since I couldn't find anything similar for Hexen I thought I'd do this myself. Not sure about anyone else here but playing Hexen with this wad makes it feel alot more like an ancient 90's RPG (like Eye of the Beholder in EGA mode). Obviously the sounds don't suit it too well, but I can't do much about that. Anyone with ideas are free to give me some suggestions though.

I tried my best to keep as much features in the monsters and textures as possible, so that they look less like brown misshapen horrors and more like the monsters they're meant to be. I have considered just making the entire thing fullbright, but I quite like how some objects and textures look in the dark. The small wad file only includes Hexen's Palette, Colormap and Fogmap files, mostly edited with a later version of Slade.

Some screenshots:

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Winnowing Hall, normal


Winnowing Hall, fullbright

Feel free to criticize! If you somehow enjoy it and want to use any of it for any reason, feel free to.
Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2y_-q ... sp=sharing

[Enjay]

Well, I think it looks ugly as hell and I wouldn't play for more than a couple of minutes.

That being said, it's because I don't like EGA graphics anyway. The only EGA game that I ever played extensively was Commander Keen. I didn't even play EOB in EGA. So, yeah, it looks like you've done a pretty good job (in fact, it looks significantly better than I expected from your screenshots), but it's not to my tastes.

However, I'm mainly dropping in to say that for the sounds you could use the old PC speaker sounds from Doom (the ones that have names beginning DP******). Slade can play these and convert them to WAVs. Obviously there are more sounds in Hexen but you could match up the ones that you think sound about right from Doom and possibly edit a few others in Audacity or something.

[edit]
Also, there are a bunch of PC speaker sounds in Wolfenstein and Noah 3D that Slade can also play and convert. I'm pretty sure you'll find them in the AUDIOHED files.
[/edit]

[Gez]

I think Hexen's art style is too gritty and busy to work well with EGA; you'd need to simplify the graphics a lot to make them look more like pixel art.

Look at the title screen, you can't tell what's part of the stone arch and what's part of the bishop's robe. The green lighting just looks noisy.

[JimmyJ]

Cound stand to use dithering. I love dithering.

[osjclatchford]

so... um... why is this? not being a punk or anything Is it just I don't get it? or is it a 'just for the hell of it' thing?

[black-thrones]

@Enjay:
Thanks for your input and advice for the sounds! Understandably this really isn't everyone's cup-of-tea and my artistic view on it probably isn't shared with anyone else but I'm having fun maintaining the mod. I'll begin on work for sounds soon.

@Gez:
Yes after some extensive testing on more levels I noticed it does look quite bad in some parts, so I'll have some textures/sprites/graphics edited when I have time. The title screen will definitely get a nice edit as well.

@JimmyJ:
Yes, definitely!

@osjclatchford:
"for the hell of it"/experimental reasons/boredom/for fun/nostalgia/possibly may be used for a dungeon crawler mod

[osjclatchford]

oh right ok. I thought it was like some crazy super-low-end-machine compatibility! LOL makes it look insanely oldskool. reminds me of the old catacombs3d or like what a commodore64/amiga version would have looked like. quite nostaligic. indeed sounds need changing for the full effect but we can all wait for that. I would definitely go for fullbright IMHO even though it would essentially ruin the effect of some maps (hidden stuff in shadows and lightning effects) but at present a lot of the texturework is getting lost in the shadows...

i'm sure I 'get it' now!

[leileilol]

The ditherihg should be possible by doing a post-process shader with one of the many "d3d9 shader injector fx!1!!" things out there and I don't mean no lazy posterize shader.

[Nevander]

Can this work in Doom? Or is there one of these for Doom somewhere? I'd love to play through Doom like this for the lulz.

[TehRealSalt]

Yep, in fact this is based on it.

Can't find a working link though, here's the original thread though: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/5 ... rsion-2-0/

[mallo]

Hexen's graphics are definitely not fit to this, maybe if you modified the graphics themselves it'd look better. Right now it just burns to the eyes. (But idea is cool, I'm an EGA fan )

[Valherran]

Looking at this reminds me of CastleVania 1 on NES.

[black-thrones]

Very sorry for a seemingly half-assed reply to everyone here. Issues in real life have been preventing me from playing games, but to those that show some interest in this, I'll make sure I begin working on the next version soon that will focus on making the graphics less horrid, and hopefully with some sound replacements too.

Thanks for your critiques. For a little 'side project' I'm surprised it's got attention.

[Kaeoschassis]

I actually think this has definite potential. The third screenshot down, in particular, is sort of pretty. Definitely not for everyone, mind. I'll be interested to see what you do with this, but I do agree with the general sentiment that the graphics themselves will need to be worked over to fit the palette.

[mk8o]

Hello !

I'm actually interested in the part where you converted colors to EGA colors... Is it hexadecimal colors you want to convert ? Well, if it's the case, have you succeeded in developing that tool ? Because I'm really interested in it