Brutal HeXen/Heretic RPG - A Final Update

[Mere_Duke]

The download links from the original post are broken, I'd like you to put the Mage on the Brutal Hexen V4 final version, the Mage is my favorite, please !

For you and others who want to download.
Here's the fixed version. The latest from 1st post, then argv improved it, then I made a few fixes (underwater stalkers bug, mouse bugs, etc.). I think it's really the latest one.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ep8j7ycsa ... G_V4.1.pk3

[MaxRideWizardLord]

The download links from the original post are broken, I'd like you to put the Mage on the Brutal Hexen V4 final version, the Mage is my favorite, please !

Heh, he's mine too. There been a video of Mark attempting to make the Mage class. Unfortunatelly, he never released it; neither did it look any impressive to begin with, as he made attacks behave blunt and underwhelming even compared to original Hexen's Mage, made him shoot like just a doomguy rather that proper elemental prodigy guy. Few years ago I gave him my ideas, he leeked them all, but said there is a little to no chance for him to bother about hexen as other projects are on his schedule.

[PWAD Pete]

As far as I know Sarge might resume work on Brutal Hexen after he finished V21 of Brutal Doom. One of his patreon goals was to resume work on it and he has more than doubled that goal now. I don't know if he actually will ever come back to it, but if he did it would probably be a lot better than my Brutal Hexen. I've tried messaging him to show him my work but he's never responded. There is a chance that I might return to this project too but it probably won't be soon, and it would have to be zandronum compatible as well.

[irontusk341]

And my sad attempt experimenting with wads and combining brutal Heretic with Wrath of cronos inadvertently led to the birth of Diablo 3D

[MaxRideWizardLord]

And my sad attempt experimenting with wads and combining brutal Heretic with Wrath of cronos inadvertently led to the birth of Diablo 3D

You saying it like it's a bad thing. Although it would be lovely to have a class-less hexen\heretic mod with RPG system where you can grow character the way you like, and mix stuff like warrior-wizard, wizard-healer, warrior-wizard-healer-stealth, etc, i.e. have wrath of cronos skill but being able to learn them ALL. Maybe one day I'll mix BD + Hexercise + WOC + Hexen Arena to make a somewhat fun and elemental based Brutal Mage class, rather than just doomguy with plasmagun and RL.

[Robban]

Hi everyone! Been lurking for a few months on this forum and finally decided to create an account.

First of all, huge thanks for Seidolon for his work on Brutal Heretic! Heretic was my first FPS game over 20 years ago, and I'm pretty much obsessed about the game. Playing through it with the added "oomph" was like a dream come true, much more so than any Doom mod has ever been.

I downloaded the latest version of the said mod a few months back (the one with slight modifications by argv). A few weeks after I downloaded Slade and started to mess around with some numbers. I have zero previous experience in programming, but so far I've figured out a lot about level editing, changing actor properties and creating new sound effects. This has actually been quite a therapeutic process because for over 10 years now I've been interested working in game development. While this is not quite that, it still kind of feels like food for my soul... or something.

Aaaanyway, what I've been working on is basically a version of Brutal Heretic that has very little to do with any kind of RPG mechanics, but that offers more challenge and a deeper, faster FPS experience. I've been messing around with enemy behavior, weapon balance and sound effects, and also just a little bit with level design as well (adding traps, eliminating sequence breaks etc.). But, as I have no prior experience with programming, or even Slade, progress is obviously pretty slow. As long as it's just about changing actor variables, all is fine and dandy, but after that.... yeah. I obviously have no timelimit, or even a complete vision of the end result, so anything can change at any time.

The reason for this post is that there are a couple of questions on Heretic decorations that I can't figure out on my own.

The first question has to do with gargoyles:
Is there anything in their decoration that explains their behavior in regards to charging at the player? There is obviously A_Chase, which means they come after the player, but nothing about the charge attack. I can read any other enemy decoration and understand their behavior just fine, but I have no idea how this one attack works.

The reason I ask is because when a gargoyle is attacked in the middle of their charge, they get stunned, and are basically done for at that point. This behavior is a huge turn off for me (in terms of challenge) and I was hoping to somehow change it. Anyone know what I could do?

The next question has to do with Hellstaff Alt Fire:
Changing damage values for either the rainspawner, or the raintracers doesn't seem to do anything. I don't really understand why this is. Changing raintracer speed does just what you'd expect, but even if the amount of damage is turned all the way to zero, everything still dies instantly. So what gives? Every other weapon's projectiles work like I'd think they would: I reduce damage to 0, and enemies take no damage. Why does this projectile work differently?

Thank you in advance! I'll post some videos on my progress at some point.

[Tryintodraw]

Hi everyone!
Can somebody upload both non rpg Brutal Heretic and Hexen? The links on the main post are broken.
Many thanks!

[PWAD Pete]

The first question has to do with gargoyles:
Is there anything in their decoration that explains their behavior in regards to charging at the player? There is obviously A_Chase, which means they come after the player, but nothing about the charge attack. I can read any other enemy decoration and understand their behavior just fine, but I have no idea how this one attack works.

The function that makes the gargoyle charge at the player is called A_ImpMsAttack, and it's in the gargoyle's missile state.

Code: Select all

Missile:
    IMPX A 10 A_FaceTarget
    IMPX B 6 A_ImpMsAttack
    IMPX CBAB 6
    Goto Missile+2

[wiki]A_ImpMsAttack[/wiki]

The reason I ask is because when a gargoyle is attacked in the middle of their charge, they get stunned, and are basically done for at that point. This behavior is a huge turn off for me (in terms of challenge) and I was hoping to somehow change it. Anyone know what I could do?

The problem with them getting stunned is the fact that their momentum is getting changed but they are staying in the same state. You could fix this by changing their painchance to 256 while the gargoyle is charging.

The next question has to do with Hellstaff Alt Fire:
Changing damage values for either the rainspawner, or the raintracers doesn't seem to do anything. I don't really understand why this is. Changing raintracer speed does just what you'd expect, but even if the amount of damage is turned all the way to zero, everything still dies instantly. So what gives? Every other weapon's projectiles work like I'd think they would: I reduce damage to 0, and enemies take no damage. Why does this projectile work differently?

If you want to make the rain itself do less damage, you'll need to decrease the damage by replacing the [wiki]Classes:RainPillar[/wiki] actor.

Hi everyone!
Can somebody upload both non rpg Brutal Heretic and Hexen? The links on the main post are broken.
Many thanks!

The download links here should still be working:
viewtopic.php?f=43&t=50697&start=165#p1001148

EDIT: you could also check out Mere_Duke's post above which has a bug fixed version of this mod.

[Ryuhi]

The first question has to do with gargoyles:
Is there anything in their decoration that explains their behavior in regards to charging at the player? There is obviously A_Chase, which means they come after the player, but nothing about the charge attack. I can read any other enemy decoration and understand their behavior just fine, but I have no idea how this one attack works.

The reason I ask is because when a gargoyle is attacked in the middle of their charge, they get stunned, and are basically done for at that point. This behavior is a huge turn off for me (in terms of challenge) and I was hoping to somehow change it. Anyone know what I could do?

The next question has to do with Hellstaff Alt Fire:
Changing damage values for either the rainspawner, or the raintracers doesn't seem to do anything. I don't really understand why this is. Changing raintracer speed does just what you'd expect, but even if the amount of damage is turned all the way to zero, everything still dies instantly. So what gives? Every other weapon's projectiles work like I'd think they would: I reduce damage to 0, and enemies take no damage. Why does this projectile work differently?

Thank you in advance! I'll post some videos on my progress at some point.

For Gargoyles: Their dash attack is a native command that is similar to A_SkullAttack, but pretty much worse. Replacing it with that alone will make it more consistent, albeit it will still have the same issue of flying off into the sunset if you dodge out of their way. A personal rewrite of their AI that I like to use basically has them start with a skull attack, then make multiple face target checks and simple dashes toward the player, activating their melee state when they get within range instead. You can feel free to use it or modify it if you like:

Code: Select all

See:
    IMPX AABBCCBB 2 A_Chase
    Loop
Melee:
    IMPX DE 5 A_FaceTarget
    IMPX F 5 A_CustomMeleeAttack(random[ImpMeAttack](5,12), "himp/attack", "himp/attack")
    Goto See
Missile:
    IMPX AB 2 A_FaceTarget
    TNT1 A 0 A_Jump(128,"NoGo") //This gives the gargoyle a chance to not dash, without it they would be far too aggressive.  You can modify the chance as you see fit.
    IMPX C 3 A_SkullAttack
    IMPX BABC 3 A_FaceTarget
    TNT1 A 0 A_ScaleVelocity(0.5)
    TNT1 A 0 A_FaceTarget
    IMPX B 0 ThrustThing(angle*256/360,10)
    IMPX BABC 3 A_FaceTarget
    IMPX B 3 A_ScaleVelocity(0.25)
    Goto See
Nogo:
    IMPX CCBB 2 A_Chase("","")  // This causes them to close in a bit without dashing or attacking.  Can include melee in the equation if you wish.
    Goto See

Without those changes, the AI pretty much craps the bed if you set the Aggressiveness rating too high. Works well enough with normal settings too though I think (at least better than vanilla.) As for the stun locking, you can lower their pain chance and they will be able to power through shots more often and get stunlocked less. Due to how wimpy a lot of heretics vanilla weapons were, monsters tend to rely on getting pushed back/stunlocked fairly often. If you up the weapons power, you'll want to lower pain chances and increase mass appropriately.

The Hellstaff's altfire damage is almost entirely caused by the explosions from the tracers, namely the actor "HellRainExplosions" in its death state. The call of A_Explode is where most of the damage comes from, and also why it does considerably less against enemies that ignore radius damage.

[Robban]

Thank you so much to both of you! How lucky I am to receive replies from not just the original mod creator, but also the person who has spent the most time with the said mod after it was discontinued.

It turns out that the gargoyles Missile state wasn't written in the Decoration at all, so I had no idea where to start out from. Copying the code Seidolon linked didn't alter the monsters behavior in any way, so it's almost like this code was present even though not written. Anyway, thanks to Ryuhi as well for suggesting A_SkullAttack, would've never figured that out on my own. What I came up with is not exactly like the code you provided, but something of a combination of yours and the original. It seems to work fine, I've yet to see a single stunned gargoyle after implementing it.

Thanks for the Hellstaff info as well. I've now finished working with the Crossbow, changing it's rate of fire and making separate primary and alt firing modes for PowerWeaponLevel2. I've also changed the Dragon Claw, by making the sprite slightly smaller (the original always looked a little out of place for me), as well as making it handle differently. It now has way more recoil, especially during its alt fire. It even has a separate sound from the Elven Wand, sounding more like a proper dragon now.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and that combined with my complete amateurish level of understanding of modding means this'll still take a lot of time. I had some wild plans of redesigning all the levels to accommodate GZDoom features like jumping and crouching. Upon further playtesting I've come to the conclusion, that the incredibly fast pace of the mod (even before my modifications) makes it pretty damn difficult to focus on features like jumping in the heat of battle. Hell, I often times even forget that I can kick. I am, however, currently redesigning the levels by adding more dark areas, and thus making the torch more important of an item.

[ZDL_800]

Hello,

First we would like to say thankyou for the great RPG mods, eternally grateful.

May I ask, could it be possible to combine both the Brutal Hexen RPG mod with both Hexen and the DLC IWAD? So you could literally play from Map 1 to Map60 in one playthrough?

It seems we can only load either the original Hexen which starts from 'Map1 to Map40' or load the Hexen - Deathkings of the Dark Citadel DLC which starts from 'Map33 to Map60'?

We are using GZDoom with ZDL and everything works fantastic but we don't know if we have done some kind of wrong setup parameters? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.

[PWAD Pete]

Running both the WADs in GZDoom wouldn't play them back to back unfortunately, but you could probably combine the two WADs yourself if you want. (Just make sure to save into a NEW wad rather than overwriting one of the IWADs.) I don't think we're allowed to upload such a WAD here though. MAP33 - MAP38 of Deathkings are deathmatch levels so they could be omitted. If you wanted to make it so that you go straight to Deathkings upon completing the original game, you would need to change MAP40 to warp you to MAP41 instead of ending the game, and also take all of your weapons and inventory upon doing so, since you wouldn't want to start Deathkings with all the weapons.

[ZDL_800]

Hello and thankyou for the reply much appreciated.

So am I correct in saying that Deathkings single player maps start from MAP39? This is quite confusing indeed, I'm surprised no-one has combined these games already, we thought the DLC was actually an extension of the original Hexen.

The theory is as you say warp the players from Hexen MAP40 to Deathkings MAP39? We would want to keep the players weapons and inventory so its a single playthrough, I'm not sure that the ''Brutal Hexen RPG'' mod levels up enemies with the player?

Are you suggesting that you would remove all weapons and items from the player to move to Deathkings because it would be too easy from MAP39? If that is correct then we would hopefully edit the damage on enemies or somehow drastically increase the Ai count on Deathking Maps? To make it stupidly difficult, super hardcore. It would be insane.

Regarding uploaded WAD's here, are you allowed to private message WAD's?

Imagine this, The Brutal Hexen RPG mod in coop, playing from map1 to map60 which would progressively go to insane difficulty. Still not sure if keeping all the weapons and items would be possible? Could it break the Deathkings Maps? Are there any new weapons in the DLC? Could we somehow replace the Deathkings weapons placements ingame with a boss instead? So you wouldn't pick up the same weapons as you already had from Hexen?

All the pieces are there for an absolute mega edition for Hexen.

Thankyou for your time and hope to speak soon.

[ZDL_800]

Update here.

Its not an issue with the mod but rather a slight issue with the upscaled texture pack, link here.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/1 ... ck/?page=5

Basically some enemies are not upscaled, example, the Ai that drop an item when killed will not be upscaled? Really strange but may I ask are there any sprite textures in the RPG mod? The theory is to replace all standard textures with the new upscaled textures, the non upscaled sprites stick out real bad I'm afraid, you can clearly see the difference.

May I ask could we use Slade and somehow check out any textures within the RPG mod and replace them? If anyone could point us in the right direction we will gladly update the mod.

Thanks again.

[willeatpants]

hey, ive been trying to get this mod (4.1final) working on GZDoom 4.1.2 but I keep on getting the same error

Script error, "BrutalHexenRPG_V4.1.pk3:animdefs" line 1:Bad syntax.

I thought it was because it was because I was using the wrong version of GZDoom but after downloading who know how many other versions I still got the same error.
Can anyone help me out here please!