Disjointed notes on Hexen, with no relevance or order

[Excommunicator]

Damn this thread. Makes this game sound really fun, and now I will have to go and look for it somewhere

 

[DraQ]

It's also quite a bit longer, with little practice you can beat ettins into 'contrition' with impunity.

Not a problem against ettins, but against serpents and imps - which you'd want to kill as quickly as possible in melee since they can roast you with ranged attacks. You don't need to deal with many serpents before finding the staff, but those you do need to deal with end up making one tough beginning. Gets easier afterwards.

If everything else fails, you can resort to flechette or two.

 

[Phelot]

I think it's zdoom that fucks up the cleric's flechette? Makes it so it doesn't actually do damage to anything. I wonder if they ever fixed that...

 

[DraQ]

I use Doomsday.

 

[ElectricOtter]

I think it's zdoom that fucks up the cleric's flechette? Makes it so it doesn't actually do damage to anything. I wonder if they ever fixed that...

No, it works for me.

 

[Sceptic]

I think it's zdoom that fucks up the cleric's flechette? Makes it so it doesn't actually do damage to anything. I wonder if they ever fixed that...

Yeah, was a problem, but they fixed it a while ago. Works perfectly now.

I use Doomsday.

Enjoying your lack of end of hub text?

Damn this thread. Makes this game sound really fun, and now I will have to go and look for it somewhere

You've never played Hexen?
Definitely try it. There's no guarantee you'll like it (it's rather... unique in terms of gameplay. Even Hexen 2's very different, as you can gather from the discussion here) but it's definitely worth trying. There's a CD image floating around the web called Towers of Darkness which contains both Hexen and the expansion (and Heretic as a bonus), with Hexen's CD audio tracks. I won't break Codex rules by posting a link, but PM me if you have trouble finding it and I'll send it to you.

 

[DraQ]

I use Doomsday.

Enjoying your lack of end of hub text?

How do you like your widescreen weapons/hands, btw?

 

[Sceptic]

How do you like your widescreen weapons/hands, btw?

FFFFFU- no wait, MY Doomsday end of hub text works perfectly fine, remember?

 

[DraQ]

How do you like your widescreen weapons/hands, btw?

FFFFFU- no wait, MY Doomsday end of hub text works perfectly fine, remember?

But do your hands on widescreen?

 

[Sceptic]

In Doomsday? yes they do.

My Doomsday is perfection incarnate.

Except for the lighting.

 

[Phelot]

What's wrong with the lighting?

TBH, I'm getting confused right now if I'm using zDoom or Doomsday. Pretty sure it's zDoom. The lighting in it is awesome! I LOVE turning it down real dark and making the luminosity of the torches fairly large. Somehow it manages to look cooler then modern FPS's.

 

[ElectricOtter]

TBH, I'm getting confused right now if I'm using zDoom or Doomsday. Pretty sure it's zDoom. The lighting in it is awesome! I LOVE turning it down real dark and making the luminosity of the torches fairly large. Somehow it manages to look cooler then modern FPS's.

Sounds like Doomsday, but I could be wrong. And how do you not know what source port you're using? :/



Also, Chocolate Raven branch, bitches :monocle:

 

[Sceptic]

Sounds like you're using Doomsday. Which has awesome looking lighting... that manages to not look ANYTHING like original's lighting, and thus completely messes up the design of some of the old levels. It's not so bad in Hexen (or even Heretic), but it's rage-inducing in Doom, which made quite good use of (completely unrealistic) adjacent sectors of very wildly varying luminosity. Doomsday destroys this by having the light sector light up the dark sector much more than it should.

 

[SCO]

I'm racist towards FP shooters (but thief is god's gift to the worthy).

Never completed a single one

(deus ex doesn't count)

 

[Phelot]

TBH, I'm getting confused right now if I'm using zDoom or Doomsday. Pretty sure it's zDoom. The lighting in it is awesome! I LOVE turning it down real dark and making the luminosity of the torches fairly large. Somehow it manages to look cooler then modern FPS's.

Sounds like Doomsday, but I could be wrong. And how do you not know what source port you're using? :/



Also, Chocolate Raven branch, bitches :monocle:

I was at work when I posted that so I had no way of checking and it's been awhile since I last used it and they both have "doom" in their name :D . Yeah, it's Doomsday.

But I thought the cleric thing with the flechette was in zdoom?

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Loved Heretic back in the day, but Hexen somehow passed me by (only played the demo a few years later). Inspired by this thread I decided to finally play through Hexen.

As for Hexen II and Heretic II, I am only barely aware of their existence. Do they work on XP without any additional patches/mods/ports? Hexen II is a 1997 game, I suppose it has a DOS executable?

 

[Sceptic]

Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 are Windows games. They should work fine in OpenGL mode, but you'll need to go into the game folder and delete opengl32.dll, at least for Hexen 2. They (and other games at the time) shipped with a DLL that specifically wrapped OpenGL to Glide so that they would run on 3dfx hardware, so it will of course not work on modern graphic cards, but deleting their custom opengl32.dll forces the game to go to the system OpenGL, which naturally works fine.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 are Windows games. They should work fine in OpenGL mode, but you'll need to go into the game folder and delete opengl32.dll, at least for Hexen 2. They (and other games at the time) shipped with a DLL that specifically wrapped OpenGL to Glide so that they would run on 3dfx hardware, so it will of course not work on modern graphic cards, but deleting their custom opengl32.dll forces the game to go to the system OpenGL, which naturally works fine.

Great, thanks for the info. Think I'm going to try it, Hexen's controls are pretty awkward after all this time and in effect I can play it only in short sequences.

 

[DraQ]

Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 are Windows games. They should work fine in OpenGL mode, but you'll need to go into the game folder and delete opengl32.dll, at least for Hexen 2. They (and other games at the time) shipped with a DLL that specifically wrapped OpenGL to Glide so that they would run on 3dfx hardware, so it will of course not work on modern graphic cards, but deleting their custom opengl32.dll forces the game to go to the system OpenGL, which naturally works fine.

Great, thanks for the info. Think I'm going to try it, Hexen's controls are pretty awkward after all this time and in effect I can play it only in short sequences.

Or you can just download a sourceport like Doomsday Engine and play Hexen in it, to experience fully configurable controls and better graphics, without changing the original assets, which actually makes it look pretty modern and impressive but true to the original.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Or you can just download a sourceport like Doomsday Engine and play Hexen in it, to experience fully configurable controls and better graphics, without changing the original assets, which actually makes it look pretty modern and impressive but true to the original.

Yeah, I'm tempted to use a port but... I don't know, it just doesn't feel right to have modern controls in this. I'll probably end up using one anyway.

Graphics - Hexen looks great, but then I have a rather old monitor so no problems with the screen being weirdly stretched or anything.

 

[DraQ]

Or you can just download a sourceport like Doomsday Engine and play Hexen in it, to experience fully configurable controls and better graphics, without changing the original assets, which actually makes it look pretty modern and impressive but true to the original.

Yeah, I'm tempted to use a port but... I don't know, it just doesn't feel right to have modern controls in this.

Temptation:

 

[Sceptic]

Think I'm going to try it, Hexen's controls are pretty awkward after all this time

They are configurable in the original game... though I too suggest a port. You could always go for Chocolate Hexen for an almost-identical-to-original experience.

Temptation

Purty lighting!

http://dengine.net/images/misc/biaslighting_thumb.jpg

Fuck off

 

[DraQ]

http://dengine.net/images/misc/biaslighting_thumb.jpg

Fuck off

Precision troll successful.

In any case it looks better in Hexen than it does in Heretic, and better in Heretic than it does in Doom.
The reason is simple, Doom environments use a lot of artificial, directed light sources giving sharp light/shadow boundries that can be depicted well with sector lighting.
Heretic, being a fantasy world with no fluorescent lights, uses lighting more naturally, although sometimes still in a doomlike manner.
Hexen uses light almost naturally, and when it doesn't (like with light rippling along the corridors on Guardian of Steel) it still attempts to smooth the effect considerably so that bias lighting doesn't change the look much.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Temptation:

This is indeed very pretty, but tell me one thing - are the sprites horribly blurred abominations when in short view distance? I tried out Doomsday, the game looks quite nice (not as good as on the screenshot, but I didn't look much into the graphical options), the music plays without the slightest skipping (unlike in dosbox) and the controls are completely customizable - but those blurry sprites made me nauseous (the whole experience reminded me me of Might and Magic VII in hardware mode, by the way). Give me not too pretty, but clean looking pixels instead of that... blur (extensive vocabulary, I know). And yes, I tried enabling/disabling various graphical settings, but nothing seems to help with this.

They are configurable in the original game... though I too suggest a port. You could always go for Chocolate Hexen for an almost-identical-to-original experience.

It's not a problem with keyboard settings. The problem is in the two (well, three if you count a joystick) ways to play it - keyboard only or mouse+keyboard.

Keyboard only is playable as long as there are not too many enemies but fifghting hordes is very frustrating because I can't reliably turn and strafe at the same time.

Mouse+keyboard is a much better way to play, because I can both strafe and turn around at the same time, but... moving the mouse forward or backward also moves the character. Not a big issue, but pretty annoying, especially when I take a step in the wrong direction (a chasm for example) while I just want to turn around.

Chocolate Doom is a great recommendation - it keeps the original graphics without any filtering, while allowing to customize the controls a bit more, including disabling the mouse movement. Now I can play the game in a comfortable manner. Cheers.

 

[reaven]

So I decided to replay it as cleric on cardinal and Im fucking lost at 7 portals... Theres some switch I cant find and its becoming really frustrating...
I need to open the door to guardian of steel 2, I think, and its driving me nuts.