Ever wish Hexen was more like Diablo?

[skymarshall]

Hi,

I had a bit of spare time over christmas so decided to turn jHexen into more of a diablo-style RPG game with experience, level-ups and more importantly weapons that get visibly better as you play. Yes, this is a pretty tragic waste of time, but this is my first attempt at C coding outside of work and I'm pretty happy with the results :)

Here's some examples of the level up screen and how the mage's weapons improve as I allocate skills :

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jHexen-rpg1.JPG

After a few upgrades, the wand starts firing multiple shots :

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jHexen-rpg2.JPG

Pile enough skill points into the wand and it does a quake 2 railgun-style spiral (and coincidentally is about 4x as effective ;) )

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jHexen-rpg3.JPG

I've been thorough and made all the weapons improve one way or another. This shows the mage's lightning after a few upgrades :

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jHexen-rpg4.JPG

If you want to download it and try it out, you'll need to replace your jHexen.dll and objects.ded file. Instructions are in the zip. Since this is my first post, and I'm putting up a modified game DLL, it would be nice if someone official could vet this and confirm that I'm not trying to do anything nasty to unsuspecting gamers.

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jhexen-rpg.zip

NB It wont work with existing save games as it saves off the character into the save file.. sorry, you have to start a new game from scratch.

Absolute respect to skyjake et al for making such a great source tree that we can all play with!*spin*

skymarshall

[Yagisan]

This looks interesting, wish I could play it. Do you have a diff available so I can patch the source and try this out on linux ?

[skymarshall]

Sure, these are the start and end versions of my source tree. There's still a few of my failed attempts at things left commented out in there, but they shouldn't have any material effect. I'm too lazy to clean them up now as this was for fun after all.

I think this includes everything I changed, let me know if there's obviously a file missing (you'll also need my objects.ded from the other zip).

http://www.geocities.com/skymarshall78/jhexen-rpg-src.zip

[Ffabbia]

I've just had a go with this, and it rocks! *thumbs* It's added a complete new depth and resonance to the gameplay.

It's so odd, because I've often caught myself thinking about the possibility of an FPP game that allowed level-ups in a Diablo II manner.

Could you possibly give a quick list of how each weapon is affected by the skill upgrades? For example, I noticed that the fighters' gauntlets gain a fire attack, but the axe, hammer and Quietus' mods were more difficult to ascertain (I presume they just do more damage than normal?)

A couple of issues that I discovered:

I did L1 (Winnowing Hall) and cheated using mystic urns to put myself up to level 20, and to put each 'weapon skill' up to higher levels, and then warped to L2 (Seven Portals). My level went back down to 1.

Is this a bug? my computer? or does this mean that your character will default back to 1 at the start of each new hub? If so, it would be more fun, I think, if the levelling up was kept constant throughout the game, and you can keep your points, as in Diablo. That would allow you to aim for the really high skill levels.

The on-screen text that appears when you gain a new level could perhaps do with being a bit more forcefully presented. I found myself missing the 'you have gained a level' text in heat of combat. If it was presented in a different colour (if possible), or better still accompanied with a unique sound?

Here's some other ideas (just off the top of my head) for possible skill points. I've know idea how possible they are in terms of coding, so feel free to ignore them.

Chance to Block: Basically, putting points into this would give you a higher percentage to avoid or 'absorb' certain types of attack. At higher skill levels, it would begin to actually deflect ranged attacks back at the attacker (as in the Centaur's shield).

Speed: Self explanatory - Increase speed of attack, and perhaps running/walking speed as well. Maybe even the height/distance that you can jump?

Regenerate mana: Once again, self explanatory - would provide mana regeneration, the more points, the faster the regeneration.

Thanks for the great work, and for having such a great idea.

[skymarshall]

Thanks for the great feedback Ffabia! It's cool that you're having fun with it!

Yeah, if you look at my source code you'll find out why the level-ups vanish when you use the 'warp' or 'class' cheats. I've stored off all the character attributes inside a structure that happens to get reset by some of the cheat codes. However, the character attributes are 100% safe through changing hub or saving the game, as I made a point of copying them around in those cases.

Here's a quick list of the weapon changes I made. All weapons increase in raw damage as you put skills in, and generally the more impressive the effect of a weapon becomes the lower the rate of raw damage increase.

Fighter Weapons :

Fists - Gain a fire attack at level3, sends out additional flames at levels 8,12,16 (just like the cleric flame circle)
Axe - Gains the ability to hit an additional target at levels 4,8,12, and a bit of extra range too. Even though I stopped it hitting the same target more than once in a single attack, this is probably a bit too strong in it's current incarnation (try it in a crowded area and you'll start to see..)
Hammer - Increases in radius as well as damage
Quietus - Starts with 4 shards, extra shard for every 3 levels up to 9

Cleric Weapons

Mace - Gains an ice attack at level 8, visibily increases in effect
Serpent Staff - Starts at one projectile, extra projectile for every 3 levels, up to 7 (this is quite cool to watch as they slither about in tandem :) )
Flame Strike - I modified this so that it always spwans a flame ring, as that's much prettier. The flame ring increases in radius and # of flames
Staff - Starts at 3 ghosts, gets an extra ghost every few levels up to 6 ghosts

Mage Weapons

Wand - Fires 2 projectiles at lv5, 3 at lv10, and a 4x dmg spiral projectile at lv15.
Ice - The number of projectiles increases every 3 levels, increases indefinitely so you could probably crash your machine with this one if you put it high enough. Oh yeah, I improved the way it targets close range, made it show visible hits for close range and allowed you to destroy frozen corpses with it. This makes it a lot less of a liability as you could previously get your close range attack 'blocked' by a frozen corpse on the right hand side of the screen.
Lightning - Increases duration with level, very slow damage increment. Extra lightning blasts at lv8,12,16. I removed the random zig-zagging once you get more than 1 of these, so you get a cool 'lightning wall' effect.
Bloodscourge - Starts at 2 projectiles, extra projectile every 4 levels up to a max of 5

Doubt I'll be doing much more work on this, but thanks for the ideas! I quite like the idea of a reflective shield though as that might look really cool.. hmmn.. but maybe if I made it so you got a % chance to auto-use the chaos devices...

The trouble with automatic mana-regen is that it tempts you to find a quiet spot and wait forever which is _really_ tedious (did you ever play shadowcaster?). % to block attacks outright is generally indistinguishable from extra health.

I actually had a play with increasing the attack speeds - this is a surefire way to make the game way too easy - increasing the ROF of the wand (for example) by x4 makes it insanely strong, as you can pin monsters like the chaingun in doom. It's also more difficult to do this in a continuous-increase fashion, as it's controlled by the def file, not the code.

[Yagisan]

Thanks for the source :) Unfortunately it appears to be non-trivial to port it to 1.9.0beta3. This looks very interesting though, and I'd love to see it added to doomsday as perhaps -game jhexenrpg. Have you tried it multiplayer ?

[KuriKai]

Would you like your website/files to be hosted on http://jfiles.org ?

[skymarshall]

Simon - sure thing. That might give my files a bit more permanence than living on geocities! What do I need to do?

[DaniJ]

I've downloaded the source myself and plan to have a look at it more closely once 1.9.0 is released.

However I can confirm that this mod doesn't appear to do anything untoward and seems safe.

There certainly sounds like there is some interesting ideas in there that we might have a use for in a more generic sense.

Upgrading the src to 1.9.0 is definetly not trivial. In fact I suggest it would be much easier to wait till 1.9.0 is released and then re-implement skymarshall's changes in a clean source base.

[KuriKai]

email the webmaster of jfiles at webmaster@jfiles.org

[Ffabbia]

That's cool Dani. I was a bit worried about this not working in 1.9.0, because, of course, using it in 1.8# means that it's not possible to use the latest JHexen model pack, not to mention all the other benefits inherent to 1.9.0.

And thanks for the list of changes Skymarshall, it's clear that this is anything but a 'tragic waste of time'. I actually think you are on to something big here, and it could actually serve to completely revitalise the game....maybe even games, because surely there's no reason at all why something similar could also be implemented in Heretic?

[Yagisan]

or doom ...

This is a great idea - I think you should keep at it :)

[skymarshall]

Hehe. Thanks for the enthusiasm, but I know friends in real life who would beg to differ with you ffabia!!

When 1.9.0 gets publicly released I'll take a look at how long it would take me to port all of my changes over (and preferably put a generic framework in for handling the character advancement in all 3 games while I'm at it). A word of warning though - as soon as this gets too much like my day job then I'm going to start losing interest!

- skymarshall

[KuriKai]

You havnt emaild the webmaster yet...
email him and you will have your site.

[Ffabbia]

Been brainstorming some more ideas about this project (I should get myself a life right?).

Starting with
but maybe if I made it so you got a % chance to auto-use the chaos devices

Not such a great idea in my opinion. Chaos devices are unpredictable little rascals, that I prefer to use with some pre-thought, the idea of having one suddenly activate in the middle of a fight could unbalance things and interrupt the tactical flow of combat, via adding a random element of unpredictability .

Imagine having just completed that tricky jumping puzzle in Hub 2, and then being attacked by an Afrit....which causes a chaos device to spawn? You'd have to do the entire jump section again. It would be much better (I think) if a Disk of Repulsion was used instead, that would have obvious benefits, without doing anything drastic to your flow of progression.

Heretic brainstorming
Tricky one this, because the balance of Heretic is radically different to that of Hexen. It's worth remembering that the weapons in Heretic are already effectively supercharged by the use of a Tome of Power. Adding further weapons damage bonuses could very easily unbalance the game, and Heretic is already a very finely balanced beast!

I feel that any possible Heretic modifications should be implemented in a different manner, based upon percentages (chance to cast) for example: rather than allowing players to add points to each individual weapon (and remember there are lots more to choose from than in Hexen), it would be better to add one 'ballpark' point system to the menu, it could actually feature just two areas to add points - such as 'Passive' and 'Attack Rating'. 'Passive' would do obvious things like increase the base health progressivly starting at 100 at level one (same as default), and going all the way up to 200 at the ridiculously high levels, it could also possibly affect things like how many life points are gained from using a Quartz Flask, how long a Tome of Power lasts.....things like that, I'm sure you get the idea.

'Attack Rating' could (for example) give a player a percentage to spawn and cast a Morph Ovum with each attack, regardless of the weapon used. The good thing about this, is that such an ability would not effect boss monsters, and thus maintain an element of balance, it could also occasionally allow ranged attacks to home in on targets, create fire enchanted arrows, a life stealing Dragon Claw...etc. etc....Each successive point placed into 'Attack Rating' would increase this percentage by 5%, but max possible percentage to cast should be no higher than 40%. (and you'd have to place a hell of a lot of points to get that high).

This is just an idea from my warped imagination, and (as I know bugger all about coding), I've no idea how practical it would be to implement.

In my wilder moments, I even imagined a sort of 'shadow warrior' powerup, an avatar that could be spawned for a brief period, consisting of a player duplicate, that follows you around, and fights by your side, armed with a Hellstaff.

Doom Brainstorming
Doom is even trickier, and I'm not convinced that this would work at all in single player.

One thing to bear in mind, is that whereas the weapons in Hexen/Heretic are 'magical', Doom's weapons more closely reflect something in the real world. Thus suddenly giving elemental damage to the shotgun, or suddenly having a rocket launcher that spews out four rockets at once is not only unrealistic (as far as 'realism' counts in a game that allows a player to carry six heavy weapons at once and still run and strafe :D) but is sure to unbalance things. Doom is one of the few exsting games that allows a 'one shot kill' for lower enemies (part of what still makes it so compelling in my opinion). Having an 'ultra shotgun' that can eventually gib a Pinky in one shot is not the way forward.

I can envision a Deathmatch pack however, and that is where such a modification would really come into play. Once again it would be better if these were 'chance to cast' based.

In DM, such considerations are not really as important. Imagine a game in which (as you accumulate frags and gain experience) you get a percentage to cast a quad damage (or JDoom equivalent), quad speed, invisibility, invulnerability, use a heat seeking rocket launcher, or temporarily lose the ability to be hurt from friendly fire?

Nobody wants to stand still in the middle of a DM game, and start going through menus to implement experience points (anyone for a turkey shoot?), so these should ideally be implemented automatically as the players level up, and ideally be completely random.

Once again, I'm sure most of this would be impossible to code, or at least so difficult as to be confined only to these message boards...but imagine the considerations for such a system? even if only for amusement?,,,because it really would be cool! For example, would all experience gained from frags be 'across the board', or could you gain bonuses for certain tactics. In other words campers would be actively punished, as little experience would be gained from from a frag gained via hiding in a little nook with a rocket launcher for 20 minutes (hell, you could even lose experience for camping!). Should a player gain more experience from a flawlesly executed kill, at long range with the shotgun, or chainsaw frag, than from a kamikaze charge at short range with the rocket launcher, causing him to lose most of his life, but succeeding in getting a kill?

At the very least, you have to admit that this is great fun to consider, even if only on paper.

[g6672D]

Your. Mod. Is. Fragging. Fantastic!! Great job on the conversion. I'd love to see more of it. ;)

[werfu]

Hum, this mod open the door for a persistant online world and persitant stats.... a DooM MMORPG??? *jawdrop*

I suggest you could also use both the Heretic and Hexen weapons and item in such a mod (requring the heretic and hexen wad to be legal through). Well... thinking about it, I think if you just use the 3D weapon, would you still need the wad?

[g6672D]

OK. There's several bugs I picked up in your HexenRPG. I can hope they are controlled through the DLL and not the executable.

You can't replenish your life past 100 with "Use Quartz Flask Key". But you CAN do it
by scrolling your inventory to Quartz Flask and "Use Currently Selected Inventory Item". So,
fix it to read max life instead of 100. Mystic Urns work fine as do Health Vials.

OK. Depending on the view size, there's a full status bar or a partial status bar. When using
the full status bar, the life counter doesn't display past 100. With the partial status bar, it
can display past 100. Also, the mana bars can overflow if you upgrade it past 200. So,
correct the life chain and the mana bars by making them display percentage out of maximum
remaining. And I'm assuming the life counter fails to register past 100 because it reads from
the life chain. Either way, correct it to display the current value. The mana counter seems to
work fine.

The Timon's Axe still hits a target more than once. It only appears to occur when you hit a
single enemy.

Some cheat codes clear the stats of the player! Fix please! :)

Now, the upgrade concerns. First of all, the Cleric is unfavoured to the Fighter and Mage. There's many weapon imbalances in all classes too. And then there's the non-weapon upgrades. So, to the problems and ideas! Naturally, it's up to you what to do with them.

Gauntlets: Not really good. Though they do high damage if upgraded a lot, the fire
ring is weak. A weak explosion effect would probably be better.
Timon's Axe: WAY too powerful having it hit multiple targets. Just increase range and
damage. Maybe allow it to hit two at most after heavy upgrade.
Hammer of Retribution: Does lots of damage when upgraded heavily. Increased blast
radius exacerbates the balance problem. Maybe reduce upgrade power.
Quietus: Well, more projectiles + more damage + already high damage = UNBALANCED! :)
Maybe make it consume more mana per upgrade to force points in mana and reduce
damage increase a fair bit.

Mace of Contrition: This sucked in Hexen. It still does. Heavily upgraded does good
damage but it's not worth it due to the range. Maybe rethink this one.
Serpent Staff: This one is probably OK. Just reduce projectile count.
Firestorm: The flame ring isn't really useful. Nor is the actual attack. Maybe have it pierce
targets like Sapphire Wand after several levels.
Wraithverge: This is one of the best weapons in standard Hexen. It still is. :) Still, lets
make a higher mana consumption and reduce power upgrades.

Sapphire Wand: Heavily upgraded, it is really powerful. Weak to start with though. No
mana consumption makes this even better. Like a railgun... :) Anyway, you may want to
reduce its power somewhat.
Frost Shards: The upgrade isn't really useful. Hitting wider areas is hardly needed. Maybe
increase the damage rather than number.
Arc of Death: The current upgrade makes in even unfairer than Timon's Axe! Increase
duration of effect every so points and remove the wall effect (even though it's so pretty!)
and leave the damage increases.
Bloodscourge: Pretty much OK. Except that it gets too potent after heavy upgrade. Increase
mana consumption and reduce upgrades.

Health Upgrades: Since this is based on level rather than contribution of points, lets make it
less powerful! An addition of 5 life per level and an ending level of (around) 75 makes a LOT
of life. So make it 1-2 life added instead. Or make it point-based to make players choose.

Blue/Green Mana Upgrade: These are hardly useful unless you'll be relying on weapon four.
Reduce the initial max mana to a small amount (say, 30) and add a percentage or fixed value
(or both) should make these more desirable.

[g6672D]

A few extra bugs. Sorry to double-post. But the edit button has "vanished".

The mana and life meters in the partial view are capped at 999 though the actual life and mana can go higher. But you won't know except when you don't seem take damage. :)

If you place enough skill points in something (somewhere above 50), it CRASHES the game when you try and add another point.

Dark Bishops give an excessive amount of experience. You really start to level-up after Hub 4 (Heresiarch's Seminary). And it can be well and truly abused in Menelkir's Tomb. Just keep summoning them in the pit room. It's how I discovered the above bugs.

I take my remark back about the Cleric's mace. I managed to pass the game with it on skill four. However, it uncovered a severe issue. Monsters that are destroyed the instant they get killed don't trigger scripts or register as dead! You'll find this causes major problems in Sacred Grove (the Ettin counter is read incorrectly), Dungeons (when you kill the Chaos Serpents, the cells don't open) and Gibbet (it causes that horrible Heresiarch-not-appearing bug again!!!). This occurs with the upgraded mace and (potentially) with the Frost Shards since they also shatter foes now.

I don't know if this is related to the mod or not. But when Traductus fired his Wraithverge, it crashed the game. Usually I kill them before they get to fire a shot. *wacky*

[Event Horizon]

Here's a few ideas:

Gauntlets - The fire damage is a nice idea, but it does need to be changed a bit. The weakest fire damage should have the gauntlets be a dark red color. Thw next level could throw out not a flame ring, but a single flame that will travel out a short distance and explode on impact. The next level would have two flames shoot out, and then three. The highest level could use the napalm explosion from the Death Wyvern attack.

Axe - Instead of hitting multiple targets, it should increase in power as you gain levels. However, you could try dual wielding (I think you'll come across another axe in Wastelands), where you'd swing both axes in about the time it took to swing just the one before, and each axe would hit one target, or the same target twice if only one is there.

Hammer - Maybe have more than one hammer shoot out at higher levels, up to 4.

Quietus - I don't see much need of change here. It's cool enough as it is, although you could start with fewer projectiles at level 1.

Mace - Instead of ice damage, perhaps use open wounds (along with spewing blood) for the higher levels.

Serpent Staff - Increased melee attack health drain for higher levels.

Firestorm - The problem with this is that the flame orbit radius is too large (shoot it at a tree to see what I mean). If you decrease the radius, the flames will all explode on the target instead of circling around it. As for levels, since it goes out a certain distance before stopping, maybe increased range (by increasing the projectile speed) along with number of flames as it gain levels.

Wraithverge - Can't think of much to do with this.

Wand - Probably my favorite weapon in this mod, especially the highest level attack

Frost Shards - The huge spread at higher levels makes this weapon much less useful than you might think. Maybe as the number of shards increase, the spread could be kept about the same as in normal Hexen.

Arc of Death - You could stick with one bolt, but increase damage and duration as it gain levels.

Bloodscourge - Nothing much wrong with this.

For some of these you could have increased mana cost as they gain levels.

Oh, and one last thing. Get rid of that hit count (not the kill count). For an example of how annoying it can get, blow up one of a group of poison mushrooms and see what happens.

[Danimetal]

Definitely looks interesting... I should download and try it... Are you planning a custom map pack for that Hexen mod?.

[Psykoman]

Yes !!!
Final something new for Hexen *flip* *thumbs*

[GuntherDW]

sorry for bumping this thread but
how's this mod coming along, i would LOVE to see a linux port and an updated version :p

[Zhanavahn]

sorry for bumping this thread but
how's this mod coming along, i would LOVE to see a linux port and an updated version :p
Just wait, i think that this Mod´ll return later

[Valherran]

Hiya, i just stumbled onto this thread and tried out that MOD of yours for Hexen, i liked it, and it made the game alot LESS boring when your trying to get through the puzzles etc. I have found a few bugs here and there, and there are some things you can fix that the game creators didnt. Also i have a TON of ideas for you, when you start remaking the MOD for the latest Doomsday, i will post the entire list! :-)

[picklebro]

Well the original poster hasn't posted since January last year - don't be surprised if you never hear from him again. :(

[doomjedi]

May I remind you that there are already RPG Hexen project, it's called "Korax Heritage"...it has all those features and more.
http://www.korax-heritage.com/

[Valherran]

VERY interesting MOD, i will DL it and check it out, thank you for the input, and i will tell you all what i thought of it when im done.

ummm, cant seem tog et this to work, i get this error everytime i try to start it, can anyone help?

R_InitTextures: Missing patch in texture ABADONE

[picklebro]

Most likely you have to insert the Hexen wad somewhere in the install files in order for it to run.

[doomjedi]

VERY interesting MOD, i will DL it and check it out, thank you for the input, and i will tell you all what i thought of it when im done.

ummm, cant seem tog et this to work, i get this error everytime i try to start it, can anyone help?

R_InitTextures: Missing patch in texture ABADONE

Hm...hope you'll find a way to make it work after all

[Milten]

It's a good mod, but there's a question. Is it possible to make that mod multiplayer compatible? Because, onle the host is getting all the experience. An after dying, alls experiences are lost

[g6672D]

/me schedules for download on Wednesday

Which jDoom does it run on?

[Valherran]

figured out the problem, you have to get the 1.1 version of the hexen.wad file, and then cut and paste it into the folder in which the MOD is located in, the REAL bad part about this is, i cant DL it from file front, it wont let me, so i went to the MOD's forums and registered to see if they will send me a 1.1 version.

Curses...IDK how long it will take them to activate my account there, although it took this forum like 5 days to activate mine...sooo...

[GuntherDW]

May I remind you that there are already RPG Hexen project, it's called "Korax Heritage"...it has all those features and more.
http://www.korax-heritage.com/

i has everyting and more...
but a linux version :p