class-based doom ports?

[bouvrie]

Whenever a multiplayer game is started with people having different Dehacked patches, the game won't start due to different versions.

I was wondering though: would there be an easy way to make engines 'allow' this? I've always dreamt of doing a mod that adds specific other-game characters to Doom, along with their respected weapons.

For example, in many source ports, players can customise their skin, so it's already possible to make a match of Duke Nukem vs Doom Marine vs Lo Wang, but all players will have to share their weapon arsenal.

It would be rather awesome however, to change the weapon graphics and behavior, based on the skin selected. Duke Nukem could then potentially shoot his special Duke weapons vs the Doom Guy, who could respond with a big BFG blast in Duke's face. :D

Aside from the objections in terms of balancing out characters and all, would such a construction be plausible, given some of the current source ports? Or would it require a complete rehaul of the engine, because the server will have to calculate behavior and stats from multiple dehacked patches running at the same time?

[ace]

ZDoom (http://www.zdoom.org) has support for custom player classes, though you won't be able to do it via DeHacked (which yes, would be, AFAIK, impossible); rather, you'd have to know how to use ZDoom's DECORATE (http://www.zdoom.org/wiki/index.php?title=DECORATE) and create the classes from scratch (or find someone willing enough to do it for you, though I'd only be able to wish you the best of luck for that ;)).

[bouvrie]

ok, so this is a ZDoom-only feature? I figured, since a lot of source ports support Hexen and Heretic (i.e. other class-based games), extending the classes would be relatively easy if the engine was programmed in an extendable way?

I glanced over some sites on ZDoom custom classes, but I don't see it being used that much. I wonder why, or perhaps my search wasn't specific enough... :P

[ace]

The player classes feature is relatively new (the first major update to the engine for about 7 years just happened about six months ago, and the version which included this feature for the first time, 2.1.2, came out just a month later), so I'm not surprised that not many have used it yet.

AFAICT, creating custom classes isn't very difficult, though it's a far cry from making DeHackEd patches (which, to be fair, I find to be much more difficult than DECORATE anyway).

However, creating custom "classes" doesn't necessarily have the same meaning as the Hexen/Heretic "class" idea. With custom classes, you can basically change the skin, player speed, max health, starting weapon, jump height, score icon, sound class, etc. After looking it over, I guess that you can't restrict certain classes to certain weapon types, but it might be possible by hacking around with ZDoom's features to limit what weapons certain players can pick up (though it would undoubtedly be complicated, I'm guessing).

But seeing as I'm not an expert on this specific area, you could always get better help at the ZDoom forum through the link in my last post. You'd probably find much more accurate information/help there.