Blasphemer discussion

Does E1M6 have a "normal" exit? The only exit I can find is "secret" and leads to E1M9.

I have completed the whole episode 1 uv-max, but still haven't found weapon 7. Is it normal?

E2M4: no secret exit? 

@siealex, thank you for testing this so thoroughly!

E2M5 is a whole teleporter mess :-D 

A couple of suggestions on monsters.

1. Make ordinary gargouilles and fire gargouilles visually different. Also make their fireballs clearly visible, green poison droplets cannot be seen in dark places.

2. The same for golems and nitrogolems: make them visually different, e. g. use differently colored sprites.

3. Increase the amount of ammo for weapon 4 on all maps, it is way less than in Heretic.

I'm pretty sure that using different sprites/colors for "leader" versions of the monsters compared to the "minion" versions requires code/HHE/DECORATE changes that are (AFAIK) outside of the purview of this project, unfortunately.

E2M5. I reached the northwesternmost part of the map (near the blue door) and jumped down. But I can't get to the upper portion in this part. Should I use the Wings of Wrath?

PS, the Wings are actually in three square pits near the map center :-O 

E2M6: a lot of sectors near the starting point (176, 173, 169, 9, 172, 174, 171) are marked "secret", but are unreachable (unlike sector 175) without the Wings. Even more, sector 9 is extremely difficult to register even with the Wings.

E2M6: this lift does not go down when entered from above.

I have forked Blasphemer. New stuff getting added. Will go through thread and see what else can be added.

https://github.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer

Also updated iwad downloads available. These iwads should always be recent.

https://github.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer/raw/master/blasphem.zip

Current repo changelog:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer/master/FORK_CHANGELOG.md

On 3/5/2023 at 6:51 AM, AntonR said:

Here's another version with 9 additional sounds, a few revisions too.
Stuff added includes: some hopefully suitably creepy sounds for the iron lich replacement, a hissing idle for the ophidian, explosion and firing sound for phoenix rod, a new water ambience, new lift sounds and others.

If you want me to do any specific sounds, let me know and I will give it a shot!

 

Blasphedits-v2.zip

Can you list the sounds that were CC0? Ill add them to the fork, but will keep license. 

Thank you all for keeping the project going! Going for a fork is the best course of action imho, as i more or less left the scene :)

On 2/20/2024 at 4:47 AM, Catoptromancy said:

 

Can you list the sounds that were CC0? Ill add them to the fork, but will keep license. 

It's all of them, they are all made from CC0/public domain sources, and for my part, unless stated otherwise I consider everything I share here to also carry the CC0 license.

On a completely random note, I've had this stupid idea for a while: would it make any sense to somehow make Blasphemer tie in with REKKR? Or would this be like forcing two completely unrelated projects on one another? My reasoning is that both are fantasy-themed Doom engine community projects, so perhaps it would be nice to establish some sort of connection between the two along the lines of how Heretic and HeXen are related?

I'm thinking that perhaps such a connection could sort of bring more focus to Blasphemer in terms of world-building, because REKKR was originally conceived as a stand-alone universe with a well-outlined theme, while Blasphemer, like Freed∞m, originated as first and foremost a free resource IWAD for Heretic source ports, having to kinda fit into the Procrustean limitations of the former, with the lore and characters following these already established patterns of Heretic's design.

I understand that this might not be actually a good thing and @Revae might very well not agree too. But I guess there's no harm in asking.

I have added some of those new sounds. I am trying to follow Freedoom standards, so will allow CC0/public domain as placeholders. New resources made by the community will always be preferred. Looking at sprites, will figure out how to add soon.

Here is a list of all resources. Anything that is a placeholder can be updated using CC0. Anything anyone makes, can replace it though.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer/master/wadinfo.txt

Also Iwad is now on the repo in a .zip instead. 

https://github.com/Catoptromancy/blasphemer/raw/master/blasphem.zip

Double posted by mistake, whoops

On 7/24/2023 at 2:54 PM, MrFlibble said:

Strigoi is Greek (but somehow plural if yes)?

Nope, Romanian, comes from Latin. I can see why you'd think it's Greek though, as the Romans ultimately borrowed the base word from Greek.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strigoi

I looked at which ports blasphem works in. The video shows the game in k8vavoom with the bdw mod.
Besides k8vavoom, this works in vavoom 1.33, edge-classic, doomlegacy 1.48. I haven't watched GZdoom, but I think everything is fine there.
Does not work in Risen3D, Odamex and Helion.
In general, a very interesting experience playing heretic with weapons from brutaldoom. I wonder if patch like Dehacked and MBF21 allows you to modify the Heretic?
 

More visible boss, and added a few knight frames. 

On 2/29/2024 at 4:43 AM, MrFlibble said:

On a completely random note, I've had this stupid idea for a while: would it make any sense to somehow make Blasphemer tie in with REKKR? Or would this be like forcing two completely unrelated projects on one another? My reasoning is that both are fantasy-themed Doom engine community projects, so perhaps it would be nice to establish some sort of connection between the two along the lines of how Heretic and HeXen are related?

 

I'm thinking that perhaps such a connection could sort of bring more focus to Blasphemer in terms of world-building, because REKKR was originally conceived as a stand-alone universe with a well-outlined theme, while Blasphemer, like Freed∞m, originated as first and foremost a free resource IWAD for Heretic source ports, having to kinda fit into the Procrustean limitations of the former, with the lore and characters following these already established patterns of Heretic's design.

 

I understand that this might not be actually a good thing and @Revae might very well not agree too. But I guess there's no harm in asking.

I don't know that you could place them in the same universe. You could fudge it, perhaps -- REKKR is set in a Norse-influenced fantasy setting but it's easy to pretend that it's just the Viking era from the Dark Ages, and Blasphemer certainly has overtones of Christianity in the strongly Satanic-gothic sense. But that's probably something that should be strictly headcanon.

Another, I suppose more metaphysical, approach would be that these fantasy settings, and indeed almost all fantasy settings in constructed worlds, are simply refractions of our own cultural history, just under the skein of reality. When you consider how much isekai fantasy there is out there, and then when you consider how often it pops up in western video games (even Heretic features alternate worlds conquered by D'Sparil) it's easy to from there take the step that these fantasy settings all share a multiverse in some way. Of course that runs the risk of a very broad scope, and sounding absolutely bonkers (wait'll you hear my theory about the Elder Scrolls setting!) but it leaves room for crossover between these two obscure boomer shooter fantasy games.

(I'm not kidding about how often the isekai concept pops up in western fantasy -- outside of novels like Chronicles of Narnia, it's a frequent theme in games like Ultima, Raven's own Shadowcaster, Undertale, and so on.)

@june gloom, I'll be perfectly honest, I had not heard the term isekai until today :) Although it does seem similar to the concept of accidental travel that I'm familiar with.

The starting point of my reasoning is that the Heretic/HeXen trilogy already includes the notion of different worlds being targeted by the Serpent Riders -- although I do not remember right now if they are supposed to be in different dimensions or are just different planets within the same universe. This alone is a setting that allows to bring together distinct settings -- I'm not sure why Raven did not explore this further and include worlds with higher-tech civilizations as opposed to just Western magic fantasy.

In REKKR, the bad guys pour from some kind of hell dimension, so it could be imagined that this, in turn, is in some way related to the menace which the protagonist of Blasphemer is fighting (which I think is not yet something fleshed out in the project's lore?). On the other hand, if you take Heretic and HeXen, there are only a few characters and items that have been directly borrowed into the latter from the former, if you don't count the similarity of the general art direction. But both games are part of the same story and the same ethos, in addition to being similar because they use the same engine. In practical terms, I suppose that a single secret level in Blasphemer referencing REKKR could be already a very nice feature, in my opinion.

Isekai and "portal fantasy" (and "accidental travel") are all basically the same thing, usually with more focus on one trope or another depending on culture and era but those differences aren't inherent to the genre, more a matter of approach. I just say isekai because I'm a Millennial nerd with weebish tendencies and "isekai" is less of a mouthful.

Also, as far as Heretic is concerned, in the retail game you actually visit three separate dimensions conquered by the Serpent riders -- episodes 2, 4 and 5. Multidimensional travel plays a big role in Heretic's plot (remember that Corvus gets thrown out of his home dimension and is stuck wandering various dimensions looking for a way back, which he finally does at the start of Heretic II.) At the very least, it's implied in the manuals for Hexen I and II that these are all different dimensions that the Serpent Riders have been gradually conquering.

I think the Raven games like many fantasy games from around the time owes a lot of this to Moorcock, who established the typical use of a fantasy multiverse through Elric of Melniboné, Jerry Cornelius, Hawkmoon, Corum and the rest of them all in different worlds and times and scenarios connected by the same traversable multiverse.

Let's say it's not so subtly hinted at by the dimension travelling Lords of Chaos in Moorcock's stories using the eight pointed arrow star symbol he invented, which looks and awful lot like the Chaos Device in the Raven games.

Nitpicky, but I would not tie Blasphemer in with the theme and story of a game that is not equally free from an asset standpoint.

12 hours ago, dasho said:

Nitpicky, but I would not tie Blasphemer in with the theme and story of a game that is not equally free from an asset standpoint.

Agreed.  Whatever headcanon you want is fine, but if it were to be anything "official" it should be some sort of Free game multiverse that projects can mutually work off of.

Yes I think that's sensible

I agree with that.

On 3/23/2024 at 3:27 AM, dasho said:

Nitpicky, but I would not tie Blasphemer in with the theme and story of a game that is not equally free from an asset standpoint.

On 3/23/2024 at 3:52 PM, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Agreed.  Whatever headcanon you want is fine, but if it were to be anything "official" it should be some sort of Free game multiverse that projects can mutually work off of.

It is true that REKKR assets are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, while the Blasphemer license allows commercial use among other things, but it's still FOSS in both cases, is it not?