Hexen Hack Editor (HEX)

(Not sure if it goes here or in Everything Else)

Hello everyone!

I've just made a small DoomWiki page for an old DeHackEd equivalent for Hexen called Hexen Hack Editor (HEX). But, unlike Heretic Hack Editor and SeHackEd, it appears that this utility wasn't that much used and its patches are not supported by any source port. The only thing I was able to find is this closed feature request in Chocolate Doom repo. My search through the idgames archive didn't show any mods using HEX. And it seems strange, because according to its release history HEX was in very active development (almost 20 public releases between February 1996 and June 1998).

So, the question is - does anyone here ever used this program? Have you heard of any mods using it? Maybe you know some HEX-related stories - please share!

I had heard about the Heretic one (HHE), but I never knew there was one for Hexen.

Perhaps the reason no source ports support these is because the files they create are binary files instead of text files.  I have experience with the early DEHACKED binary files, and the EDGE source port could load them, but they would be a pain to support since they are just the raw structures dumped into a file, and all the source ports (even conservate ones) have extended their structures (mobj_t in particular).

On 5/4/2024 at 4:00 PM, Nockson said:

So, the question is - does anyone here ever used this program? Have you heard of any mods using it? Maybe you know some HEX-related stories - please share!

I've tried.  It's hard to get it working (I forget all the specifics offhand, but I remember having a dickens of a time, it seems to dislike DOSBox and on my Windows 98 computer I had to use a throttling program because it's made with Turbo Pascal and has the infamous divide by zero bug that the patch for rarely seems to work right and didn't in this case either) and it's even more limited than HHE.  Combine that with Hexen, even more than Heretic, having weird hardcoded aspects to entities and functions, and it's not really any wonder that no one did much with it.

I also remember trying it and basically being unable to make any significant changes without either it crashing/locking up, or the resulting hacked hexen.exe behaving weirdly.

Thank you all for answers! Do you remember what versions you were using? Was it final 0.84f or maybe some other early version?

4 minutes ago, Nockson said:

Thank you all for answers! Do you remember what versions you were using? Was it final 0.84f or maybe some other early version?

The ones available on idgames, so probably mostly the final version but I think I did at least try loading v0.53p to see if it ran any better (it didn't as I recall).

I believe I tried two different versions, don't remember which ones but one was surely 0.84f if that was the last release.

Mostly out of curiosity, what is commonly used to make Hexen levels? I don’t hear about Hexen mods very often, and I wonder if the lack of good editors is the reason? Or am I wrong and good editors do exist as well as a lot of mods and I somehow haven’t heard of them?

27 minutes ago, Skullzrawk9 said:

Mostly out of curiosity, what is commonly used to make Hexen levels? I don’t hear about Hexen mods very often, and I wonder if the lack of good editors is the reason? Or am I wrong and good editors do exist as well as a lot of mods and I somehow haven’t heard of them?

Now, or back then?

Nowadays, just about any of the Doom Builder iterations do a good job.

In the 90s, good options were indeed fewer than those for Doom, in my experience of messing around with a few of them, WinDEU was probably the best choice but there were some others that saw use too.

29 minutes ago, Skullzrawk9 said:

Mostly out of curiosity, what is commonly used to make Hexen levels? I don’t hear about Hexen mods very often, and I wonder if the lack of good editors is the reason? Or am I wrong and good editors do exist as well as a lot of mods and I somehow haven’t heard of them?

Like Heretic, I think for the most part you are either Vanilla or GZDoom with no in-between. So Ultimate Doom Builder and SLADE, probably. Crispy has been making a lot of strides on the Raven IWADs in terms of making a viable limit removing option with some nice, boom like quality of life changes (SWITCHES, AnimDefs, etc.). There is kind of a lack of easily findable documentation for non-zdoom stuff, Ettingrinder is probably the authority.

So, it looks like HEX is just an obscure unfinished utilty that saw little to no use. Well, if no other exe-editor for Hexen has come out in the last 25 years, that means the demand is not that great. There are only nine Hexen WADs covered on the DoomWiki right now, and only two of them are for Vanilla Hexen.

It is also sad that the source code for both HEX and HHE was never released.

I do remember The Five Realms of Satan, which used HHE, basically Hex for Heretic, for the first episode. HHE was lost in the mists of time and for the same reason. It's a bitch not being able to see older stuff as intended, despite ZScript or DDF rendering these hack programs obsolete for new stuff.

42 minutes ago, Martin Howe said:

I do remember The Five Realms of Satan, which used HHE, basically Hex for Heretic, for the first episode. HHE was lost in the mists of time and for the same reason. It's a bitch not being able to see older stuff as intended, despite ZScript or DDF rendering these hack programs obsolete for new stuff.

It appears that Heretic HE was more popular, a few mods using it are on idgames. It is also used in some latest mapsets, like Fastest Shovels 6 and PUSS XXVIII: Quoth the Raven. HEX however is nowhere to be find.

On 5/6/2024 at 6:24 PM, TheHambourgeois said:

Like Heretic, I think for the most part you are either Vanilla or GZDoom with no in-between. So Ultimate Doom Builder and SLADE, probably. Crispy has been making a lot of strides on the Raven IWADs in terms of making a viable limit removing option with some nice, boom like quality of life changes (SWITCHES, AnimDefs, etc.). There is kind of a lack of easily findable documentation for non-zdoom stuff, Ettingrinder is probably the authority.

Not quite; as a port fully supporting Heretic and HeXen (as opposed to most other ports partial support), there was/is Doomsday in between Vanilla (HHE and HEX) and GZDoom; Heretic Doomsday supported near all of Doomsdays modding features from mobj defs to XG etc etc.

But no non-visual mods (i.e model packs etc) were ever released for Doomsday Heretic.

HeXen Doomsday didn't support XG (though naturally it supported Vanilla HeXen ACS), but it did/does support mobj defs, infine etc. Again no -non-visual mods were ever released for it.