Hacx 1.2

- HacX IWAD 1.2: DOWNLOAD from /idgames, updated 10-10-10 -

My apologies for the delay to the three or four of you who were eagerly awaiting this, but the HacX 1.2 IWAD release is done. Note that this is NOT the super-updated version that's been promised -- that's actually in the works and will be accepting new members very soon. This is an interim release to get a few things working... think of it as a consolation prize if nothing else.

Don't expect anything super-new, though. Most of the gameplay is identical to HacX v1.1, and while a few improvements are present (maps work in co-op, a couple of the weapons animate better, etc.) it is largely the same game. The primary purpose behind this release is not to provide new content but to get a stable, standalone version of HacX out there. There was some version discrepancy between previous HacX releases (1.0 had screwy textures and 1.1 introduced a couple of DeHackEd bugs) and neither one of them was a standalone IWAD. Note that this version is an official HacX release (under Nostromo's authority), and older versions can be considered obsolete. ;)

At any rate, co-op works, so gather up some friends and get HacXing!


P.S. -- Just for the sake of letting everyone know that there is real work being done on a full 2.0 update, or if you're looking for something new, check out Protean Cybex (MAP16), a (rather large) HacX map I've done for the new version. It's based on the original HacX design docs and is set in a massive chemical plant that you get to blow up. Gameplay's still a bit rough, but that'll be worked on as soon as people start complaining. I mean commenting.

Major huge thanks to Nostromo for help n' support for starting this crazy project, Blzut3 for donating his DECORATE work and co-leading the project (go go SVN!), and Quasar for putting up with our constant support bothering. ;)

Too cool! I was going to go to bed as it's 1AM and I've been playing a new Wolf3D map pack and MM8BDM too long but now that I've seen this it looks like it's going to be a late one! I knew I should've just shut down the computer but, no, I had to go and check my geeky sites before bed! Grrr, damn pesky games! :)

What does the DECORATE lump provide that the DEHACKED lump doesn't? Is it just minor aesthetic stuff, or has the behavior of monsters been significantly changed?

andrewj said:

What does the DECORATE lump provide that the DEHACKED lump doesn't? Is it just minor aesthetic stuff, or has the behavior of monsters been significantly changed?

The player's view height was increased and the weapon puffs have been changed visually. It also restores the blue invulnerability colormap to ZDoom. Other than those I don't think there are any other changes.

That said Hacx 2.0 will be abandoning DeHackEd. Right now we only plan to support Eternity and ZDoom (and compatibles), but if we get ports of the decorate code to other formats we may consider other engines as well.

The main motivation for the DECORATE code is for future extension, as Blzut3 said. The changes are minor in this version but there is now a code base to work with for adding all sorts of stuff in the future.

Its inclusion here was mostly a matter of "It's here, so why not use it?" It makes things a little friendlier, if nothing else.

For the record, there are also EDFs in progress. They were originally going to be present in the wad as well but time got away and we figured it would be best to release it sooner than later. That's okay considering it's not the final version. :P

I haven't really heard of this project before; what are you going to be changing/adding in 2.0? Will the existing maps be overhauled? I'm assuming you will be expanding the game to 32 maps, at the least.

Edit: Delete me.

P.S. Good to see this version 1.2 is out, well done!

Some time ago (6 or 9 months, I dunno) I had the idea to do this myself -- take the necessary bits from FreeDoom, put the dehacked info into the DEHACKED lump, and thereby make a stand-alone IWAD. But before making a thread about it, I googled around, found you guys had started doing the same thing, and I left it there.

So I'm glad to see this version appear, and even gladder that it stays fairly true to its DOOM roots and didn't become restricted to a single source port or source port family.

HacX is comparable to FreeDOOM in many ways, a totally free game using the DOOM engine, and I think it's rather more successful (albeit having less maps) since it achieves it's own artistic integrity and storyline, whereas FreeDOOM is a fairly straight clone of DOOM.

Thanks for your work, and good luck with 2.0

YES

Do note that Eternity natively supports this as an IWAD and will make various interface adjustments to accomodate it :)

It's totally my fault that the EDF wasn't ready on time, but I don't think it'll make a big difference, since EE doesn't quite yet support most of what the DECORATE changes. I'll be focusing on those things in time for the next release though ^_^

Quasar: Good to hear! I had noticed some oddities with running HacX with the -iwad switch (though I'm still running the Simorgh release build), namely the game trying to treat it as Doom 1 and fail when trying to start an episode, but Blzut3 assured me that you'd fix that more easily than we could. :P

Remind me to talk with you about the DECORATE tweaks. I'm planning on updating the weapon set with some new behaviors and I want to get some idea of what EDF supports so I know what to work with.

david_a said:

I haven't really heard of this project before; what are you going to be changing/adding in 2.0? Will the existing maps be overhauled? I'm assuming you will be expanding the game to 32 maps, at the least.

Both. The original idea was just to finish up the remaining maps according to the original specs and call it done, but it would be a sin to leave some of the original maps untouched or not take advantage of a new feature or two.

It really surprised me how much detail was given into detailing the game prior to its creation. There's a "HacX Bible" of sorts that would've resulted in one killer game had it been followed to the letter. What it really boiled down to was a lack of time, unfortunately. The game was rushed so Banjo could work on a sequel (and to avoid competition with Quake), which never got far either because of other issues. At any rate, I'm hoping to release the original design docs sometime along the development line, probably closer to release so not much is spoiled. :P

Xaser said:
Note that this version is an official HacX release (under Nostromo's authority), and older versions can be considered obsolete. ;)

Cool, Hacx seems suitable for beefing up with ports, but when you upload it to idgames make sure it's placed with but doesn't replace the original and vanilla-compatible v1.1.

myk said:

vanilla-compatible v1.1.

Isn't Hacx 1.2 just as compatible with Vanilla as 1.1? Just extract the dehacked and apply the patch. You won't get the ZDoom enhancements of course, but they're all cosmetic at this point.

Possibly; and maybe v1.2 can fully replace v1.1, but I'm just saying because the usual policy is to "replace older versions of your projects on idgames" but this one may have historical reasons to keep the original "registered" one. Not replacing should also give greater freedom in updating the existing stuff with ports, in v2.0.

I'll drop a note to Ty to not replace the original versions -- they should still be around for historical interest. If there exist Doom/2 downgrade patches, why not? ;)

FYI, 1.2 is still fully vanilla-compatible. I actually have a HACX.EXE I made from DOOM.EXE + the included DeHackEd patch that runs HACX.WAD as its own game, and it works great as long as you don't try and enable PC speaker sound.

I would go as far as to argue that 1.2 is suitable for "fully replacing" 1.1 in the sense that it completely obsoletes the older version in every way except demo compatibility (not that there are many HacX demos out there, I suppose). But wiping 1.1 from the face of the internet would not be so great, I'd imagine. :P


On that note, I don't suppose anyone's found any glaring issues to prevent an /idgames upload yet? I'm hoping to get it uploaded to the archives by tomorrow or Monday so it gets a permanent home.

Xaser said:

On that note, I don't suppose anyone's found any glaring issues to prevent an /idgames upload yet? I'm hoping to get it uploaded to the archives by tomorrow or Monday so it gets a permanent home.

It's not glaring, but Eternity wasn't able to play the demos in sync, so it might be worth rerecording them?

Good catch -- I checked with the vanilla .exe and sure enough, the player dies prematurely there as well. Curse my ZDoom-fueled ways: I always forget about the demos in the title screen. :P

I can re-record them easily, so long as nobody minds them being different. I'll stay on the same maps though, for the illusion of similarity. :P

Yeah, rerecording seems necessary.

If you have any DOOM fans nearby you could also introduce a coop demo (or DM demo) using DOSBox, Chocolate Doom or PrBoom.

You could even play something with Nostromo himself, if you're not far away, given the time to contact him.

Why was the players view height increased in the ZDoom lumps?

Seems a strange tweak to make because it means all your attacks uniquely spawn higher in said port family.

The other little ZDoom and Eternity specifc things added only very slightly affect a few visuals, so they don't really matter (though their pressence is a little strange; I would have thought that they would have been held back for the Hacx2.0 mod), but the view height thing leads to a game play difference between ports.

This is awesome you guys are trying to fix this. The original was good, but it was a bit too buggy. Also, now that it won't need the Doom 2 IWAD, that's pretty awesome too.

Mmm yah, instead of raising the view height it would have made more sense to scale the player sprites down wouldn't it?

A couple of the bugs I found earlier and reported were not fixed, it seems:

• In the Lava Caves if you go down one lift you're offered rubber boots to guard from the lava, but the other side doesn't have one. This means if you get down there with too little health, you are condemned to death.
  
• In Digi-Ota it seems you can get stuck if you make it over the edge of the platform in time. None of the switches in the area which are apparently supposed to raise this walkway back up seem to do anything at all.
  

Demos are done. First there's a short MAP15 walk in the style of the original DEMO1 (only with actual gameplay :P ), a MAP12 demo which shows how to progress from the start a bit, and a MAP19 co-op run between myself and Blzut3 that shows just how much less annoying it is without all the backtracking. Before dying, of course. ;P

I did try and contact Nostromo for a co-op demo run, but he wasn't available. We'll just have to give it another go "just for fun" later.

For whatever reason, though, the new DEMO1 just doesn't want to work right in Chocolate Doom. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the demo itself -- playing it back via command line works just fine -- but any time I try to put any of my MAP15 takes in the DEMO1 slot, it desyncs in Chocolate (though Eternity plays it back correctly, interestingly). I'm not sure if this is a bug on Chocolate's part (I'm using 1.4.0, for the record) or if the DeHackEd is just confusing the engine. Either way, it always works in EE and never does in ZDoom, so at least there's a little bit of consistency. :P

In other news, I reluctantly changed the viewheight back to normal, for this release. I like the increased height (and that's how it'll be in 2.0), but I suppose you're right in that it's inconsistent between ports and isn't exactly "classic" by any stretch. So, enjoy the dwarfism, I suppose. :P

Quasar said:

In the Lava Caves if you go down one lift you're offered rubber boots to guard from the lava, but the other side doesn't have one. This means if you get down there with too little health, you are condemned to death.

I've never been happy with the placement of the boots in the first place -- there's nothing stopping the player from just grabbing them before heading upstairs. I'm thinking about just moving them to a spot where the player can grab them from the lava, in case they happen to miss. I don't like the idea of introducing a second one since it would prevent 100% items.

Quasar said:

In Digi-Ota it seems you can get stuck if you make it over the edge of the platform in time. None of the switches in the area which are apparently supposed to raise this walkway back up seem to do anything at all.

What's actually happening here, I think, is that the switch at the bottom (which is supposed to raise the walkway) is being hindered by the walkover lines nearby, which have a lift action that temporarily prevents the raise switch from being hit until the action finishes. It's just a badly-designed area. Changing the lift action to an SR type is a trivial change, so you don't have to wait for the lift special to reset before you can hit the raise switch.

Thanks for pointing these out again -- sorry I missed them last time.

In Map03 the front sides of lines 1868, 1341, 1869 and 1333 should have had the texture SFALL1 , not PIPE2.

Fixing that won't be quite as simple as changing the textures, but it's doable. At this point, though, I think it's best to call it quits regarding non-gameplay-essential map tweaks. The maps are all going to get a more thorough comb-over later that will fix all these and more. I'm about ready to wrap 1.2 up and get on to the real deal -- this is an interim release, after all. ;)

[EDIT] Okay, so I did fix this one. But that's the last (nonessential) one. :P

Whats with all the ZDoom-specific lumps in HACX.WAD? They seem totally out of place in an IWAD.

andrewj said:

What does the DECORATE lump provide that the DEHACKED lump doesn't? Is it just minor aesthetic stuff, or has the behavior of monsters been significantly changed?

Blzut3 said:

The player's view height was increased and the weapon puffs have been changed visually. It also restores the blue invulnerability colormap to ZDoom. Other than those I don't think there are any other changes.

That said Hacx 2.0 will be abandoning DeHackEd. Right now we only plan to support Eternity and ZDoom (and compatibles), but if we get ports of the decorate code to other formats we may consider other engines as well.

Xaser said:

The main motivation for the DECORATE code is for future extension, as Blzut3 said. The changes are minor in this version but there is now a code base to work with for adding all sorts of stuff in the future.

Its inclusion here was mostly a matter of "It's here, so why not use it?" It makes things a little friendlier, if nothing else.

For the record, there are also EDFs in progress. They were originally going to be present in the wad as well but time got away and we figured it would be best to release it sooner than later. That's okay considering it's not the final version. :P

I get that but why do they need to be in the IWAD? Is it not better to have a set of accompanying PWAD addons for each port?

I'm currently researching a possible jHacx plugin and in my use, this will all be redundant data.

DaniJ said:

Is it not better to have a set of accompanying PWAD addons for each port?

In my opinion, not at all. I don't need a PWAD addon to use the Doom2 or Heretic IWADs, so why should I need an addon to use the Hacx IWAD? For the original games, all the data that would go in these control lumps is part of the engine, but it makes more sense to include control lumps for ports than to distribute Hacx with its own custom engine, à la Caverns of Darkness or Carnage Galore.

DaniJ said:

I'm currently researching a possible jHacx plugin and in my use, this will all be redundant data.

I don't think having an engine ignore the lumps it doesn't use is a problem unsurmountable enough to merit inconveniencing users of other engines. :p

Why can't the ZDoom lumps in Hacx 1.2 be distributed in the ZDoom.pk3 instead? Ditto for the Eternity lumps.

I mean Deng team presumebly plan to distribute the Dday Hacx deds with Dday it'self or as an optional download; I don't see DaniJ asking to put his upcoming deds in the Hacx Iwad.

Seems that the BFALL animation in Hacx1.2 causes a "P_InitPicAnims: bad cycle" error in Vanilla Doom.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Error_message#P_InitPicAnims:_bad_cycle_from_.25s_to_.25s