The Heretic Project (Quest Name Pending)
-
another picture except you can see this time:
-
Damn that looks good. I love your mapping style.
-
Thank you! The terrain detail funnily enough not only makes for a more natural environment but also can trigger those multitudes of gargoyle imp gibs that amused me before!
-
Cool little project here!
I was wondering if it was still ok to participate.
As I have a half-finished map and one fully planned from my previous heretic stuff and I think they would fit well here. There should be still enough time for me. -
@Fryuko Yes of course you can still participate! I'll see if I can update the resource pack tonight or tomorrow at the latest.
-
My map is ready, I playtested in DSDA-Doom, but I'm not sure how it will play in Crispy Heretic.
Title : Library Theatre
Music : I Appear Missing - Queens Of The Stone Age -
@joe-ilya FDA recorded with Crispy Heretic joelib1.lmp I forgot to bind my look keys but that's not important!
Thank you for the map! Time to be a bully:
Did not finish. The enemy count before the library is too beefy and I didn't have the ammo to take them on, the monsters can fulfill their purpose still only having half as many. I figured at first you just wanted me to move on ahead but even throughout the map I'm struggling for resources and I see arrows and claw orbs but have no idea where the weapons are. My experience was a frustrating slog overall. Kept dying trying to push forward to get anything to help me kill the overwhelming opposition. The library looks great.Since I wasn't able to progress very far I can only say that the Dragon Claw would be much better, say at the center of the bridge (with some ammo too please). Maybe some Morph Ovums where the crossbow is, which the crossbow hardly helps at all since it seems to have no presence or real use as things stand.
The music will have to change too.
EDIT: I think cutting down on the forest opening some should flow better. Also about music Castlevania/Square Enix stuff is a pretty safe bet.
-
RESOURCE PACK THIRD EDITION
DOWNLOAD HereticLRP_RSW3.wad
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The changes:
- The offsets of HM_039 have been fixed.
- HM_034 has been replaced with a small wooden wheel graphic.
- New textures including several walls and flats, and a bit of everything else.
- Among those new textures are two new dithered animations, one being fog and the other a forceful waterfall mist found in E1M2.
- A duplicate of the blue portal now as a purple/red one for purposes to not be confused with exits.
- Removed the pitchfork and made it a midtexture. The ground spiky rock has been returned.
-
v2 contains a lot more Phoenix ammo, a couple more Ovums, an extra Dragon Claw in the library, and changed the music to E3M7 from megawad.wad.
-
@joe-ilya Okay time for some in-depth feedback where I detail my gripes and then some.
First of all the intro part still irritates me because all it does is stall me from reaching the good (looking) part of the map. With each restart I have to spam fire on hordes of monsters for a while before anything interesting happens. It doesn't grab attention but instead detracts from holding any due to how numb it feels to play. Again the worst part is having to go through this tedium with each play of the map, and doesn't make a good first impression being so flat and basic.
The gameplay is largely samey until a ghost monster shows up or an alternate weapon is obtained. You have these single gargoyles that pop up while only having the Phoenix Rod, which feels like a waste to use on a single gargoyle when the real fun is when you get to use it blow up an entire group. Getting the Ethereal Crossbow has me switch back to the Phoenix Rod so I can use the it for something it's actually good for.
With ghost monsters the Phoenix Rod becomes interesting with having to use splash damage to kill even a single ghost golem. Even those few ghost golems in the area around the Firemace instantly boosted my engagement. The odd ghost enemy can be a great curve ball in this map.
You've doubled the ammo far too much on the other side, as it feels there's not much incentive to explore to get ammo for the one weapon (seeing four inferno orbs on the same floor), and it's still a bother to see ammo for the weapons I don't have. And by the time I get any other weapon I forget I've gotten it since I've spent so long spamming the phoenix rod on everything without reason to change, obvious being to run out of ammo for it. The thing about the first version I enjoyed was that while there wasn't an abundance of ammo I had to push through and use the Tome of Power to get the edge and squeeze out as much use out of the Phoenix Rod's flamethrower as I could, but it felt unreasonable to have dig that deep into enemy territory like I was speedrunning to have any edge. The current balance stuffs it full of ammo to where there's no urgency to explore and scavenge as you go.
The Firemace pickup works well since it has a recognizable place and works well enough in it. Dragon Claw is fun in the same way as it due to the high fire rate, and the Dragon Claw can regularly hit ghosts while the firemace/normal Phoenix Rod cannot.
The placement of the Dragon Claws and Ethereal Crossbow don't serve the gameplay well. Honestly I don't even think the crossbow is a worth acknowledging in this map. Rod, Claws, and Mace seem to be the way to go.
You can also cut the enemy count and repopulate the map with a few roaming incidental combat monsters to make the map feel less static/more alive and less grindy. Block sound line barriers rather than alot of the monsters being set to deaf.
The balance of everything lacks a clear identity and confuses me. Doesn't make for a good standalone experience imo.
In the surrounding upper area of the green key/where the firemace is a bunch of melee imps can't reach me from the impassable midtexture. There are also a few instances of monsters that don't seem to awaken at all, most consistent being these golems at the start:
I don't know if that's just me though.Also the weredragon turret on a single raised rock doesn't have much room to run around and attack due to spatial reasons as well as due to the monster's speed. It looks funny jittering around on this cliff:
Do you have any better music? It makes me feel like I'm playing a bargain bin GBA game, and still doesn't immerse me at all (which is the most important aspect).
Also I still haven't finished the map, but at least I wasn't wholly frustrated this time. The opener most certainly contributes to my fatigue. I hope you can strike a good balance. I also hope there can be feedback from more than just me.
-
Don't let the sound of the Dragon Claw hold y'all back, now with this small add-on to replace the firing sound with Hexen's wand sound:
-
Greetings, I just found that this is in development, and I'd love to contribute a map if there is still room for more mappers. Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this project!
-
@Fiendish
Howdy and welcome aboard! You're very welcome to unleash your inner Heretic here -
- Removed all the enemies in the forest
- Reverted ammo and item balance to V1, with slight changes.
- Firemace replaced with Hellstaff, however, the Firemace may be found in two different non-secret spots, if it decides to actually spawn, ammunition for both weapons has been adjusted accordingly.
- New music : Digging Up The Ghosts - Alfonzo (Taken from Bloody Rust 3 wad)
- Some enemies are swapped to ghost variants
- Swapped crossbow with Dragon Claw, and added additional signposting.
- Undeafened some monsters to let them roam
- Replaced funny weredragon with axe thrower
-
Very cool to finally see someone realise the sheer power of DSDA-Doom now supporting Heretic and it finally being a truly limit-removing port for the game, so no more dichotomy between vanilla and GZDoom. The lack of generalised specials is still a pretty major disadvantage compared to something like Boom, but the conveyor belts on their own should be enough to make all kinds of wild crap with.
I'll see what I can do with them resources, though I still can't promise I'll be able to finalise anything with them anytime soon.Also, does anyone who whom I could possibly pester to add HeHackEd compatibility and some modern tools for it?
-
This map does not currently work with Crispy Heretic. You will need to play it with DSDA-Doom until the port is updated
NEW MAP (that was an absolute struggle to make wasting time with technical limitations, UDB map stats going into the red aside, having detail and then removing yet alas the map was too great and no longer had any corners to cut while still being unplayable leaving the past few days in vain).
I share this madness in the form of SCT_StagnantNeverlandV2.zip Plays in the E4M2 slot
Enjoy
-
Problems I've just noticed with DSDA:
automap doesn't behave the same
skies are horribly tiled when looking up
waterfall animation doesn't work when used as a midtextureWhat a mess! I've gone in to try bug reporting the latter two right now.
Revision: Crispy Heretic will be alright come an update I hope. Sorry about any inconvenience, Heretic is undersupported so it's pretty rough.
-
@Cuppykeks That's annoying about crispy. I will play through the map (and Joe-Ilya's) later today after work. I did check quickly and the map opens in international heretic, another limit-removing port, though there seems to be something that crashes it just in certain locations.
Re: midtex waterfalls in DSDA: there is a trick I've found to get around this. If you unflag the linedef as two-sided but don't make it impassible, the middle texture will behave like it does for one-sided lines, but the linedef will behave just like a two-sided line for all intents and purposes (you can walk through it, it can have middle textures on both sides). One side bonus is that the middle texture will tile vertically, so you can make passable waterfalls taller than 128 units this way.
-
@joe-ilya demos recorded in dsda: joelibthev3_2.lmp joelibthev3.lmp
Nice! I still haven't finished but I was really darn close. First demo file has my initial attempts and the second demo was my closest to finishing run, ended by me trying to use the gauntlets on the maulotaur which did not work well for me. I was able to play a lot more of the map this time since I didn't hate the MIDI this time around heh. The few ghost knights at the start are a bit cumbersome to damage in the open area. It was hard to see the enemies in the darkness of the theater, especially spooking me when I noticed a maulotaur stomping around. I still missed the Dragon Claw at the start a few times since I didn't make the detour to grab it every time, which really burned in one run. Anyway the mummy in the gauntlets secret area can't leave the monster closet.
Time for some praise in the form of the balance of the map being muuuuuch better. The map looks great too of course. I no-clipped around afterwards and noticed the old man with the textbox which looks to be a great secret. The name of this map can be called "The Library Theatre" if you want, to match with the usual Heretic naming scheme. Cool ideas, dicey combat for my keyboard only hands, but yeah thank you again for the map.
-
@joe-ilya
Fantastic map! The theater opening at the end was a really cool setpiece, and really satisfying to beat. The map as a whole was very fun and frantic to play, running around looking for ammo, trying to maximize use out of the phoenix rod and timebombs. I'm not sure if everyone will be a fan of the lack of dragonclaw/crossbow at the start, though I'm sure the map would play differently not missing the dragonclaw earlier on like I did. But I thought it was fun nonetheless. I do wish there were just a bit more elven wand ammo lying around. Here's a demo recorded on DSDA-doom 0.25.6: LT_fddemo.lmp@Cuppykeks
Wow, this map is incredible. I can't even imagine how much work this took to make. There are a lot of really cool ideas here, and all felt well executed. The map really feels like an adventure, with all of the little details, the background story about the curse, acquiring items to break it, and the creative way of making the torches part of the progression. Very immersive! The combat all felt good and fun -- it never got too difficult, but it wasn't a total pushover either. I liked the abundance of items spread out around the map, which really encouraged exploration. My only complaint about the map was the lack of automap, which made it difficult to navigate at times. I think I know why you did that (so as not to make players think that the map scroll would reveal something on the automap to reach the exit), but even if that's right I'm still not sure if it's worth losing the automap altogether rather than signifying progress a different way than giving the player the map scroll. Here's a demo recorded on DSDA-doom 0.25.6: SN_fddemo.lmpAwesome job, both of you guys!
