DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

Chapter 1: Prehistory

1996-1999

by RambOrc

I made my first Hexen maps back in 1996 when the game was still new. It's a very good thing they got lost somewhen between the many computers and hard discs I had (yes, they were that bad). But I had not enough self-criticism at that time so I found those maps actually interesting. ;)

Many months later, in summer 1997 I started the ambitious project of creating a whole episode (i.e. 9 maps) for Heretic. Amazingly, I did it in a couple of weeks and even more amazingly, they did turn out quite the good-looking and fun-to-play maps (according to people who played it and cared to give me their opinions).

The name of this episode was Hell's Surface and you can see it complete with screenshots and downloads here (yes, Heretic lives on up to this day).

After having finished my episode for Heretic, I turned back to Hexen. I started with one map of a forsaken town in a swamp. While working on it, I had the feeling I will make a whole hub (4-5 levels) out of it. It was the first time I got interested in the scripting language of Hexen (ACS), I was thinking about a possibility of using something, e.g. the gems as money and make a shop where you can trade in the gems for some good stuff like armor, powerups etc.

I was also experimenting with different tricks to build maps with very high buildings and still faraway horizons which go over into the sky. Korax' customized 3D engine will benefit from some of this experience.

Before I ever finished that map, my interests went into other directions for a long time.

* * * * * * *

It was 1998, a time when the only connection I had to Hexen was that I still played it pretty often. Then one day Camper told me that Raven Software released the source code for Hexen (and Heretic). That opened up a whole new range of possibilities. Especially when several Windows95 and Direct3D ports started to pop up for these games.

Camper got excited about some of those ports and as they were open source, he fumbled around with them, but he never got really far (i.e. at least to a half-working port).

Parallelly, I started thinking about whether it would be possible to include some role-playing elements in a 4-5 level Hexen add-on episode, like a shop or the changing of day and night. Camper wrote me a script that was able to change the light levels in a definable time frame, thus simulating the change of day and night. He also did his first modification on the original Hexen source code by converting the Maulotaur into a standard enemy.

At around that time I've accidentally stumbled upon Kokak's pages with an OpenGL port for Heretic and Hexen. It was way better than all the Direct3D conversions I saw until that time (i.e. he was the first I know of who used filter effects to get rid of the annoying low-res pixel look). Thus we decided to use his OpenGL port as base.

Too bad it turned out there were several problems with that. Biggest problem was stability and I had several other (mostly graphical and also sound/music) probs as well until I came to the point where I meant we're maybe better off with the original DOS 320x200 Hexen engine, at least that one was reliably working. :(

Indeed, my motivation sank so low that the project went asleep once again.