DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

Chapter 2: The Early Days

September 1999 - October 2000

by RambOrc

Early Fall 1999, one day I was browsing the net and was on another Heretic page where I got a link to a new OpenGL port. I followed it out of whatever reason and - SURPRISE - I saw a screenshot that nearly catapulted me out of my chair! This was the first time I saw a Hexen conversion which looked like Tolkien or Dragonlance in-your-face. This was definitely genuine fantasy look, not some soul-less geek-programmer conversion.

Yes, I'm speaking about SkyJake's jHexen. Especially compared to earlier ports, it was reasonably bug-free and stable. So we simply swapped over to the jHexen engine and thus the project was saved another time...

...but don't think there weren't any troubles any more. SkyJake implemented full 85° up and down look angles which made sprites looking even more out-of-space then before. On some days, I had my doubts about whether there would be anyone who wants to play such a tolded-folded looking game.

Things started to look rosier when SkyJake announced he's going to implement MD2 support into the engine. And then on July 5, 2000, off he went to the army for a year and left us his source code --- with MD2 support only in jHeretic and jDoom but not in jHexen!

In the end, the world didn't end (and the project neither). Camper succeded in implementing the MD2 support into the jHexen engine (MD2 is a 3D model standard used in Quake2 engine games like Quake2, Heretic II, Half-Life. Thanks to converters, it means of course MDL and MDS support as well). Thus the base work was laid for the mass conversion of standalone 3D objects from Hexen II and Heretic II. After all, the 5-minutes-stool of Camper wasn't exactly the artwork of artworks... ;)

This was the point where thanks to about half a dozen other self-invented modifications, we could start to speak about a Korax engine. Most of these modifications were new console variables, and one was a calendar function: once you start the game, the program counts away the minutes, hours, days and months...

Another area where the MD2 models helped us a lot was for creating more complex environments. What wouldn't have been possible in the original DOOM engine (and thus Hexen), we created for Korax' Heritage: a bridge you can walk upon and pass through under it.

OK, now we had MD2 support and thus all bad-looking standalone sprites could be replaced with true 3D objects. So far the theory. We found out pretty fast that while converting MDL objects was relatively easy (after Camper modified an MD2 editor to suit our purposes), converting the 3D objects from Heretic II proved to be tougher. With what editor we had, a very small selection of the Heretic II objects could be converted, but the vast majority didn't work.

As Camper didn't have much time in those months, we left it for the time being and concentrated on the Hexen II models. This was a lot of work anyway, and a boring one at that. Everyone was greatly relieved when we found a dedicated slave to do this task, Gumbo. If you take a look at the screenshots below, you'll see how different 3D models with relatively high-res skins look compared to fixed-resolution 2D sprites.

In September 2000, a new continent was created, with the scientific help of Sierra. This continent doesn't have tropic deserts bordering on arctic ice fields, like some fantasy worlds I've seen do. When and where rain falls, what the current temperature on a given point at a given day will be, is all dependent on the geographical conditions. The weather model was laid down on paper (together with the detailed map of the continent), to be featured in The Serpent Power.

Another major step was that we finally started developing the RPG part of the game. In October 2000, if you killed a monster, you already got experience points.

On the 3D models front, SkyJake rewrote most of the MD2 handling for his other projects (jHeretic/jDoom), and Camper ported these improvements to the Korax engine.

Camper also coded a new converter prog for the bothersome Heretic II 3D models. Once again with Gumbo's help, the conversion was done, so by the end of Autumn we had literally hundreds of standalone 3D objects.

Last but not least, Camper wrote a new WAD editor which - unlike all others we'd seen before - allowed you to edit maps as large as 64'000 x 64'000 units (for comparison, one of the best editors out there, WadAuthor, allows only 10'000 x 10'000 units large maps).