Post your Heretic/Hexen textures and decorations!

Community Wishlist:

*More blood-splattered/gory wall textures and flats. We all know how much these add to Doom's atmosphere. Heretic has none at all, and Baker's Legacy has a total of two, both of which are smallish blood splatters on tan walls.

*Textures and/or decorations that portray magical machinery -- sort of a fantasy techbase aesthetic?

*Textures for a wizard's lab, particularly shelves.

*Magical forcefields. (post)

*Magical lighting. Currently, most sources of light available for both Hexen and Heretic are fire-based decorations. One advantage Doom mappers have that Heretic/Hexen mappers don't is that they can cast light directly from a ceiling or floor panel, or from a wall panel without the use of a decoration that may get in the player's way. Since there's no electricity in the fantasy setting, magic is the obvious source of power. Some magic-based light decorations would also be nice to have.

*Some kind of large setpiece switch texture, like Doom's giant skull switch.

*An alternative waterfall animation. Doom's liquid falls are so -- I dunno, elegant? -- and they're a big part of what makes many of the biggest and best Doom levels so sublime (See Speed of Doom, Water Spirit, Jenesis map 15, etc., etc.). The Heretic falls definitely have their purpose, but they're not as general-use as Doom's, and it would be nice to have more choices. (post)

*A stained glass window depicting Heretic's Disciple of D'Sparil. (post)

*Stained glass windows depicting Hexen's Dark Bishop and Heresiarch.

*Macabre decorations, a la Doom's heart pedestal and evil eye.

*More dead bodies in general (mainly for Heretic -- Hexen has a ton. Just as a suggestion, note that all bodies you encounter in Heretic and Hexen are long-dead, as though the apocalypse has already come and gone and there are nearly no survivors. For consistency, you may prefer to stick with this aesthetic, but you don't have to).

*More colorful metal textures, particularly fancy/ornate silver/gold stuff. Could be studded with gems. (From SOSU and Halfblind)

I'll have to sort out some of my other stuff, but for now here's a link to the Hexen texture WAD that I've been building alongside my Hexen megawad.  It's a mixture of edits from the stock textures, scratch-made stuff and stuff collected (and sometimes edited) from ZDoom forums resource threads.

As for the weapon/armor racks, the items themselves look good but I think there's too much plain black space around them.  It might help if you took a couple dark shades and added a subtle wood grain/stone texture to those spaces so they're not completely flat.

Thanks, that looks like great stuff!

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

As for the weapon/armor racks, the items themselves look good but I think there's too much plain black space around them.  It might help if you took a couple dark shades and added a subtle wood grain/stone texture to those spaces so they're not completely flat.

I hear you. I wish I could have taken more of a lead from Hexen's bookshelf textures, but all the empty space in those textures is actually black. It's also tough to find colors dark enough to do anything that subtle with outside of the darkest grays -- the next darkest colors are probably the bottom couple of browns, which I'm already using in the weapons and the foreground parts of the rack itself, so it could be pretty tricky. I'll keep messing with it and see if I can come up with anything better.

Where does Blasphemer and Zauberer fall into this thread? These are TC projects that are, I believe, in the spirit of FreeDoom, and are still active. Are these projects totally separate, or should efforts be combined? In other words, is the goal to add content to Heretic and Hexen specifically and exclusively, with the requirement of Heretic.wad/Hexen.wad? By the way, nice resources so far!

The goal of this thread is just to create more resources for mappers to use. Posting paletted .pngs that are already set to use the Heretic or Hexen palette, or a .wad with the graphics in Doom engine format and all appropriate lumps, is convenient for mappers who come along and want to use the resources you post. But the conversion process is very easy using Slade, and I'm not going to be super anal about it.

Blasphemer and Zauberer have their own development threads already, and I assume it's up to the respective teams to decide what textures are needed and have people make them. Also, as far as I know, the only real difference between a Blasphemer graphic and a Heretic graphic is the palette, so again, it's probably not a big deal to convert. Both this thread and Blasphemer/Zauberer are basically open source projects. So in other words, if someone posts resources here that the Blasphemer team wants to use, I'm sure they'll be welcome to do so, but they might want to ask the person who posted those graphics. Similarly, if you make graphics for Blasphemer/Zauberer and want to also post them here, you are welcome to -- but again, it would be nicest for people browsing the thread if you post a version of them that uses the Heretic or Hexen palette so that they're easier for people to use.

Also keep in mind that edits of Heretic or Hexen resources (or pretty much any other game), even if just a tiny part is used, will not be usable by Blas or Zaub. They can use only 100% free resources.

I added a bunch of stuff to the community wishlist in the second post, in case people are looking for inspiration and ideas. Pretty much all of these are things that are specific enough to create world-building/backstory for a setting, but general enough that many mappers can easily use them.

Just some basic stuff today -- getting my minor edits and recolors out of the way before attempting some of the more interesting stuff I want to do.

A basic bloody surface. Not very detailed, but it does its job. Intended primarily as the top/sides of a sacrificial altar or a very messy floor.

Blood liquid flats. Baker's Legacy has a bloodfall, but it doesn't have these -- only a Hexen-style warping flat.

Some recolors of stock/Baker's Legacy textures to expand the black, red, and dark brown ranges, since BL doesn't have many of those.

Somehow i managed to miss this thread. here's a link to the Blasphemer textures pack, it include 235 textures and 172 flats (plus the palette and whatnot). Those are obviously not mine, but are free to use to whoever needs them.

Pretty cool stuff Not Jabba! I like it when Heretic gets some much needed love.

22 hours ago, Cacowad said:

Somehow i managed to miss this thread. here's a link to the Blasphemer textures pack, it include 235 textures and 172 flats (plus the palette and whatnot). Those are obviously not mine, but are free to use to whoever needs them.

Thanks for posting that! I'm impressed with the quality of the textures overall, and it looks like the team has gone well beyond just recreating the small amount of Heretic resources -- I especially like the doorway arches and the custom recreations of the Quake runes.

15 hours ago, Sky said:

Pretty cool stuff Not Jabba! I like it when Heretic gets some much needed love.

Thanks! I'm trying to give it as much of a boost as I can!

One more than one occasion, I attempted to sit down and have a look at Heretic's textures to see if I could try and emulate that style, but I'm short of ideas outside of recolors and attempts to frankenstein some Doom and Heretic pieces together. I attempted to have a go at some of the suggestions in the wishlist but I found that Hexen, and Eternal Doom already have a lot of the stuff like stained glass, lighting, forcefields, alternative liquids, etc. Would it be unwise to simply convert Eternal Doom textures to Heretic's pallete?

No it's not unwise. People have been known to complain about Doom textures appearing in Heretic though, so avoid using recolored Doom stuff or edits based on stock id software textures.

On 4/22/2017 at 0:25 AM, 40oz said:

One more than one occasion, I attempted to sit down and have a look at Heretic's textures to see if I could try and emulate that style, but I'm short of ideas outside of recolors and attempts to frankenstein some Doom and Heretic pieces together. I attempted to have a go at some of the suggestions in the wishlist but I found that Hexen, and Eternal Doom already have a lot of the stuff like stained glass, lighting, forcefields, alternative liquids, etc. Would it be unwise to simply convert Eternal Doom textures to Heretic's pallete?

Not unwise, but personally I've never been happy with the way most of Eternal Doom's textures look. Most of what I remember is a mishmash of Doom edits, direct rips from Heretic and Hexen, and graphics from slightly newer games that aren't that well palettized. I've been meaning to have a look through them at some point to see if I want to grab anything, but I'm not sure how much there's going to be -- a better bet might be the Gothic texture pack, or a curated selection from CC4, since it has a lot of nice polished textures that would be compatible with a fantasy setting, like the dragon stained glass. Or the "Culture Shock" stuff from Ancient Aliens. If you're interested in editing existing textures, you might get more inspiration from messing around with those resources.

Again, my memory of the textures isn't super good, but aren't the lights and forcefields from Eternal Doom tech-based? Also, there are limits to how much you can take from Hexen and put into Heretic -- I'm using some of the dead body/vegetation decorations in Wayfarer, and I think many of Baker's Legacy's textures are based on some of the more basic Hexen stuff, but you can't necessarily take things that are specific to Hexen's world and backstory, like the stained glass or the decorative wall panels, and put them into Heretic.

Hey, so I'm working on converting some of the larger/better medieval-themed texture packs (Gothic, Eternal, Graphtallica) to Heretic. I've converted the graphics to Heretic paletted .pngs and pruned down the selections to be more useful (e.g., removing all tech textures from the Eternal pack), but now I'm running up against my limited knowledge of port compatibility.

To my knowledge, there are only two real compatibility levels for Heretic: vanilla and ZDoom-based. Other ports don't support the game, right? So here's my question: Is there any point in setting up these resource packs to target lower compatibility levels? Currently the only format I know is TX markers for textures/flats and Decorate code for decorations. I've noticed that wads like Elf Gets Pissed and Realm of Parthoris use more traditional TEXTURE1/2 and PNAMES lumps while presenting graphics as .pngs, but why do this if the wads target ZDoom ports and the .pngs won't work in vanilla? Because it allows you to map in plain Heretic format but still target ZDoom? Basically, what's the best format to present a graphics resource wad in for people to grab it off of the forums and use it in their wad?

Other Heretic-compatible ports include Doomsday, Doom Legacy, and 3DGE, with hopefully the addition of Eternity in the near future. Doomsday, 3DGE, and EE have their own content definition languages, though it's probably okay if you just do the DECORATE code and leave conversion up to modders (they're used to that :p). These advanced ports are also all compatible with PNG graphics, except for Legacy AFAIK.

Then there's the vanilla level of compatibility you'd get from Chocolate Heretic, obviously.

alright, i have officially resolved all of heretic's texturing problems with a single texture. i think this should help out immensely with making spaces more interesting

(ok I made this texture as a joke but I honestly want to go back and start revising some of the little faults it has)

Edit: here's the revised one

and some more crimes against heretic textures:

Ok, here are the converted texture packs I've been working on (shoutout to @40oz):

First is Graphtallica. This is a small texture pack, and all I did was convert it to the Heretic palette.

Graphtallica Texture Pack (Heretic)

Next is Eternal Doom. In addition to the palette conversion, I pruned a bunch of stuff out -- all the tech textures/flats, anything that references Doom (e.g., dead hanging Cyberdemons), any decoration sprites taken directly from Heretic, and some graphics that were so rough and abstract that I couldn't even tell what they were supposed to be. I left in some textures that came from Heretic, because I didn't want to mess around with determining whether they'd been modified and how much -- some did look modified, and in any case, being converted from Heretic to Doom and back to Heretic has probably changed the look of them slightly. It's still not my favorite texture set by a long shot, but I have to admit there's a lot of useful stuff in here. I also removed the recolored Imp, of course; however, this pack does include Eternal Doom's decorations in addition to just textures and flats.

Eternal Doom Resources/The Return (Heretic)

I also pruned a handful of textures from the Gothic pack -- basically anything that was really obviously a Doom recolor, plus a couple of tech lights that couldn't be interpreted as anything but tech lights. I did leave many of the lights in because I think they could be seen as some kind of magical glow lights (in fact, I'm pretty sure Realm of Parthoris uses them that way).

Gothic Texture Pack (Heretic)

Finally, I converted the Blasphemer textures and flats to the Heretic palette. The conversion went better than I thought, and the only colors that didn't convert well were the blueish purples. I have manually touched up all textures I noticed that had issues with these colors, including the blue tile mosaics, the teleport markers, some banners, and the water/waterfalls.

Blasphemer Texture Pack (Heretic)

At some point, I'll go through the CC4 and Ancient Aliens resources and cherry-pick stuff that's relevant to Heretic, but today is not that day. Are there any other useful Doom texture packs that I'm missing?

I wanted to use the hanging skull decorations from Echelon, so I cleaned them up a bit and animated the skull cluster with the candles. As per usual, these are Heretic paletted .pngs.

Also, some metal textures made as a supplement to Baker's Legacy:

Ha, I love the one with the Serpent embedded in it  Doom-style

Some more quick Baker's Legacy edits -- various switches and a few vine/wall textures.

I wont lie that they have nicer palettes than Doom does in terms of colours...hmmm...I wonder if I could whip up a few things/conversions...

Funny thing is, that clock face has almost exactly the same shape and dimensions as the Korax ellipse circle, except the odd yellow pixel in a couple of places, so I tinkered with it a bit and here you go.

Just realized I hadn't posted these here yet. Made them for The Wayfarer.

17 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

Just realized I hadn't posted these here yet. Made them for The Wayfarer.

 

 

Beutiful...

I converted Socks Egyptian texture pack down to Doom sizes a few years ago. I haven't palatalized them to a given games palate but they look best in Heretic. In the archive I put them inside a wad and inside a standard folder. I highly recommend that you use them in Zdoom or some other derivative port though.

Here they are; Egypt SOC for Heretic

I can't believe that most of these have not been mentioned yet.

Realm667

As for my wishlist. I want someone to take 'all the black metal textures' from Heretic, Bakers Legacy and Medieval texture packs and color them White, Gray, Red, Gold, Green, Blue, and Purple.

Sewers without the moss and slime. Also water and ice.

49 minutes ago, Ichor said:

Sewers without the moss and slime. Also water and ice.

Thanks! I've actually been looking for something like this.

Something I'd love to see, per a shoutout from @Alfonzo in the most recent Doom Radio podcast -- a set of believable fantasy techbase textures. It's easy enough to rip futuristic techbases from Doom, and more power to anyone who wants to make maps like that in Heretic/Hexen. But what would fantasy tech look like? Somebody in the podcast (MTrop, maybe?) mentioned Great Bay Temple from Majora's Mask.

If @40oz is still looking for inspiration to work on Heretic textures, this might be a good place to start. I would use the hell out of those textures.