Blasphemer discussion

Well, if by too close to the Heretic one you mean the Disciple of D'sparil, then yeah... I suppose. I thought it would be novel to switch around the designs for the monsters, and I suppose there probably are ways to differentiate my design.

As for the player sprite, we've already clarified I'm not a great pixel artist (it would help if I knew WHICH PROGRAM to use), but I had a design for the player that, if I got a better package, could probably make.

Sodaholic said:

How about using rejected DTWiD and D2TWiD maps? They could be retextured with the appropriate items replaced. Obviously this would require the permission of the original authors, but there are some nice maps in there that would be useful should their authors be okay with it.

It's worth a cheeky gamble at least for the time being. I'll have to ask around as I am only aware of the lost episodes and a couple of single releases.

Joe667 said:

As for the player sprite, we've already clarified I'm not a great pixel artist (it would help if I knew WHICH PROGRAM to use), but I had a design for the player that, if I got a better package, could probably make.

dude i use a file called "Saint Paint" he is a very nice prograns to pixel edit for begginers but is very simple and give no choce for very god desings, but can be a begin if you want

I personally use Paint.NET most of the time for my pixel work.

Springy said:

It's worth a cheeky gamble at least for the time being. I'll have to ask around as I am only aware of the lost episodes and a couple of single releases.

There should be a whole archive of them on the DTWiD website.

Joe667 said:

As for the player sprite, we've already clarified I'm not a great pixel artist (it would help if I knew WHICH PROGRAM to use)

Paint Shop Pro 5. It comes bundled with Animation Shop to test your animation frames.

Using anything else is like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

lol, I still use PSP5 too...

Maybe I should switch. I mostly use Paint.NET because I'm comfortable with the interface, but it's not exactly ideal for working with animation, and especially for indexed color (doesn't even support it AFAIK).

I'd use Photoshop but I'm not too comfortable with its UI and it's also pretty heavy and slow.

so ive noticed that a lot of people over at zdoom also use psp5, do you guys think i should try it out? do you think its easier than using photoshop?

Depends entirely on your process. I draw things out using vectors (macromedia freehand 10), animate them by hand, and use PSP to convert the finished animation frames into low res sprites.

The package is worth it entirely for animation shop imho. By far and away the fastest way to test animation frames.

There are tons of good pixelart tools, and each are good on their own merits so it ends up boiling down to what you are comfortable with. If you wanted a semi-definitive list of graphics tools to compare, check out http://www.pixelprospector.com/graphics-programs/

Btw, many of heretics monsters were made from 3D models. If anyone is welling to play with sketchup or something to make something that remotely resembles the monster you want, get screenshots of it from all angles, then touch up the individual frames with some paint shop pro or whatever, you'd achieve some pretty sweet results. Check our some of Jimi's work on the post your doom picture thread for example.

Also, in regards to pixel art, you'll save yourself a lot of time and energy if you refrain from drawing sprites at a pixel level. Most doom graphics I've made from scratch started at 4x the resolution, then resized to the correct proportions. The best part about that is that you can be sloppy and it wont be very noticeable. Most of my work is made with a lot of scratchy, grainy, jagged paintbrush and pencil lines and looks like garbage in normal resolution, but is blurred together in a nice harmony when downsized. In fact I found the scratchy look looks much better than if I make it clean before resizing.

40oz said:

Also, in regards to pixel art, you'll save yourself a lot of time and energy if you refrain from drawing sprites at a pixel level. Most doom graphics I've made from scratch started at 4x the resolution, then resized to the correct proportions. The best part about that is that you can be sloppy and it wont be very noticeable. Most of my work is made with a lot of scratchy, grainy, jagged paintbrush and pencil lines and looks like garbage in normal resolution, but is blurred together in a nice harmony when downsized. In fact I found the scratchy look looks much better than if I make it clean before resizing.

Yes, this is a good method. From what I hear, Valve did the same thing when working on Half-Life 1.

Anyone has some sort of familiarity with heretic+? I can't find any information on how to load pwads on the forums.
This is bothering me for the fact i can't test my maps in a limit-removing context without using zdoom (wich is bad for debugging, since zdoom is a really forgiving port).

sooo, anyone know any tool that may be able to do so?

Cacowad said:

Anyone has some sort of familiarity with heretic+? I can't find any information on how to load pwads on the forums.

It uses the same exact command line parameters as Heretic, which itself uses similar ones as Doom. So just heretic.exe -file something.wad should do the trick in most cases (unless it's also got new sprites or something you have to merge into the IWAD).

thank you, i'll try this once i'm back home.

Someone should have a patch of chocolate-heretic+. With a tiny amount of programming knowledge, it would be trivial to make.

Here's one patch for Chocolate Heretic that uses same limits as Heretic+
http://pastebin.com/NgFuhJ22

You can ignore the g_game.c stuff though... I was just unhappy the game has hardcoded binding on Backspace key (my ergo keyboard has odd layout...)

Btw this patch is several years old. I haven't tried to apply it recently, but that code probably hasn't changed.

Thank you Hex11, i'll try the patch tomorrow. In the meantime i tested my e1m1 with heretic+, resulting in the image below when trying to enter it...



I can suppose only 2 possibilities: 1) i didn't gave enough memory to dosbox to toy with OR 2)my map is too heavy even for H+ resulting in a crash on start.

I'll try something tomorrow morning, do you have any idea on what could have caused the memory violation and/or how to fix it?

EDIT: p.s. i used Blasphemer as iwad, but i have already tested it with other maps and it works good on them.

EDIT2: my map crashes even chocolate heretic, but apart from a duplicate of player 2 spawn (wich i fixed) i can't seem to find why this appens.

EDIT3: anyway i made the patch run as a .bat, but i don't know if that was the correct way to do it, even since i don't know if it actually raised the limits or did nothing.

does blasphemer have the same pallete as heretic?

raymoohawk said:

does blasphemer have the same pallete as heretic?

No, it's a darker, less saturated palette.

i see, so why was the pallete changed?

If i remember correctly, is becouse the heretic pallette is just too bright and cheerfull for making a dark fantasy temed project, just look on how happy it looks! ;)

On a side node i finally fixed my map, now it works in every limit removing port, BUT most of the times my DB2 just refuse to build the reject, segs and ssectors lumps even when using nodebuilders that should build them (as zdbsp compress nodes or bsp-win32)... oddly enough zdbsp c-n DID build them once, then never build them again, so i am stuck with a version that have the incorrect player 1 starting position... i don't know what to do.

You can always download WARM and run it on your wad file. There's DOS version on idgames, and it's also provided as part of this:
http://code.google.com/p/xwadtools/
(native version, but needs compiling)

darknation said:

Paint Shop Pro 5. It comes bundled with Animation Shop to test your animation frames.

Using anything else is like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

But... but... I use PSP 7.04. That's not a sledgehammer. It's really not that different to PSP5. ;)

I used to constantly come across an annoying bug with PSP5. If I had selected something and then pressed "undo" twice in short succession (the second press being before the selection animation had fully vanished, I think) PSP5 would crash. I lost loads of work like that.

Done: competely limit removing compatible, tested in chocoheretic and heretic+: http://www.mediafire.com/download/izg9tuu5ojb9aby/e1m1FIX.zip

I guess it's a good time to post this:
http://imgur.com/m04famq

It's the sprite for the witch-demon sketch I posted before. It's not finished as you can probably see, and also needs some serious polishing.
I did some progress on the zombie thing too, but it was on my External HDD, which just died.
I also won't be able to work on these for a while because my Video Card is dying aswell, and I can't open any heavy programs(Photoshop, Steam,etc...).
I WILL continue working on them when I get a computer that doesn't suck major ass, but right now it's just out of question. :p

its looking pretty cool :-)

raymoohawk said:

its looking pretty cool :-)

Seconded.

Does the main character have to be a human? It'd be interesting to make the player something other than human, for a change. Something like this: http://sta.sh/01rz14789eyq
Obviously not that exact guy, though, since he's just an edit, but that kind of thing. Making the hero a minotauresque dude would also give the game more personality.

pretty cool maz!