Best way to play Hexen in 2021?

[Quasar]

On 11/17/2021 at 3:29 PM, Arbiter said:

BTW, why did Raven change the name from Heretic to Hexen? Is it true that the third game in the series was supposed to have yet another name?

It was conceived by Romero as a trilogy - Heretic, Hexen, Hecatomb. One game for each of the three Serpent Riders. Once Romero was out at id and no longer the producer for the series, they abandoned that plan and made Hexen II instead, and then eventually a Heretic II also.

[Master O]

Sadly, Heretic 2 and Hexen 2: Portal of Praevus are not available on GOG due to legal issues. Hopefully, GOG will resolve that some day.

[Arbiter]

35 minutes ago, Master O said:

Sadly, Heretic 2 and Hexen 2: Portal of Praevus are not available on GOG due to legal issues. Hopefully, GOG will resolve that some day.

 

Steam Hexen bundle lacks Portal of Praevus too.

I played Heretic 2 demo on release and did not like it. I prefer FPP games.

[SMG_Man]

Was gonna say "At least the portal of praevus disc is cheap and easy to get working with the steam version of Hexen 2"

 

then I checked eBay and saw most copies of it have skyrocketed in price since I bought it. wtf?

[printz]

The best, authentic way to play Hexen is to use DOSBox and run the original executable. For vanilla-compatible PWADs I recommend Hexen+ (Hexen-Plus), which is a binary-hacked executable to push the limits away, so it won't crash due to visplane overflows. For non-vanilla WADs and PK3s I recommend GZDoom.

 

On the other hand, GZDoom is also a good choice for vanilla Hexen because it's a natural fit for the most part. Combine it with the lights.pk3 and brightmaps.pk3 bundled mods for the best effects.

[Nikku4211]

On 11/10/2021 at 12:43 AM, Gibbon said:

Indeed there is, but it wasn't in the original.  Choco hasn't been truly vanilla since the 2.x series.

 

I mean, Heretic and Hexen and Strife always supported looking up and down. So I really don't see a problem with changing what inputs you can do to do this already-existing looking up and down functionality. I'd especially recommend the port as whole by this point if it still preserved all of the bugs of the original .exe.

Accuracy is good, but it shouldn't get in the way of playing the original IWADs the way they designed it to be.

 

It's not as major as adding mouselook to Doom is, as Doom never had looking up and down to begin with.

 

Also, in the 1.x days of Chocolate Doom, weren't there already way more Chocolatisms that actually got in the way of Chocolate's goals?

Edited November 20, 2021 by Nikku4211

[Gibbon]

9 minutes ago, Nikku4211 said:

 

I mean, Heretic and Hexen and Strife always supported looking up and down. So I really don't see a problem with changing what inputs you can do to do this already-existing looking up and down functionality. I'd especially recommend the port as whole by this point if it still preserved all of the bugs of the original .exe.

Accuracy is good, but it shouldn't get in the way of playing the original IWADs the way they designed it to be.

 

It's not as major as adding mouselook to Doom is, as Doom never had looking up and down to begin with.

 

Also, in the 1.x days of Chocolate Doom, weren't there already way more Chocolatisms that actually got in the way of Chocolate's goals?

I never played the 1.x series, but I would expect so yes.

 

Sure you can look up and down, same as in DOS, use pg up and pg down.  Hexen is a slow paced game, stopping to look up and down was the point.

[printz]

I believe Chocolate-Doom has superior key binding customization in SETUP.EXE (compared to vanilla SETUP.EXE) because it seeks to emulate vanilla Doom as run from any kind of device able to run either DOSBox or as a driver to the real DOS. At this point I think it's up to your honour if you want to limit yourself strictly to PC MS DOS available controls or other, more gaming friendly flavours of DOS.

[Arbiter]

The warehouse area filled with boxes in Silent Refectory reminds me of something ;)

[pentriket]

On 11/8/2021 at 10:40 PM, Z0k said:

 its there anything like smooth doom for Heretic/Hexen? i know there is the korax mod but something like smooth doom for heretic/hexen would be welcome since gzdoom its the most used por for these games.

yeah I've been working on this 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/hexen-weapon-refinement