Strife97 - a Strife fix mod!

[The Almighty Egg]

Hello everybody! Most of you by now are aware of Revenant 100's excellent WAD called the "Doom 2 Minor Sprite Fixing Project".

Such mod is a display of how much a person can love a game and want it to become the best it can be, in this case by fixing it up art wise!

However Strife, has not received such love in the past years so as a gift from me to the Doom community here I decided to take up the mantle in that regard.

The goals here are pretty much the same as the Doom 2 ones but with some more lax adjustments and assumptions due to Strife not having as many community WADs as other Doom engine games.

Here are the general goals of the mod as follows:

Spoiler

1. Adjusting sprite offsets - This comprises the bulk of the project. Strife suffers from very poorly handled auto centering usage, this is most noticeable in the big lads such as the Inquisitor and the Spectre. As always the offsets were carefully edited to be as close as possible to the original intent of Rogue's artists. All changes were made by studying the original animations carefully, you will notice that most animations have now fluid transitions, some amount of creative liberties had to be taken however I tried to remain as close to the original material as possible.
The explosions offsets were actually from a stock video so I got pretty lucky in that regard.

2. Small image edits - These mostly consist of garbage pixels leftover from the capturing process or adding back random missing pixels.

3. Making the graphics widescreen-friendly - For those running source ports with widescreen resolutions, you've likely noticed that some sprites cut off abruptly near the sides of the screen as they were only intended to be seen in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This WAD file extends these sprites so you can enjoy all of that extra viewing area without impediment. Credit goes to Nash for creating most of these new graphics and Korp for further help.

As for how to use this WAD it is fairly simple!

Chocolate Strife - Using the -merge command line parameter along with the wad file name should be enough.

Crispy Strife      - Same setup as Chocolate Doom.

Veteran Edition  - Same setup as Chocolate Doom. (NOTE: Achievements will be disabled if you run any mod.)
GZDoom           - Drag & drop or use a launcher.

Here is the download:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pnH3_eY7q1oFKWqURU2VRXyNcEZMJ5Gu/view?usp=sharing (4.34 MB)

Widescreen pack:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIt7b-eBLRiweSuCF-bv5IYnlFVgCwDT/view?usp=sharing (4 MB)

SEHACKED patch:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K0oTm3PWsJolaaqREKGPwqwyBa5rPufF/view?usp=sharing (1,25 MB)

And here is the complete changelog:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ht09BmeXcnuO5prGqL6rS-Vo9GOq4voh/view?usp=sharing

This section has some pretty visuals to show off changes, expect more animated showcases like this in the future!

Animation on the left is the original where as the one on the right is the Strife97 version.

 

And as always this mod will always be a W.I.P as the community figures out new techniques or hidden content. I am always open to feedback and new changes on how to better achieve this mod's goals!

Note: The sprite fixes and widescreen-friendly graphics are split into two WAD files. This is meant to provide compatibility for any future source ports. Make sure to load SFWIDE12.wad after STRF9712.wad

• mysourceport.exe -iwad strife1.wad -deh ANIMFIX.SEH -file(or -merge) STRF97XX.WAD SFWIDEXX.WAD

Edited April 13, 2023 by Eggman07
Updated the download links.

[NastyAndBrutal]

Niceeeee! I love that people are making more strife mods

[The Almighty Egg]

By the way for anyone interested. You can run this with Veteran Edition via the Choco Strife method (makes sense its a fork) but all of your achievements will be disabled due to mods being able to break how achievements are obtained.

[LadyMistDragon]

Um, it was released in '96. But also, '97 sounds better.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

Hey, nice work Eggman! It's appreciated. Strife is a really neat game, glad to see it get some love. 

[MundyC]

Neat! Love seeing Strife get some, well... love.

 

BTW, regarding this comment in the changelog's Stalker section:

Quote

- TODO (Find out why gzdoom doesn't accept the spider sprites.)

 

(G)ZDoom internally renames sprites to prevent naming conflicts, which includes the Stalker (SPID to STLK). I'm 99% sure that you'll have to make a separate, ZDoom-compatible version that renames any and all of the affected sprites.

Edited December 21, 2022 by MundyC

[Revenant100]

46 minutes ago, MundyC said:

(G)ZDoom internally renames sprites to prevent naming conflicts, which includes the Stalker (SPID to STLK). I'm 99% sure that you'll have to make a separate, ZDoom-compatible version that renames any and all of the affected sprites.

This is a problem I ran into with the Heretic Minor Sprite Fixing Project. As the simplest solution, @Eggman07, I recommend just including a duplicate set of Stalker sprites in the WAD but with the "STLK" sprite name so it works with ZDoom as well, ergo avoiding the need for two separate versions. Vanilla Strife will simply ignore the "STLK" sprites, and hopefully the ZDoom user won't be loading Strife sprite fixes while playing Doom to cause conflict with the "SPID" sprites.

 

As a visual example, here's how I addressed the ZDoom conflicting sprite names for the Iron Lich in the Heretic fixes (left) and how the same fix would look for the Stalker in the Strife fixes (right).

Spoiler

 

However, the Stalker is not the only Strife sprite that requires renaming due to conflicting names. Check the full Strife list here. To summarize, the following Strife sprite fixes don't work in ZDoom at the moment and would also need renamed duplicates:

Quote

ARM1 → ARM3
ARM2 → ARM4
BAR1 → BARC
BARL → BBAR
BLOD → BLUD
CNDL → KNDL
LOGG → LOGW
PMAP → SMAP
POT1 → MPOT
SHRD → SHAR
TLMP → TECH
VASE → VAZE

 

Edited December 21, 2022 by Revenant100

[The Almighty Egg]

A many thanks to both MundyC and Revenant100 for informing me and giving me solutions for the Gzdoom compatibility problem!
Both the wad and the changelog have been updated accordingly, this new update simply adds renamed sprites for the Gzdoom source port resulting in 1.0 being a few kilobytes larger than the initial release.

[The Almighty Egg]

Minor update today! This simply adds some minor fixes that I overlooked from the first 2 initial versions, also included is a BONUS version with the beta Crusader graphics for anyone who likes that stuff.
Now all things considered, I have gone over the iwads many many times and I am confident there won't be any updates for the following months unless anything big gets discovered like any official sprite sheets or something of that sort. In the mean time, Merry Christmas to all Strife fans!

[The Almighty Egg]

New update arriving in a few weeks! This one will address even more discrepancies that I neglected to act upon in previous iterations of the mod.
In the meantime, enjoy this preview gif. What a funny robot not a care in the world.

Edited January 16, 2023 by Eggman07

[Ludi]

Very cool! Animations are hella smooth B)

[The Almighty Egg]

Greetings everybody.

Been quite some time huh? (New update arriving in a few weeks!) I LIED !!!

Well the wait was (somewhat) worth it! Because the 1.2 release of this mod is now here! Includes MANY many changes all included in the changelog :)
Some other also important changes are also now in effect:

• Removed the Beta crusader skin version as to not give myself a headache trying to organize future releases.
• A widescreen asset pack is now available for use in source ports that have support for these kind of features. I highly recommend checking out the recent Crispy Strife to test it out.
• All of the assets minus 1 weapon frame (credited accordingly in the changelog) originate from Nash's Widepix project.
• The main .WAD file is now named ala Rev100's mod, as to better differentiate different versions (e.g, STRF9712.WAD with the last 2 numbers being the version number).
• A SEHACKED patch is now included, courtesy of @Χyzzy, that fixes up the janky walking animations of the stalker, reaver and inquisitor. Due to limitations however, the search sounds are played more often, other than that the patch should function just fine.

And those are the changes! I have gone over the IWADs again many many times and tried to correct as much stuff as I could, I would love feedback on the recent changes as well as everyone's thoughts on the mod itself.
All links with relevant materials are updated on the main post.

 

 

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Eggman07
Proper link.

[The Almighty Egg]

Update time woohoo!

 

This update just fixes the Sentinel offsets that I forgot to gloss over during 1.2's release. The SEHACKED patch is also updated to fix 2 minor issues.
Version number is now 1.3, the SEHACKED patch changes are also included in the changelog.

[Obsidian Plague]

"Look at those subtle sprite fixes. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even includes an Egg."

[Shockwave_S08]

I've a question. Are the widescreen sprites standalone, or do they need to be loaded with Strife97? If the former, then that still needs updating to v1.3, as it only shows v1.2.

[The Almighty Egg]

5 hours ago, Shockwave_S08 said:

I've a question. Are the widescreen sprites standalone, or do they need to be loaded with Strife97? If the former, then that still needs updating to v1.3, as it only shows v1.2.

They are standalone as stated at the end of the OP, the reason why I didn't rename them is because they received no changes from 1.2 to 1.3.

[Quasar]

On 12/20/2022 at 4:44 PM, Eggman07 said:

By the way for anyone interested. You can run this with Veteran Edition via the Choco Strife method (makes sense its a fork) but all of your achievements will be disabled due to mods being able to break how achievements are obtained.

This is intentional, on account of the fact you'd otherwise be able to make a map that just gives you pretty much every achievement for free, and you're really not supposed to let users do that on most platforms. Besides the fact it'd be lame, especially if you didn't mean to get the achievements that way as a user.

[The Almighty Egg]

8 hours ago, Quasar said:

This is intentional, on account of the fact you'd otherwise be able to make a map that just gives you pretty much every achievement for free, and you're really not supposed to let users do that on most platforms. Besides the fact it'd be lame, especially if you didn't mean to get the achievements that way as a user.

I am well aware, I was informed of that fact by Edward.