Vanilla-Compatible Heretic String Editing?

[kinker31]

As the title may imply, I've been trying to find something capable of modifying the strings of Heretic's automap names and text screens, preferably without having to use ZDoom's MapInfo/Language. I wanna aim for vanilla/limit-removing compatibility, with anything ZDoom-unique added after main development.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

HHE can do it, although like many things about it, it's a little crusty especially when trying to work with the latest version of Heretic.  Where you see weird gibberish strings, don't touch them (and check your patch in a text editor afterwards to make sure it didn't export any corrupt bits).  You will also face certain string length constraints, if you want to put something shorter than HHE will allow, just pad it out at the end with the spacebar, but for too-long messages the only thing you can do is abbreviate it somehow.

[andrewj]

On 10/20/2023 at 3:09 PM, kinker31 said:

I don't actually know if Chocolate Heretic can even support HHE's patches.

I think it does, there is a "src/heretic/deh_htic.c" file in the source code for something HHE related, plus this in the documentation:

  -hhever <version>  Select the Heretic version number that was used to
                     generate the HHE patch to be loaded. Patches for each of
                     the Vanilla Heretic versions (1.0, 1.2, 1.3) can be
                     loaded, but the correct version number must be specified.

 

[kinker31]

On 10/18/2023 at 5:39 AM, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

HHE can do it, although like many things about it, it's a little crusty especially when trying to work with the latest version of Heretic.  Where you see weird gibberish strings, don't touch them (and check your patch in a text editor afterwards to make sure it didn't export any corrupt bits).  You will also face certain string length constraints, if you want to put something shorter than HHE will allow, just pad it out at the end with the spacebar, but for too-long messages the only thing you can do is abbreviate it somehow.

Looking a bit closer at the program... looks like it requires DOS to use, and to be honest, I don't actually know if Chocolate Heretic can even support HHE's patches.

I'll probably just stick to the default text, but thanks for answering anyhow!

[kinker31]

On 10/21/2023 at 10:55 PM, andrewj said:

I think it does, there is a "src/heretic/deh_htic.c" file in the source code for something HHE related, plus this in the documentation:

  -hhever <version>  Select the Heretic version number that was used to
                     generate the HHE patch to be loaded. Patches for each of
                     the Vanilla Heretic versions (1.0, 1.2, 1.3) can be
                     loaded, but the correct version number must be specified.

 

Well, that's slightly more promising, but I really do kinda wish I could modify hard-coded strings without needing to bring in a DOSBox of some kind, since digging into Heretic's lumps, it turns out that things like difficulty names, non-automap map names, just about anything that could be a string is something that only HHE can presumably deal with.

 

:(