The idmap01 thing is a pretty deep cut, especially when showing off differences! I wonder how hard it was to convert a map like this, but knowing that early years of Doom mapping have produced innumerable map flips, its probably not that hard. Дякую!
I suppose they copied the geometry, and just had to put in new textures and new objects, which shouldn't be too hard. And they removed the exit, of course.
another oddity in Heretic is E1M3. There is a buggy door which due to coordinates does not open. But in some ports it does. It is through the yellow door on the left and around the corrner. On the opposite side through a window is a torch. The door is a bit further down
The maze debug map I think probably was testing out the thoughts of how much a switch trigger can change geometry probably and to help wrap the brain around how to change it up Considering how Hexen is infamous for switches that open up this and that in the opposite sides of the map or on another map in the hub, they deffo had that in mind
About hexen, I remember some weird level geometry outside the map boundaries in some levels, including I think the intro level Winnowing Hall? Remember seeing this when I played the n64 version with noclip mode on back in the day. Though in retrospect these might have been monster closets used for monster spawning, not sure. The maze debug map to me looks more like a discarded prototype level section than a map for testing a mechanic.
As far as I know, the weird rooms outside the maps are part of the "polyobject" rendering (e.g. doors that swing or columns that rotate). The walls inside these rooms are used to create the rotation/swinging effect, which is then rendered within the actual map... yeah, it sounds complicated, but that's how they did it back in 1996 ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin ah, so every wall outside is like an animation frame for those opening doors, and the sectors are swapped quickly when the door opens? Neat
I like the idea of hexen and used to play it on n64 a lot but always gave up halfway through. It just gets way too puzzle like for me. But I still appreciate it for what it is.
Why would Ravensoft create fully realized levels and make them inaccessible? These levels are fully put together with enemies, weapon placement, monster closets, keys, and working doors. It's even stranger when you consider the time frame Heretic released in... It was the dark ages for 3D gaming. They didn't have a quarter of the sweet tools they have now. Back in 1994, you couldn't even place an item in a map and check it out in game easily. You had to save your work, close out the WAD editor (map editor), open the game up, choose your new WAD, play/clip with God mode on, and then find your work. If the placement was wrong, repeat until you get it right (insanity).
That's one thing that makes these old games even more impressive - they managed to make them so cool even though they had such primitive editing tools to work with (not to mention the numerous limitations of DOS and the hardware of the time). Yeah, it would have been great to make 6 more maps and thus make a full sixth episode. E6M2 in particular is too good a map to be wasted.
Really nice video, it's nice to learn all those tiny anecdotes. I didn't know about the hidden maps, i'll try to do them next day, after a good night of sleep. I also have a soft spot for Hexen 1 (and 2), even if i have ragequit in the first hub during my first time. It was even worst for Hexen 2, i did beat it only when adult, my teenage me never succed to finish the first hub, but i'm so glad to have beat them !
Oh, dear lord Hexen 2, the one where you positively had to have a pen and paper beside you and draw the maps yourself, otherwise you are stranded period
I know this feeling. Teenage me didn't have access to online walkthroughs, so many puzzles took a while to figure out... but it felt really nice to beat them without external help.
One more HeXen 1.0 oversight to add to the list. The text displayed when the game quits to DOS reads "Hexen: Beyond Heretic". Notice there is an extra space added after the colon before the B. This was fixed in 1.1. One last thing that isn't a bug, rather a hidden command-line argument. Starting any of the Hexen or Heretic games with the "-debug" parameter will show a more verbose log as the id Tech engine starts up. This was likely used by support reps when they were helping a customer whose game would hang while loading. I made a video about it here: ruclips.net/video/UlQyJioJiiU/видео.html
I had a pirate copy of Hexen with cheat launcher. When demo play in menu it was possible to save and load. 1.0 allow to use save menu, but it does not really save.
@@AlexeiVoronin As I recall, the original Hexen released on a mixed-mode CD where the first track was the game data and the rest of the disc comprised ordinary audio tracks with the game's music. You could even swap in a different CD while the game was playing and it would happily stream music from whatever disc you gave it: I remember many happy hours beating up monsters with Judas Priest accompanying me in the background!
A funny coincidence - I recently got a bit of a sudden craving to play some AvP... and just a couple of days later, Civvie posted an AvP video. What are the odds? ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin IIRC he doesn't like the game because of constant alien spawning, but we can try. The civvie vid proves to me that I still can't psychologically handle facehugger attack, I wonder how he will fare :D
@@AlexeiVoronin Just leave one straggler serpent for a while... yeah. It's obscene that wasn't fixed in the 1.1 patch (and I've always been playing deathkings silent! I thought it was supposed to be mute)
I'm a huge hexen fanatic. There's a couple things here I didn't know about, but there's quite a few obscure things you didn't mention. Like 'The Justifier' in the demo, the Golden Ovum, the unused superweapon piece sound effect, 'CHARTR' and 'CHAP2R'... if any of that is news to you, look up myself and/or ArgonianLord if you want to do another hexen vid.
@@VikingBoyBilly Oh yes, I wanted to include more topics, but I also wanted to not make the video way too long. One thing I was planning but left out was to explain the Mystic Ambit Incant item... maybe another time. I've seen the golden ovum - it is some development remnant, right?
@@VikingBoyBilly What I usually do is leave exactly 3 serpents alive for about 5-10 seconds and it always does the trick. Heh, my first playthrough of Deathkings was also silent, but then I discovered the patch - the best thing about it is that it will work, even if you only have the WAD file. The patch will fail due to missing files, but it successfully updates the WAD before that happens.
I plan on replaying Heretic and Hexen again later this year for Heretic's 30th anniversary
I'm planning to do the same as well. It will be lovely :)
Hoping to one day get that navigation system they did on Quake 2 and Boltgun recently 'cuz goddamn, Hexen is impossible to navigate.
@@EnzoPinheiro I don't know... hand-holding spoils much of the fun. Besides, there already is an automap in the game ;)
The idmap01 thing is a pretty deep cut, especially when showing off differences! I wonder how hard it was to convert a map like this, but knowing that early years of Doom mapping have produced innumerable map flips, its probably not that hard.
Дякую!
I suppose they copied the geometry, and just had to put in new textures and new objects, which shouldn't be too hard. And they removed the exit, of course.
Very nice video and happy anniversary to the kitten !
another oddity in Heretic is E1M3. There is a buggy door which due to coordinates does not open. But in some ports it does. It is through the yellow door on the left and around the corrner. On the opposite side through a window is a torch. The door is a bit further down
The maze debug map I think probably was testing out the thoughts of how much a switch trigger can change geometry probably and to help wrap the brain around how to change it up
Considering how Hexen is infamous for switches that open up this and that in the opposite sides of the map or on another map in the hub, they deffo had that in mind
Really enjoyed the effort put into this video and was great to learn things I didn’t know about these games.
Always glad to spread some (obscure) knowledge.
I always loved Heretic and feel that it always deserves more attention than it gets. :-)
About hexen, I remember some weird level geometry outside the map boundaries in some levels, including I think the intro level Winnowing Hall? Remember seeing this when I played the n64 version with noclip mode on back in the day. Though in retrospect these might have been monster closets used for monster spawning, not sure.
The maze debug map to me looks more like a discarded prototype level section than a map for testing a mechanic.
As far as I know, the weird rooms outside the maps are part of the "polyobject" rendering (e.g. doors that swing or columns that rotate). The walls inside these rooms are used to create the rotation/swinging effect, which is then rendered within the actual map... yeah, it sounds complicated, but that's how they did it back in 1996 ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin ah, so every wall outside is like an animation frame for those opening doors, and the sectors are swapped quickly when the door opens? Neat
I like the idea of hexen and used to play it on n64 a lot but always gave up halfway through. It just gets way too puzzle like for me. But I still appreciate it for what it is.
Why would Ravensoft create fully realized levels and make them inaccessible? These levels are fully put together with enemies, weapon placement, monster closets, keys, and working doors. It's even stranger when you consider the time frame Heretic released in...
It was the dark ages for 3D gaming. They didn't have a quarter of the sweet tools they have now. Back in 1994, you couldn't even place an item in a map and check it out in game easily. You had to save your work, close out the WAD editor (map editor), open the game up, choose your new WAD, play/clip with God mode on, and then find your work. If the placement was wrong, repeat until you get it right (insanity).
That's one thing that makes these old games even more impressive - they managed to make them so cool even though they had such primitive editing tools to work with (not to mention the numerous limitations of DOS and the hardware of the time).
Yeah, it would have been great to make 6 more maps and thus make a full sixth episode. E6M2 in particular is too good a map to be wasted.
Great videos, my friend! Keep up the good work! Greetings from México!
Really nice video, it's nice to learn all those tiny anecdotes. I didn't know about the hidden maps, i'll try to do them next day, after a good night of sleep.
I also have a soft spot for Hexen 1 (and 2), even if i have ragequit in the first hub during my first time. It was even worst for Hexen 2, i did beat it only when adult, my teenage me never succed to finish the first hub, but i'm so glad to have beat them !
Oh, dear lord Hexen 2, the one where you positively had to have a pen and paper beside you and draw the maps yourself, otherwise you are stranded period
I know this feeling. Teenage me didn't have access to online walkthroughs, so many puzzles took a while to figure out... but it felt really nice to beat them without external help.
In 2020 when COVID lockdown started I played Hexen + DK back to back with a mod that added extra gore and RPG elements
Nice, What I did during the lockdown was create my own Wolf 3D episode (10 levels total) using a retro map editor for DOS.
@@AlexeiVoronin back in like 1992 I actually used a DOS Wolf3D editor on my friends computer.......I was 11 and had no idea what I was doing
@ 31:00 "The death kinks, of the dark citadel."
Oh, I have seen weirder kinks than that :P
One more HeXen 1.0 oversight to add to the list. The text displayed when the game quits to DOS reads "Hexen: Beyond Heretic". Notice there is an extra space added after the colon before the B. This was fixed in 1.1. One last thing that isn't a bug, rather a hidden command-line argument. Starting any of the Hexen or Heretic games with the "-debug" parameter will show a more verbose log as the id Tech engine starts up. This was likely used by support reps when they were helping a customer whose game would hang while loading. I made a video about it here: ruclips.net/video/UlQyJioJiiU/видео.html
Oooh, good catch. Never noticed this one. BTW, Strife can also produce such verbose debug output, and it kinda resembles Doom's old startup screen.
@@AlexeiVoronin Thanks! I never knew that about Strife, that's very cool. Keep up the great work.
Great video! Love your presentation style
I had a pirate copy of Hexen with cheat launcher. When demo play in menu it was possible to save and load. 1.0 allow to use save menu, but it does not really save.
there's also some mismatch between midi music and CD tracks in Hexen regardless of version number, not sure if you'd count that for oddities
I never really used the CD music, so I didn't know about this.
@@AlexeiVoronin As I recall, the original Hexen released on a mixed-mode CD where the first track was the game data and the rest of the disc comprised ordinary audio tracks with the game's music. You could even swap in a different CD while the game was playing and it would happily stream music from whatever disc you gave it: I remember many happy hours beating up monsters with Judas Priest accompanying me in the background!
@@jimcameron6803 Aaaah, good choice :)
2:06. Someone's a Civvie fan
A funny coincidence - I recently got a bit of a sudden craving to play some AvP... and just a couple of days later, Civvie posted an AvP video. What are the odds? ;)
ew civvie stinks
@@AlexeiVoronin I believe the game has a 25 year anniversary.
@@Arrinao1 Indeed it does. We can celebrate by tricking a certain Dutchman to play it ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin IIRC he doesn't like the game because of constant alien spawning, but we can try. The civvie vid proves to me that I still can't psychologically handle facehugger attack, I wonder how he will fare :D
You should show us your cat as well as these wonderful videos.
Perhaps I will... as soon as she stops trying to eat my hand :P
You watch Civvie11? Nice!
Aww no kitty pic? :C
Maybe next time... we'll see ;)
no gibbet glitch?
Maybe some other time. And I will then explain how to avoid it ;)
@@AlexeiVoronin Just leave one straggler serpent for a while... yeah. It's obscene that wasn't fixed in the 1.1 patch (and I've always been playing deathkings silent! I thought it was supposed to be mute)
I'm a huge hexen fanatic. There's a couple things here I didn't know about, but there's quite a few obscure things you didn't mention. Like 'The Justifier' in the demo, the Golden Ovum, the unused superweapon piece sound effect, 'CHARTR' and 'CHAP2R'... if any of that is news to you, look up myself and/or ArgonianLord if you want to do another hexen vid.
@@VikingBoyBilly Oh yes, I wanted to include more topics, but I also wanted to not make the video way too long. One thing I was planning but left out was to explain the Mystic Ambit Incant item... maybe another time. I've seen the golden ovum - it is some development remnant, right?
@@VikingBoyBilly What I usually do is leave exactly 3 serpents alive for about 5-10 seconds and it always does the trick. Heh, my first playthrough of Deathkings was also silent, but then I discovered the patch - the best thing about it is that it will work, even if you only have the WAD file. The patch will fail due to missing files, but it successfully updates the WAD before that happens.