Hey, I was reading twhe post about actually release SE this year, with or without a TC, and I think it would be a little like wasting this chance of actually modify Hexen original game in something better. I know, I&#8217;m always talking and haven&#8217;t been able to actually work on it, and everybody seems to be busy too, but this is exactly how things were going since I joined, and we must not loose the hope, my children! <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) --> I admit we may not have the &#8220;firepower&#8221; to actually model the game as we all wanted it to be, but we must persist in what we CAN do, even if it happens to be quite difficult or demand a lot of work. I have some others bad news. As some of you may know, my pc was down for all this time. I can come in the net now, but only because I&#8217;m using an older pc, which doesn&#8217;t have the graphics files I was working on, my programs, sketchs, guides, etc. That means I&#8217;ll have to take some time to get my gear back, and it will surely slow down the little progress I was having. As for SE, I have some more ideas: Shields: there will be only one (2 at most) type of shileds in the game (mostly due to graphic painting limitations). If there should be more, they will all have the same stats. I imagined something like this: The shields offers 60% (6 of every 10 blows are absorbed by it) of protection against every blow coming from the front-left position , in the player pov, of cource. Attacks directly from the front, should have 40% (4 of 10 attacks are absorbed). This happens because the player has to hold the shield on his left arm, and needs to have an open area in front of him so he can attack freely, which means less protection. The shields have their own HP, and absorb damage normally from an attack, when everything goes well. For realsim, they should have the protection porcentage cutted by half, when they loose half of their HP. They need a proper key in the keyboard to be activated, and they need their space inside the player&#8217;s inventory. They also should have a code that makes it impossible to wear a shield when the player is using a two-handed weapon, and vice-versa. The coder should pick each weapon by looking at their attack mechanism and resting position&#8217;s graphics. There&#8217;s also another way: as with the centaurs, the shield is a weapon you can choose, and by pressing ctrl and activating it, the player would be protected against any attack from his front (but not against from other directions) For improved realism, we could have another function that says the shield can only portect the player against 3 simultaneous/repeated (with a time-based mechanism, like: the shield consider all attacks within 1 second of time-spce as simultaneous attacks, triggering this code) attacks. More than this and the attacks work like if the player didn&#8217;t have any shield. This is specially useful for fire attacks, like the dragon breath or a UberHeresiarch/mage spell, considering no shield can protect someone froma continous wave of fire, or projectiles. This is &#8220;very&#8221; optional. All other armor could have the shield function (the porcentage protection), that would give the player a chance of receiving no damage in a few blows, before the armor wears off -As for the script: I&#8217;m writing my own script right now. When its completed, I&#8217;ll send and you can see if it&#8217;s ok to go. Anyway, I would like to have a few headlines, of things that should be in it, of people that can or cannot appear, etc. Like in this little plot: The players defeat Korax. As I imagine it, he had all his armies on Cronos, fighting the humans, and that&#8217;s why the 3 players had the chance of entering his domains and kill him. So, when Korax died, his forces, which were powered by his magic, felt lost and desperated, even though they were winning the war. The humans were then able to gather and make a final attack. The monsters were defeated and had massive losses throughout the Empire. The few surviviours fled to the most isolated and hidden places they could. This would be the intro Years passed,and there were no sign of their existence. The Empire was being rebuilted, and what was a number of devastated villages were now grown to be much bigger cities. All the world is recovering, improving, countries/realms/kingdoms/empires that were deadly enemies before the Dark War (or whatever&#8230;) were now friends, and, in the end, the sight of total extinction made the humans try to look closer to themselves and their behaviour toward the world they live in. Festivals are still being made in honour to the 3 heroes, who are now livind normally (being treated like kings, of course), and now have different places into their respective Order. (Even though they deserve to be the highest member of their orders, I still think they should be left one step to it, so it could be a side achievement in the end of our TC! &#61514;). The warrior is now a General, and should be treated like one by the cities soldiers (this means he has access to militar maps, militar reports that can bring him clues about enemies movements and appearances, and to keep the game balanced, he DON&#8217;T have access to the Order&#8217;s Armory! He begins with a few weapons at his disposal in his chambers, but they are all normal and cheap ones, in terms of value. This may sound a bit strange since he&#8217;s a hereo, but&#8230; Hey this reminds me of something, but I&#8217;ll writte in the botton), the cleric is a Bishop (or whatever comes beofre the HighPriest), and now have access to the sacred library of the Temple, something he always dreammed of, (and where he can heal his wounds with holy water from a sacred fountain inside, learn about almost everything regarding Cronos, specially the religion, and hopefully learn some spells) and the Mage is also one step from being the Arch Mage, (eventhough he is more powerful, in terms of battle magics, than any other mage alive, he admitted the actual ArchMage, who were, in times, a concerned master and still is a good friend, is way wiser and possess such an extremely huge knowledge about averything the concerns Magika and Mana, that should be left as he is, while himslef study to became more &#8220;completed&#8221; and as wise as him), and as such, he have access to the chemestry chambers, and also the the Library, the biggest source there is about Magika. It should countain magic descriptions, knouwn magical artifacts, famous mage&#8217;s lives, tales, history of Cronos&#8230; everything the writter can imagine). Anyway, everything seems to be fine, when people start to disappear, and there comes news about attacks from the korax minnions (near somewhere OR throughout the Empire, you decide, but the second would be harder for the player to locate the hidden temple), and then the player is called once again by a reunion of the highest and wisest membes of all Orders, together with the Emperor himself, and is choosen to investigate the story, and destroy all evil he finds. This should be the beginning of the Chapter 1. From here, I would need to know what happens in each map, each chapter, what will the player need to do or go to, what and when he will learn something, who will teach him that, where is the U-Heresiarch hidden, what happens in the beginning, middle and just before the player finds him, etc,etc,etc. I know it seems a lot, but without a guide, I can make a script that goes against the story in the game itself. well, I hope you liked this fro a beginning of the game, and please comment. Although I may have some ideas, I&#8217;m not a writter. We should contact someone to writte the story that will be presented in the game, based on ours guidelines. What do you think about the guy who has that site with written stories and tales based on Hexen? He seemed talented. Note related to the plot above: I had this crazy yet interesting idea for the warrior. Even though I think it won&#8217;t be in SE, I have to tell. Since the Warrior won&#8217;t have any magical abilities (by the way, beserch should be much more limited than it is currently), and he is now a general, what about this: In some maps (maybe just one), the player have the oportunity to actually command an attack with a Legion, and it would work like this: The warrior enters a map, there he finds an extremely high number of enemies (placed specially there for HIM, and not to the others). Since he won&#8217;t have as much firepower he had in Hexen, he can choose wether he would like to go there and fight bravely, OR he could choose to get back to the city, and once inside his Temple/Fortress he will be able to command an attack to that Map&#8217;s region! It would obviously happens matematicly, and would work like this: The Warrior start a conversation with the NPC who has the trigger attached (probably another General). He would pick the &#8220;I need you to organize a platoon and command an attack to&#8230;&#8221; option (or whatever the writter chooses). Then the function would be triggered. The NPC would answer &#8220;Where should I lead the soldiers, Sir?&#8221; and a list of visited Maps would appear, letting the player pick the one he wants to be attacked by the Legion. Then the Npc would ask how many solidiers should be in the mission, and the player would have to choose from 5 different amounts (the engine should keep in memory how many soldiers there are in the platoon). Since the platoon have a limited number of soldiers, and when killed, they aren&#8217;t replaced (this is a limited feature, and should be used wisely by the player. He WON&#8217;T be able to complete SE without having one fight. Instead, he will be able to use this cool feature to help him to even the number differences, and thus making the Map population decrease to, at most, a NORMAL number). Then the General would say &#8220;It will be done, my General!&#8221; . After a brief black screen (which means a day time), the scene would reappear, and the Captain would be &#8220;back&#8221; from the battle, letting ther player know how many Monsters were killed and how many soldiers were lost. This could be done untill the platoon hasn&#8217;t any soldiers left. In the engine side, it would work like this: All the soldiers in the platoon have a determinad chance of 1st kill an activated monster, and 2nd be killed in the mission (the number of soldiers that CAN be killed in action is equal to the number of monsters activated in the map!). Only activated monsters can be killed, and the platoon have a limit to the number of monsters that can be killed in a single attack, so they can&#8217;t wipe out the entire monster population. Different monster types modify the stats regarding chances of being killed or chances of killing for a soldier (example: five Red Serpents in the map adds 1% to the chance of being killed to ALL soldiers during the check), making it harder to &#8220;fight&#8221; Dragons than to fight Ettins.When a soldier is checked, an activated monster is choose, and then the engine says if it killed a monster (and remove the one from the map), and if he was killed (and is removed of the Platoon banks). Then the same would happen to the next soldier, untill they are all checked, and then the black screen should wear off, bringing the battle&#8217;s results. A soldier can kill only one monster. The chance of being killed in a mission is calculated by the number of activated monsters in the map, and their type. This will also modify the chance of killing a monster (stronger monsters are harder to kill). Special sprites won&#8217;t appear in the engine&#8217;s battle list (like Dragons, NPC&#8217;s, etc.). When the player returns, he will find a less populated map, and carry on his mission. Of course, there won&#8217;t be any left overs in the map. Only the body of the monsters, to add more realism. Any gold bars will be gone. Again, the number of monsters inside a map would be designed specially for the warrior! This feature is to clear the excess of the maps, and NOT to clean it completely. As a warrior, the player can always choose to open his way with a good sword or axe, but it should be made so that this would be extremely difficult for him (otherwise he won&#8217;t even use the feature). So what do you think? I say it&#8217;s cool! &#61514; Maybe too hard to be implemented, but it&#8217;s cool&#8230; Well, I&#8217;ve talked enough! See you later, friends.

LOL this is a premier example why progress on SE throughout 2002, especially in the 2nd half of the year, was so little. New ideas all the time instead of consolidating existing ones into a working construct, and actually finishing something before starting something new. I didn't say much on this matter lately as I was anything but a good project leader lately, overburdened by other tasks, not only the RavenGames Network (which would suffice for a full-time job in itself), but also by becoming "second in command" in a scout group. A year ago, I was leading a patrol (5-6 kids) together with another patrol leader. Somewhat over half a year ago, I became responsible for another 2 patrol leaders and about 12-15 kids. I'm also responsible for most activities of the whole group (another bunch of leaders and kids). This year, we also start training the next generation of patrol leaders, 3 or 4. Most of this training will be my responsibility too. This takes a lot of time and energy. That's why I'm trying to delegate as many of the tasks on the RavenGames Network to other people as possible, but it'll still be difficult to invest much time into Korax' Heritage --- which normally wouldn't be much of a problem, as I as project leader should only be responsible for coordinating the work, setting goals and making sure they are achieved. The webmastering part of the project is something that involves a lot of work when building something new but there's nothing much to do at the moment. So why am I unable to keep up? Because I am the only one filling in a bunch of other positions as well, most premier of them mapper. Well I think this topic deserves a new thread of its own. Gotta start it shortly.

Well my previous reply was somewhat digressing from the subject, so here another shot at it... Mago, I don't want to criticize your ideas in any way, some of them are really good, it's just that from your post it's also obvious you rather want to push out the release another year (or several) just to be able to put even more stuff into it. People, let us realize something important: time is running out. Interest in ANY kind of TC on the old Hexen engine dwindles from year to year. While back in 2000 when earnest work on the game started it'd have been halfway groundbreaking, most of the ideas have been implemented into commercial games in the meantime - into games with way more modern engines. Scattered Evil might be loved by a dozen people and liked by another couple of hundreds - but I don't think we'll get over a couple of thousand downloads within a year after SE release. Most probably way less. The Doomsday engine is so far behind everything that it simply doesn't cut it. While Vavoom is not THAT much advanced, it at least provides the most important features to make a 3D world around the player through slopes, angles, 3D floors, sectors over each other, water you actually see as water, etc. People who will play our projects are more interested in deeper values than the shiniest graphics or newest 3D features, but there is a limit. To give you an extreme example, would you play Korax' Heritage if all maps would consist of 256x256x256 units big blocks at right angles (like Wolfenstein-3D)? I guess not. Between this example and what Vavoom offers, Doomsday is about in the middle - and somewhat over the minimal level of what people would want. There are a lot of people out there still building maps and making mods/TCs for the old DOOM engine, sure - but none of them use Doomsday, they use ZDOOM and EDGE and similar, all projects capable of providing a real 3D world. IMO that's the critical point. What's my point? If Korax' Heritage: Scattered Evil would've been released in the first half of 2001 as first planned, it'd have been much more of a hit then it'll be if we relese it now in the first half of 2003 - but nowadays it'll still make a lot more impact than it would in 2 years from now - at which point it might make none at all any more. I received Arx Fatalis for Xmas from a friend and I saw once again what the cornerstone of the Korax' Heritage project is, up to this day: there are many first person action RPGs out there (like Arx Fatalis), but AFAIK not a single first person shooter RPG like Korax' Heritage. Meaning in all those first person RPGs nowadays you still use complicated mouse movements and advanced clicking or whatever to fight and can't move your character around as freely as in an FPS. That's where Korax' Heritage steps in, giving you an RPG in which you can fight like in DOOM, Quake II or UT - fast and furious. OTOH the day a commercial game with this focus comes out, the only remaining point of Korax' Heritage will be to be a fan-made sequel to Hexen - and more than 7 years after the release of that game, that alone won't attract too many people. Mago, I really don't want to pick on you, you were just unfortunate enough to provide me with the perfect example to pick on, but the thing is, if we'd do Korax' Heritage the way you just suggested, we would most probably end up with a very cool product with a lot of love and work invested and many little niceties in it - and still nobody would be interested in it and we'd get 20 downloads in a year, half of them from our friends and family...

You know, I guess you&#8217;re right, once again. Even though all my ideas are only there to try to put some more wood into the inspiration fire of us all, I always knew none of them could be implemented. It would just take too many time&#8230; I understand your point quite clearly. I know the team is slow, and unfortunetly I haven&#8217;t been able to help. Most of what we would like to see can&#8217;t be made by us, and I&#8217;m beginning to believe that, in the end, we will all be working hard just to finnally released the tc, so that all the work already made won&#8217;t be a waste of time. This is sad and shouldn&#8217;t happen in a fan made tc, where we work for fun and pleasure, but sometimes actions such as these must happen and we can&#8217;t run away. All I can say is that I&#8217;ll stick around, I&#8217;m with you. Maybe I can&#8217;t help as much as before for now, but I won&#8217;t leave or anything like that. Although I imagined great things for SE, I know we can&#8217;t do it alone, and making all that we CAN will have to do it! &#61514; No problem. Maybe it&#8217;s time to try to really look for help out there, don&#8217;t you think RambOrc? Damn, there must be some coders/artists around that would like to help, even if just to make the release faster and all.

I'm glad you are ready to look at this all through my eyes... it seems you (and others here too) don't know that the vast majority of fan-made mods/TCs are never finished. I don't know the exact numbers but something like 90+% is highly probable. As for getting outside help, our badly outdated engine is one of the things standing in the way. I greatly admire Ichor who still finds inspiration to build good-looking maps based on the old DOOM engine... he might be the only one still doing it in the whole DOOM engine scene, but he surely is the only one left in the Heretic/Hexen scene. Everyone else changed to some source port like Vavoom, ZDOOM or EDGE, as they don't tie the mapper's hand behind his back the way the original DOOM engine (and also Doomsday) does. The only rooms on top of each other in SE will be either made with the no-flash-teleport trick or with MD2 objects (I plan one single place in the whole game where such MD2 building blocks will be used, namely in the tower of the Keep of the Legion in the main town). That's on the mapper side. On the programmer side, I don't know... I don't know the codebase enough to be able to estimate how frustrating it is to work with compared to modern 3D engines. And on the 2D artist side, well that's where most of the appeal of such a project should be, that's where most of the work should be done... does that side of the team come up with 10x more stuff to be implemented than the programemrs and mappers/designers have time to add? If anything it's rather the other way around. Let's not wrap facts up into a nice gift paper... the fact is that the project isn't just slow, it's as good as stopped a quarter year ago. The way I see it I'll either kick it up from the floor and force it into Alpha test within a month and into public release by March or so, or it might as well be declared dead. Since the Alpha test depends on me, I'll try to make some time free for it, no matter what, and put it together for download before the end of the month. A lot of things will not be present, it'll be basically the SE build of Janis from June or July with all the dungeon maps put into some kind of travelable order and if time permits some more features. To give you all some solace, Korax Mod 1.0 was born in a similar way... at one point, I just decided to make a release of the very slowly proceeding Korax Alpha (ancestor of SE). Just an example, a week or two before the release of Korax Mod 1.0, there was not yet a way to manually alter stats, they were upgraded automatically after a fixed table. You all came into the project long after the release of KMOD 1.0, most of you even after the release of KMOD 2.0, so you take it granted to be the way it was. The fact is, they are in many things far from what we planned, they offer features we had the time and manpower and knowledge to implement, and some things are done the way they are done because nobody could do it better, not because we thought it's good that way. KMOD 1.0 is very old and the forums didn't exist back then, but the designing and making of KMOD 2.0 is pretty extensively documented in the old forum posts, if you read them chronologically you'll see how a lot of things changed/evolved/got scrapped all the time. Take some solace from that - when SE is finally out, the gamers might not be able to tell how desperately it was patched together with a little glue here and there. That's one of the reasons I didn't want any of you to speak about planned and half-implemented features in public. If people don't know how we work, they'll assume we work hard and we know what we do. <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->

Hey, people. while I was browsing the net today, I found an interesting site with a mod/exapansion mde for Hexen, and for what I&#8217;ve read and saw, the author seeems very talented, and masters the scripts language. As himself said, he pushed the engine&#8217;s limits and made some detailed, complex maps, fulled with scripts tricks and new features, and I think he did all this without the codebade. I don&#8217;t know what this guy&#8217;s up to nowadays, but I do think we should drop him an invitation to join us and give us some help. His knowledges could be extremely useful, and could even save SE from suck big time on March, as I think it will. While you read this, I&#8217;ll send him an e-mail, and hopefully, he will answer. If you don&#8217;t know it, RambOrc, could you download the expansion and hava a look? I didn&#8217;t, but the instruction and feedback I&#8217;ve read say wonderful things about it. Forgot about the link:http://www.rattlebars.com/mtz/caldera.html#CREVIEWS

Hi people. I see that we and Ichor are the only humans working on Hexen right now, I can see that. But I found some people who also worked hard on it years ago, and maybe, if you get lucky, some of them would be interested in helping us. All of them have worked really hard on Hexen, and dedicated their time and passion to it, so they must like the game even nowadays. And since we can get a little rusty, but we never forget, some of their knowledge or work could be really useful, if we can contact them. I've visited a page ( <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/8666/topten2.html">http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/8666/topten2.html</a><!-- m --> ) where lots of mods/levels made by fans are posted, and collected the e-mails adresses of everybody. I will contact them, but it would be cool if somebody could give me a hand and contact some of them too (specially you RambOrc, since you are the oldest of the members, and have the best idea of what do we really need). Emails: Andy Kendall: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:llandy@host.yab.com">llandy@host.yab.com</a><!-- e --> Chuck Grant: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:chuckyg@ix.netcom.com">chuckyg@ix.netcom.com</a><!-- e --> Jorge Enrique Torres: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:jorget4925@aol.com">jorget4925@aol.com</a><!-- e --> Marc R. Bublitz: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:kingmarc@cris.com">kingmarc@cris.com</a><!-- e --> P. Hallgren: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:Peter.h@solna.mail.telia.com">Peter.h@solna.mail.telia.com</a><!-- e --> Nick Taylor: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:a1056@mail.public.net">a1056@mail.public.net</a><!-- e --> Philip Ward: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:sci.pgw@jcu.edu.au">sci.pgw@jcu.edu.au</a><!-- e --> Colin Caird: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:ccaird@islandnet.com">ccaird@islandnet.com</a><!-- e --> Roo Sleight: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:roo@hyperactive.net">roo@hyperactive.net</a><!-- e --> If you can get to the page, you can e-mail them automaticly, since there may be an error or two in the adresses. You can also know the project they worked on and download it, to test. Maybe they could even donate some of the maps to us, tips, effects, scripts, etc. All we need is to contact them and see what can be done. So, will somebody help me out. I can't come the net that many times...

I remember that site. I was even on the Heretic Levels of the Week once with ichor.wad. I see he updated his site in November of this year, so you'd think that he would mention fury.wad, but... Anyway, I've played all those maps many times, and my favorite is either temple2 or lychgate (I've used this one as a test map for my new things and monsters, heheh).

So, do you believe some of them are still working on Hexen? Have you had any contact with one of them?

I seriously doubt it, although it wouldn't hurt to try anyway.

I know you said no more things for SE, and I agree get it out ASAP then we move onto vavoom. But I have a small request, that an artist makes a new menu graphic (M_HTIC) so it reads 'Scattered Evil' or 'Korax' Heritage: Scattered Evil' What do you think?

When I meant "no new things" I meant new features, new ideas, whole new branches of thing - but not a new graphics that's needed anyway. I mean, we need new graphics for the journal and spellbook, for example, not to mention the title screen. Sorry if I created more confusion by trying to make it less. <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->

Oh good, well good thing about replacing M_HTIC is I don't have to do much work. Are there any other changes needed to the menu?

Quite a couple, but only at the very last stage when it's clear what we'll have and what not. The only thing that can surely be disabled already is everything multiplayer-related.