Aaaaaargh... here I was writing a long post and of course stupid Netscape had to crash. Oh, how I long for a good browser. Okay, I'll just quickly rewrite this... I've uploaded a new binary, not much but it's something... -RambOrc, didn't you say that you wanted to the speed attribute to change the speed of melee attacks? Well, I figured out an easy way to do it in the code (actually, it was insanely obvious, just didn't see it right away). So the attacks can now be dynamically changed to be faster or slower (although there are some close limits on how fast they can get). In this binary I've changed the fighter's weapons to be a lot faster just to test it out. -This was something I just came up with while making dummy wands for the Mage to test out the new weapon code. You know one of the first weapons you get in Unreal? The one you get to upgrade at some stages in the game. If I remember, correctly the changes weren't very major, just some more damage and a little different graphical effect, but it was nice variation. Anyway, what if we added something similar for the Mage's wand? That when he gets to certain levels his wand becomes a little more powerful and different? Could be a nice original feature. You can test out the different wands by going up a level (note that there's only four wands, so no use to go up to level 5 or higher). -Okay, this was just something I made for my own amusement. I just thought it would be nice to try completing Hexen once with a new class... Corvus from Heretic. Corvus is his name, right? Anyway, in the current state he's very "beta", he only has four weapons (starts with them all), and there's a million small bugs with him. Actually, it would be a little neat if we added this feature as some kind of secret in the game... like complete the game at a certain difficulty and the player gets to play with Corvus. That's all. I've sadly not programmed any much lately, due to one reason already mentioned in another thread and because I've been sick the last days. I'll try to reinitialize my programming routines. Note that I've also updated the wad file, so you'll need to redownload that one too. -Remi [ August 16, 2001: Message edited by: Tzar Sectus ] [ August 16, 2001: Message edited by: Tzar Sectus ]

Did you already try Mozilla / Netscape 6? Hey the new fighter speed is cool. Yes, it's a step in the right direction... it's time to rewrite the speed handling for Korax Mod II. Here is what I have in mind: Speed has a value of 1-20+. Value of 10 is the exact speed you had in Hexen, both for running around and for weapon delay. Speed values under 10 (or should it be 5?) give you half the walking speed you had in Hexen (these walking speeds of 1 and 2 are just plain stupid, I saw that). Speed values over 10 (or should it be 15?) give you double (or 1.5x?) the speed you had in Hexen (no reason in increasing it step by step). The main function of the speed value would be now to determine weapon delay. At 10, it would the be same as in Hexen. At 1, it would be 10x slower. At 20, it would be half the delay. Hmmm... wouldn't it be too extreme? Maybe each point should inrease/decrease the value by 1, 2 or 5% instead of the 10%... like when you have the lowest speed possible (1), you run half as fast as in Hexen and have double the delay between 2 shots/punches than in Hexen (in case of the 5% steps), resp. your weapon handling speed is 80% of that in Hexen (in case of 2% steps). Yes, I think it's better in this range, let's stick to 2% for now. This way, you will never be VERY much slower in firing than you were in Hexen, and by reaching a speed of 40 you'll run twice as fast as in Hexen (which is adequate AFAIK, if you add the effect of SHIFT I think you already reach the max 250% of the engine) and will deal out punches 60% faster than in Hexen... Hmmm... that might be too little change OTOH... what speed did you add the fighter in your test? While the gauntlets looked stupid with that increase, the axe and the hammer looked rather cool at that speed. For those weapons, about that speed as max would be cool (max for the fighter's speed is 40). New wands? I got a golden one at start and it remained that way throughout the levels. I didn't see any change in the strength neither. Corvus? Looks cool. Also, something I was thinking about... Korax' Heritage, the RPG I started out with originally has to be very strictly set in the world of Hexen. Also, Korax Mod plays the original Hexen levels so it can't introduce non-Hexen stuff neither. But the other 2 projects, Korax Arena and the yet-to-be-named multiplayer RPG are both more open, indeed I was thinking about making them both into Serpent Riders games. Both games could bear IMHO the weight of monsters / weapons / characters / spells / items from other games of the series. For the multiplayer RPG, I was already thinking about using Heretic monsters to make for more different kinds of foes. And for Korax Arena, I just realized how cool it would be to summon not only Ettins, Centaurs and Chaos Serpents, but also Golems and Undead Warriors, then posses any of them in that new game type we've been talking about. Also, imagine a Critter Hunt in a modified version of "D'Sparil's Skein" (e5m9 in Heretic), or a "Kill the Heresiarch" match in a re-built version of the "Barbican" (from Hexen II). BTW I realized weeks ago that the Seven Portals map of Hexen would be ideally suited for Capture the flag (with some modifications). Question is only whether there's a real chance to code such a gameplay mode with the Hexen engine (OTOH it's been done for DOOM so maybe we should just take that code and implement into Korax).

No, I haven't tried out Netscape 6 (yet). Mainly because I hear everywhere that it's worse than the last version. Okay, I'll explain a bit how the speed increase works for the weaponry. Each frame of the weapon attacks has specified a tic rating for how long it lasts (if you've ever used Dehacked you'll know what I mean), most of the frames have tics around 1-6, that limits some of the weaponry speed changes since you can't go below 1. The hammer went just marvelous since it seems to consist of a bunch of high tic ratings, the gauntlets it was worse with, since it had lots of frames with low tic rating. So there's a very close limit to how fast a weapon go (though we can slow down a weapon as much as we want... for whatever reason), in this test I decreased each frame with 3 which is a big change. So anyway, if we're going to keep this in we have to be cautious with it, we should only have two or three phases which are faster than normal, anymore and everything looks screwed. You couldn't see the new wands? Note that the new wand don't pop up right away, you'll have to manually select it by pushing 1, if it still don't work, try getting to a new level through the octomont cheat, that should work definately. So I'll just keep Corvus in the code, but just deactivate him until we start with Korax Arena, eh? By the way, why the title Korax Arena? It reminds me too much of Quake 3 Arena. -Remi

Oh, there's one thing I've forgotted to mention. There's one minor flaw with the new weapon code I implemented, each time we add a new weapon into the code and try to load a game from a previous version there's a 50% percent chance you'll start with a completely wrong weapon (for instance the Mage could suddenly started with the triple fireball attack of the Afrit), this is extremely minor though since all the player has to do is to push one of the select weapon keys and it's fixed. -Remi

The VERY good thing in Netscape 6 is that it's 100% independent of Netscape 4, you can run both on the same Winblows and they'll never fuck each other. On my Win98 installation, I've currently IE 4.0 (it's been preinstalled with Winblows, you can't even remove it), Netscape 4.72 (I use that one 90% of the time) and Mozilla 0.9.3 (Netscape 6.0 is Mozilla 0.8 with some AOL extras and a Netscape logo). As far as browsers go, I'd like to install IE 5.0 or 5.5 to be able to test newest features I code into my websites, but then a) I wouldn't be able to keep IE 4 with which I have to check websites as well and b) IE 5.0 already screws up Winblows Explorer badly and I simply hate that too much. It's fuckin' stupid to tie an internet browser to the file manager of the OS. [img]images/smiles/icon_sad.gif[/img] I'll leave the details of the weapon speed to you, it just should be the same amount of speed increase to all weapons (ie. when your speed is 12, all your weapons should be 4% faster than they were originally). OK, I saw the new wands... I didn't see any difference other than the color, except for the red one which fired in a different way, cool. So Korax Arena sounds a lot like Quake III Arena? What do you think, why did I chose this title? Hey, I guess it's time for a shock so some more details about KA nobody besides me and Camper knows yet, namely that there will be 6 classes: - fighter (from Hexen) - cleric (from Hexen) - mage (from Hexen) - assassin (from Hexen II) - heretic (from Heretic) - marine (from DOOM) The marine would have zero magical abilities and powerful physical weapons, the mage would have virtually no physical weapons but some mightily fine spells, the other 4 characters somewhere between (the fighter has some magical abilities like the berserker mode). Hell, it'll be a tough work to balance out these 6 character classes... [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] Plan is to have 7 (or maybe 9) weapons/spells for each character, the spells will also migrate to the number keys (like 5 for the invulnerability spell or whatever). I plan on refitting original levels from Hexen, Heretic, Hexen II, Heretic II and DOOM to work with Korax Arena's special game modes (I'll also build some all-new maps). Why the DOOM marine? I think it'd be cool and if Corvus, why not the Marine? Imagine you shoot someone with a Crossbow who shoots back with a Shotgun and then you both die from the attacks of Centaur Leader summoned by a laughing Mage... :-) Also, there's some nasty ulterior motive in implementing some (NOT much) DOOM stuff: I took my consequences from the fact that we got more new visitors and downloads for the release of Korax Mod through Doomworld than through raven-games.com, ravengames.com and ravensoft.com together. And that's been Hexen-only stuff. Add the fuckin' marine of the DOOMers, put in the Baron of Hell and the Hangar or the Towers of Babel maps for deathmatch and we get a LOT more popularity for Korax Arena than Korax Mod can ever get, and that'd help Korax' Heritage a lot. Also, every perversity anyone in the design team have about implementing non-Hexen stuff into Korax' Heritage can be diverted to Korax Arena, thus making KH much more pure... [img]images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] Of course if you're against any of this, this is the place to tell it, after all we're a team and I ain't no despot.