Jason Moyer on 10/1/2010 at 13:39
I decided to nuke my XP installation and do a clean slipstreamed reinstall, and since I picked up a 1TB hd I suddenly find myself with tons of space and wanting to install every game I own.
After a full day of chugging away at it, I'm still at like, "Battlefield 2" as far as my disc-based stuff goes, but in Steam I've worked my way up to Heretic/Hexen, which kind of leaves me with a question. What is the best engine for playing these now? I'm probably not going to do multi unless I can get some co-op going in Hexen, so the best port in terms of singleplayer features would probably be a winner. I haven't run either game outside of the original code in DOS/DOSbox so I'm not even sure where to start really. OpenGL/D3D would be nice but not mandatory...I think the most important thing would be being able to run the original campaigns with some form of mouselook and customizable controls.
Jason Moyer on 10/1/2010 at 13:52
Sweet, thanks. I didn't feel like sifting through a million brawls to try and figure out if Doomsday was better than ZDoom or whatever that one that starts with a V is. I'll probably try it out with the standard assets just to be an old-time nostalgic fuckhead but thanks for the link.
Trance on 10/1/2010 at 13:53
As far as singleplayer goes, Eva nailed it with jHeretic. The best port IMO for co-op or deathmatch is (
http://www.skulltag.com/) Skulltag, built off (
http://www.zdoom.org/) ZDoom with some (
http://grafzahl.drdteam.org/) GZDoom goodies thrown in (OpenGL, for one).
Co-op Hexen is a bit of a headache with Skulltag though, simply because some of the contingencies players may encounter (such as falling to their death and losing their superweapon pieces) aren't dealt with.
Jason Moyer on 10/1/2010 at 16:17
Awesome, thanks for the links.
Not to go on a tangent, but anyway, I already know about DarkPlaces for Quake and Hammer of Thyrion for Hexen II, which I assume are still the best source ports for those. What are people using for Q2/Q3 nowadays?
june gloom on 10/1/2010 at 20:27
I've yet to try the latest version of Doomsday, but hopefully it fixed that bug in Hexen where polyobjects like doors and whatnot were able to be passed through, which as you might imagine kind of caused issues.
Here's (
http://grafzahl.drdteam.org/) GZDoom for all your pwad needs.
I can't remember which Quake port I used last time. I'd like to use Darkplaces but nobody ever bothered making realtime lights for Dissolution of Eternity which
really irritates me. I think I used (
http://www.quakeone.com/qrack) Qrack, which is fairly vanilla but a good engine. The nice thing about Quake is that, as far as I know, if you have problems with the game in one engine, you can just copy and paste the save over to another engine and it'll work perfectly.
I use (
http://www.quake-engine.com/) UQE for Hexen II.
lost_soul on 11/1/2010 at 02:26
Skulltag is great for doom, but I've never used it with Heretic. The best looking port is Doomsday. If you want to play coop Heretic, I'd be happy to play. I haven't got Hexen though.
As far as Quake 1 goes, Joequake + CTF Bot Plus = lots o' fun! I just wish there was a megatf bot for quake!
Trance on 11/1/2010 at 02:39
Quote Posted by lost_soul
Skulltag is great for doom, but I've never used it with Heretic.
Skulltag's handling of Heretic is no different than how it handles Doom -- everything that worked in Heretic's original engine works in the port, and then some. For the most part the Hexen porting is perfect as well, though I can't remember offhand if the original Hexen accounted for everything that could go wrong in a co-op playthrough. Its ACS scripting seems to be somewhat easy to break.
june gloom on 11/1/2010 at 03:59
Skulltag is an offshoot of ZDoom, of which GZDoom is also an offshoot. If you're playing singleplayer, GZDoom is superior.
