Posted by deadite4 on Saturday 31st of March 2012 07:12:16 AM.
Hello all! This is a short little post simply to announce something new we are looking to try out. Brought on by the fact that it has now been 16 years since the retail release of Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders (3/31/1996 according to wikipedia), there is probably plenty of gamers who don't have their copies or weren't even around to have played it. After doing some thinking we decided: Why not try a giveaway through Steam?
We have a Steam group here and the platform has made it so easy to gift games that we see this as a great opportunity. The hope is that by giving away the heretic/hexen steam bundle or individual games (and trying to make this some type of semi-regular event), people can get interested in the world from the beginning. Plus everyone loves free games right?
Having a chance to get the gift is easy - join our Steam group. We'll just select a random member by our next developer interview and that's it! You'll be given the heretic/hexen Steam bundle that includes Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, and Hexen II.
Posted by deadite4 on Tuesday 21st of February 2012 08:22:01 PM.
Welcome all to our first installment of new developer interviews! This week we introduce to you Caffeine Freak. Our lead level designer and the main reason our first release even materialized as a playable game. Head on over to our moddb page and Enjoy!
Posted by deadite4 on Wednesday 08th of February 2012 05:48:23 PM.
While it's been an extended delay between postings, we certainly bring good news(don't we always?). To start off please note that we have moved our main domain to http://hexenmod.net and the old .com is forwarding for now. The whole team keeps rolling on as we have been. We've moved development entirely over to standalone now with the GPL code due to the exhaustive work put forth from our programmer Solarsplace. At the moment the team is sort of split between 2 goals. Level designers and modelers continue to focus on our next release in terms of levels and game content while the other few of us have been focusing the majority of our time on fixing the holes that were presented by dropping Doom 3 as our base. There's still plenty of work to be done on both fronts but work continues to get done daily.
On top of that a previous modeler, Zurra, has returned to the team! His main focus is static modeling as it was before and it is certainly great to have him back. You can recognize some of his previous work on the team in the form of the boots of speed and chaos device. He's currently working on wrapping up some other much needed pickup models.
Also joining us in the static modeling department is Gavlig! Joining just a few days after Zurra, he has been tasked for the moment primarily as supporting our level designers with much needed models for props and quests. It's definitely perfect timing for our designers.
With all of the new members over the last 2 years we have amassed quite a new team and because of this will be resuming our old "Meet the developers" interview style posts on a twice monthly timeline. It's a great way for individual members to get their background out there if they choose. We hope everyone enjoys it!
As always if there are any interested developers our there, especially level designers, we'd love to hear from you!
Posted by BloodRayne on Saturday 24th of December 2011 10:59:59 PM.
In the course of the last year my management role in Hexen has become less and less up to a point where my active participation in the mod has ground to a halt. The main reason for this is time constraints and other projects that make demands on my time. Management has been taken over in the very capable hands of Deadite, Caffeine Freak, Zeroth, Slash and other long standing members of the mod, who have all invested as much as I have into this game. In the seven years that I worked on EOC I learned more than I dared hope and have spent more hours on coding, mapping, creating sounds and other stuff than I can even begin to count.
But life goes on and so must I in the form of my new project called 'Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer's Key' which had it's release on the 25th of December, yeah that's today. Go grab it!
And with that I leave EOC in the capable hands of the team!
Posted by deadite4 on Wednesday 21st of December 2011 08:42:02 PM.
For anyone who has stopped by our twitter page lately you probably know that we've been making solid progress on moving the project to a standalone, free game. Our programmer, Solarsplace, has been hard at work getting all the code, scripts, and defs all set up for quite some time now. Mr. Rocket has been hard at work creating any needed art to fill in some of our lingering holes.
Fortunately for the majority of the project we kept fairly strict rules of avoiding anything from Doom 3 as much as we possibly could throughout the development of the project. While some things inevitably inherited Doom 3 things, the amount has been incredible low compared to what it could have been. This has made our move progress at a rather fast pace. We'll have some more detailed information on that next month when we hopefully are in the final stages of the move. We'll continue to be posting small updates via twitter until then, so be sure to check us out!
Also recently we posted a track from our new composer Mystic Realmz. It's one of his first, complete tracks and is already being used with more on the way. The whole team is quite excited with all the new music!
Posted by deadite4 on Monday 21st of November 2011 07:57:47 PM.
It doesn't feel like it has been a year since our first demo release. People joined, people left, solid progress has surely been made. Our current team is still very much enthusiastic about the project and daily updates in at least one department of the project is the norm. So what have we done? What is our future?
Well as all of our past news items have stated progress continues daily. Mapping, models, textures, sounds, music, code, you name it! Really the whole team is jiving pretty well right now and things continue to stay on course.
For the future? Well our next release has always be planned to be the entire first episode and would conclude the Cleric's journey. That includes 3 full hubs(about 3.5 levels per hub) and would be a little over triple the size of our demo release. There's also discussion on what to include on the other classes if for nothing else than some public testing of their mechanics. It will all depend on how things continue to progress in the time frame we are eying. A couple new team members of course wouldn't be a bad thing!
We hope to have some very cool updates in the coming months so stay tuned!
Posted by deadite4 on Thursday 20th of October 2011 06:48:16 AM.
It's been 2 months since our big Roden update(which had some great feedback!) and it's been quite busy since! We bring only a small update this time around. All departments continue on their tasks. We have 2 maps ready for play and 4 currently in difference phases of development.
Maxetormer has alredy sent in some animations for Roden along with another character model on the way from our other 3d artist, andy_a. New textures and fixes to old ones continue from Mr. Rocket while squeezing in some mapping as well now. We've finally(!) fixed several troubling code bugs that have plagued us since release thanks to the hard work of solarsplace. Music has been streaming on in from our semi-recently acquired composer.
All in all we've been progressing very nicely. Below we're showing 2 very WIP shots of h3m1 and h3m2 in their layout phase in progress by ShadoW and Mr. Rocket respectively. Until next month, where we plan to display more goodies, happy gaming!
Posted by deadite4 on Tuesday 16th of August 2011 06:22:00 AM.
"As the foremost Librarian amongst his fellows, Roden is widely regarded as having the greatest cohesive sense of the history of Cronos. Before founding his grand library, he feared that records of the past could one day be destroyed - either through mere accident or malicious intent. To safeguard against such an intellectual loss, he set out with his most trusted allies to create a bastion against the march of time.
Roden is, as he has always been, simply an observer. It is then horribly poetic that he is fated to continue this role now that he is stuck somewhere between the bounds of life and death. Korax was killed. The world rejoiced. The world rebuilt. But Korax's existence set the current stage, allowed a new darkness to lead that march of time. And Roden must watch as he always has, and watch, and watch..."
This month we'd like to formally introduce our main NPC of the first episode....Roden. From start to finish it took the collaboration of several people and input from the entire team to get the character to where he is today. The following is a developer commentary that is hopefully both interesting and informative on how many things are done internally. Enjoy.
Spookt:
For me, Roden always seemed the most necessary character in the first episode. The player was always going to learn of him, his research, and the world's past in the Library, but there was something too emotionally detached about that idea. Reading about the man was never going to be as powerful as actually meeting him. He is, I think, a visual metaphor for a theme running through the Cleric's story: impotence in the face of overwhelming circumstances. As knowledgeable and wise as Roden may be, he is now bound to an existence where he can do very little. In terms of practicality, he functions as a means to explain the situation to the player - in my mind more in a System Shock 2 Janice Polito sort of way, as opposed to Atlas a la Bioshock. Further, he is a presence of stability. We opened the game in a ravaged city, thoroughly raped and left for ash. The Library presents a calm disparity, as does Roden. True, the building has seen better days, as has the man himself, but what I wanted to accomplish most at this point in the narrative was to allow the player an opportunity to get a sense of what our Cleric has been thrown into and what might be done to fix it.
Maxetormer:
Like any other project it began with the idea which was written by Spookt, our writer extraordinaire. The main air about the character I'd specifically mention is one of weariness. He's trapped in the library and can really do nothing else but chronicle what he sees. While the player is his long hoped-for savior (for himself and the world), he has long since given into despair.
I began doing some early concepting and at first I was going for a simple monk feel until our Art Director/Viking- Andreas told me the design was looking too bland.
"Keep in mind he's a ghost, and we're talking about a magical entity whose existence for a very long time has been all about chronicling. You have an opportunity to play around with his appearance here, and I don't think we should limit ourselves to the "old man in a robe" option. " Andreas then drew notes over my concept, I went back to the drawing board, and we ended up at our final concept.
Once approved, I started doing the actual 3d model. I'm using blender 2.5x for all of my 3d work, and I must say its a fantastic piece of software. It comes with high resolution sculpting tools and low resolution modeling tools so, all in all, it's like having Mudbox and Maya in the same package...extremely handy.
When I completed the high res model it was just a matter of baking the normal and AO maps into the low res meshes, and painting the diffuse channels with Photoshop. Blender has a really good .md5 exporter which allows us to import the asset and its animations directly into id tech 4 with out any problems which has been another great perk of using Blender in the pipeline.
I have a thread on the Blender artist forum about this character at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... e-of-Chaos if anyone has further interest in its progression. Currently I have finished weight painting him and now begin setting up rig controls and then finally onto animations. Wish us luck!
When I saw Spookt's description and then Maxetormer's concepts, I immediately knew what type of voice would be perfect. Old, strained, and gritty but rich. As an audio engineer in the Voice Over production field I work with voice artists every day and have many relationships with those I've recorded. I knew exactly who to ask to fit this character and he was more than happy to lend his voice. As luck would have it we actually had a project scheduled together that very month! He loved what he saw of the concepts and well, we recorded his whole script while breaking for lunch.
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Until next month...happy gaming! We'll have more developer commentaries in the future if it is well-received!
Posted by deadite4 on Wednesday 06th of July 2011 08:32:31 PM.
For this month's news post we'd like to start out by introducing our new composer Mystic Realmz! We've been quietly in search of a new composer for a little while and were directed over to Mystic Realms, who was more than thrilled to hop on board. He's already started producing some tracks for the project and I must say we're all a bit excited to start expanding our musical library for our designers. You can find some of his previous work around the net especially a few that have been in other doom 3 mod projects and in Joe Goss's animated work. Welcome to the team!
We've spent a good portion of the last few weeks updating our website. You can now find updated links, official videos, all of our downloads, and a completely updated media section. In addition to updated information site wide, we've also added a fantastic IRC chat widget right in the site. This is perfect for anyone who always wanted to chat but never wanted to try IRC. Simply go to our contact page, or http://hexenmod.net/irc.php and enter your nickname. It's that easy! Upon connection it will send you directly to our chat channel. No need to install or learn a thing!
As we've had good fortune expanding the team lately, we would still love to add to our pool of level designers especially. If you have some level design experience and a love for Hexen then send us a message! Until next time...
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