[The Battlelord]

I could not find any Hexen related topic, so i did open this new one.

The HD mod of Hexen has been released by AndrewMRX a very few days ago.


Topic/Download links: ZDoom.org and Moddb.com

[Jimmy]

This is fugly.

[DisgustedGrunt]

How to destroy the look of a game? just throw a bunch of graphical shit on top of it.

[Aristotle Gumball]

High contrast anything makes my eyes water and gives me a headache after 5 minutes. I turn off movies if they look like this.

[Balls of Steel Forever]

It may be nice on a technical level, i guess.

There are definitely better technical uses of zdoom or gzdoom then that.
Imo good pixel art > 3D garbage

Also, that looks like the cleanup aftermath of 4 girls fingerpainting.
I'm sure it's someone's fetish, but surely not mine.

[NightFright]

It's like turning on bilinear filtering in Doom. Or even one of those horrid upscalers, HQ2X or whatever. These games come from the pixel era, so let there be pixels.

[The Battlelord]

Spent like 1 min to make it look brigther like the original, just go the in-game settings (if we talk about very dark movies, you can do the same on the media players going in "filters", or TV's picture modes/image quality if you're on TV) .


I think there is a lot of work and time involved in this, maybe the thing that shoould be decreased is the gloss effect, especially for some textures, but i have no idea if is doable including/excluding some of them.

[Hank]

The Battlelord, on 11 February 2021 - 02:37 PM, said:

I think there is a lot of work and time involved in this, maybe the thing that shoould be decreased is the gloss effect, especially for some textures, but i have no idea if is doable including/excluding some of them.

^ this. Good work, except a bit too shiny.

[Jimmy]

Washing machines work hard too.

[jkas789]

If there is any constructive criticism I can give, is that it looks glossy. I'm more of a pixel guy myself (with fondness for Phredrekee's upscales) but I can recognize the effort that went into this.

[NightFright]

I was actually writing positive comments about this over in the ZDoom forums before. Some scenes like the ice caves do look impressive, but for my taste, that's the only place where the glossy effect makes sense. However, there's a reason why that effect has been applied pretty much everywhere: It simply doesn't have a big visual impact without gloss. Then again, one wonders why seemingly every surface in the game needs to be wet.

There are probably people who will like this, but it's certainly not my cup of tea.

[Player Lin]

Yeah, the author tried so hard to do such works, but it never meant everyone will like the end result...


Only one problem to me is : Too shiny.
I just don't get why people think make it shiny/wetly is good thing...

[MrFlibble]

Well if the mod author was aiming to change the look of the game beyond recognition then I'd say excellent work. Because I only recognized the levels shown on screenshots after some effort.

The whole result looks like a Unity project -- I remember there was a Unity-based Doom remake at IndieDB which I believe was shut down/C&D'd. I forgot what it was called (I think the author did not call it Doom something, but level and monster design wise it was a 1:1 recreation of Doom II). IIRC it had a very similar look when it comes to colours, texture gloss and lighting.

Maybe it has its value due to simple novelty. It's very hard to make an impression just by the screenshots. As far as I can tell there are legit modern games that look like that, so maybe it makes Hexen look more modern for a certain audience too. Back in the early-mid 2000s I played quite a lot of Hexen in the Doomsday engine with trilinear texture filtering and mouselook, so who am I to judge

[Player Lin]

Never fan of Doomsday engine's "visual fancy"...and they never changes.

Just over-busy for me.

[Mark]

I enjoyed Doomsday. I would probably still play it except that for the last couple of years, after many internal changes, I have had issues getting things installed and running properly with all the different patches and addons.

This latest Hexen project should have grabbed the prop, pickup and weapon models from the web instead of using original sprites. And yes, tone down the gloss.

[The Battlelord]

Mark, on 13 February 2021 - 05:44 AM, said:

I enjoyed Doomsday. I would probably still play it except that for the last couple of years, after many internal changes, I have had issues getting things installed and running properly with all the different patches and addons..

I meanly use gzdoom for these games, but yes, same here, i have a doomsday old version that works without any problem, another one from a pair of years ago that i don't understand what it want from me lol.

Another thing to notice is the mouse behaviour, it feels different on doomsday, like a delay, but it does not looks like a real delay, is weird to explain.

About Hexen HD, i wonder if the author will change/improve something.

[Ninety-Six]

Gotta admit, I actually kind of like it. Yeah I'll hand in my card, I know.


I'm just a sucker for fancy lighting. I really am. The surfaces don't even look wet to me, even though they usually do.

[Player Lin]

Fancy lighting not always be bad thing, actually, but it is bad thing when over-doing, especially on later Doomsday engine versions.
Last time I tried the engine they still tried to fix about game supporting(Heretic/Hexen supports was broken and they still tried to fix that), and I still feel something weird even I tried mess around the settings, I don't know if it getting better on current versions...(TBH, that was some years ago)

So I guess the engine is never something for me...

Well, Hexen HD's still fine enough to me if I just ignored the problems of "too shiny", maybe a little tone down would be improvement I guess.

[Balls of Steel Forever]

Ninety-Six, on 13 February 2021 - 10:05 AM, said:

Gotta admit, I actually kind of like it. Yeah I'll hand in my card, I know.


I'm just a sucker for fancy lighting. I really am. The surfaces don't even look wet to me, even though they usually do.

You know what, I think i was in a negative haze when i made my derogatory comment.

I do like the look.

I don't fucking know how i saw shit colored bricks and felt repulsed, some weird shit must have been going on like when the same face is on multiple people.

Good damn thing no one listens to me anyways.