Hexen 2 map

I decided to collect the Hexen 2 screenshots in a new post; I’ve had a bit of innocent fun making this level, and in the course of doing so I hacked all the compile tools. Hexen 2 mapping is a bloodbath. It’s not pretty. The tools are stone age, I have to hack the map format itself by search and replace in a text editor, and I’m breaking all sorts of compiler limits. I’m also seeing cool new error messages.

I hacked AguirRe’s light tool for the coloured lighting.

The lava crack of doom; the rocks here broke the compiler and the Vis tool. I had to jack up MAX_HULL_POINTS and MAX_MAP_PLANES. I used AguirRe’s TxQBSP as a guideline for some good values.

And it’s not over yet. Let’s see if I can finish this.

And it’s over. The short mapping session today (April 19), including this lovely little ruin, broke the BSP format limit… specifically clipnodes. Same problem as in RMQ, which led to the creation of the BSP2 format.

Unfortunately hacking the BSP2 toolchain to support Hexen 2 isn’t an option right now. All the tools hacking I had to do before I even got to this point has worn me out.

I’m considering to take it to q3bsp. The upside would be even prettier lighting and the ability to use static meshes, the downside would be having to convert all the lowres hexen 2 textures to Q3 images and no more scrolling sky.

Not sure what I’ll do about this. For now, I’m quite frustrated.