One of the most highly anticipated releases of 1997, HeXen II was the first game from an outside developer to ship with Quake engine technology. The game featured four single player hubs and deathmatch capabilities for 16 players while simultaneously offering four character classes, each with four weapons with dual fire modes for a total of 32 unique weapon effects. In addition, HeXen II was the first 3-D shooter to feature transparent water effects in both hardware and software rendering modes and one of the only fully 3-D games to feature single player cooperative gameplay.
Modified much like its original this game has stood the test of time and has quite a few nifty mods to show for it
J.A.C.K. editor has been in development for a long time. However, in recent years, all updates and bug fixes were kept in beta status, and were only available to those who opted in the beta program. And now the time has come to publish a major update for all our users!
In addition to Windows and Linux, J.A.C.K. now fully supports macOS. Moreover, the editor comes with native map compilers for Quake and Quake II, as well as with an option to download native map tools for Half-Life. Unfortunately, recent macOS versions (e.g. Big Sur) don't support 32-bit apps. This means that, although J.A.C.K. and the compilers will work, to run the old game you will probably have to install a custom 64-bit port. On older macOS versions (e.g. Mojave) everything should work out of the box.
The automatic J.A.C.K. configuration tool has got much more functions, minimizing user intervention. For intance, the editor now automatically unpacks all the necessary resources from the packages, extracts textures for Quake and Hexen II (there was a plugin for those purposes, but not everyone knew it was available), creates a "maps" directory, sets the correct parameters for compile and launch, and much more!
Now you can export your level to OBJ format, which can be imported to many modern 3D editors, converted to other formats. Thus your levels can be exported to game engines which are not directly supported by J.A.C.K.. You can export the entire level, only selected objects, or objects within the bounds of the Cordon Tool. Faces with a NULL/caulk texture will not be exported.
Now the cordon bounds are initialized not with a point, but with a 128x128x128 box, which makes them easier to edit. In addition, the "Enable Cordon" button now restricts rendering of the objects in the 2D and 3D views - you can see in the realtime which objects are going to be exported. This behavior can be disabled in the config using the parameter: ApplyCord>
J.A.C.K. now supports separate configurations for multiple users (including Steam library sharing mode). Settings are no longer lost after running cache integrity checks.
How many times did you decide to create a block in the Block Tool mode, diligently painted the brush with the mouse, pressed Enter... to discover the unfortunate fact that the selected primitive was actually a cylinder? This is such a common problem that we decided to mention it in the list of major improvements! Now it is possible to undo the creation of the primitive while preserving the selection frame: just hit Ctrl+Z, select another primitive type, and press Enter again.
There are certain improvements that facilitate working with this popular open source engine. For example, there is an option to turn off the studio model pitch inversion (also known as "Stupid Quake Bug"), which is not needed in Xash. In addition, J.A.C.K. now correctly renders studio model files with vertex weighting.
The editor code has been ported to Qt 4.8.7, and has been significantly revised. Here is a list of the major changes in version 1.1.2800; many of those were requested by the community:
Many bugs have also been fixed; here are some examples:
As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions here, or on the Steam Community discussions. Thank you so much for making levels for classic games, and for using J.A.C.K. for that!
A demo release of Shadows of Chaos for Hexen 2 is now available!
Hexen II - Shadows of Chaos is a brand new mod/mission pack for Hexen 2 based off of Game of Tomes.
J.A.C.K. (previously known as Jackhammer) is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture (Half-Life, Quake, Hexen II, Quake...
J.A.C.K. (previously known as Jackhammer) is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture (Half-Life, Quake, Hexen II, Quake...
J.A.C.K. (previously known as Jackhammer) is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture (Half-Life, Quake, Quake II, Quake...
J.A.C.K. (previously known as Jackhammer) is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture (Half-Life, Quake, Quake II, Quake...
J.A.C.K. (previously known as Jackhammer) is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture (Half-Life, Quake, Quake II, Quake...
My first map ever. An attempt to port the first level of TES Daggerfall to Hexen 2. Big thanks to Hexen and Quake communities for help
A mod for Hexen 2 that adds weapon altfires, stat upgrades, and various balance tweaks, effects, bugfixes, & new features for mappers. Detailed description...
A mod for Hexen 2 that adds weapon altfires, stat upgrades, and various balance tweaks, effects, bugfixes, & new features for mappers. Detailed description...
Hexen II was for the most part a pretty solid game, but one that didn't manage to surpass its predecessor and was in fact a bit of a disappointment in more ways than one. I loved the first game to death, so clearly my expectations for the sequel were very high. In retrospect, I think that going into fully 3D and running on the Quake engine no less was a tradeoff that didn't quite pan out, and a lot of the greatness of Hexen was lost in the process. This meant among other things a somewhat slower gameplay, less enemies on screen, unrealistic gibbing deaths, lack of atmospheric sound effects, too much reliance on "urban" environments, and restricted use of hazardous terrain. Hexen excelled at doing just the opposite of those things even though it technologically lagged behind, and nowadays it's only gotten better with all the amazing things one can do via modding; Hexen II, sadly not so much. It's all a shame because despite all its shortcomings the game was still great and very enjoyable, and the expansion pack was pretty damn awesome. People can still do wonderful things with the Quake engine, as evidenced by mods like Arcane Dimensions, if you're ok with some very drastic changes, or Copper Quake if you're more into classic Quake gameplay. Unfortunately, much like Hexen doesn't get the same degree of attention as Doom from the modding community, Hexen II likewise is vastly eclipsed by Quake and its myriad of custom maps released throughout the years, with literally thousands of maps hosted at quaddicted.com alone and more coming out regularly. Not to mention dark fantasy first-person shooters are pretty much extinct by now, and a Hexen III ever coming out sounds like the ultimate combination of pipe dream and wishful thinking. More likely we'll end up having another ******* Doom Eternal follow-up, or another Strogg-themed Quake game in the future.
Hexen III would be almost impossible to have the atmosphere of the earlier ones. The creators would have to ignore all the worlds politics and caring to death attitude to make the masterpiece that hexen is. i would want to see it stay to its roots unlike doom with its pop up like nature of kills and just be the standard spray and prey the originals were. Hexed if it were created by modders would likey be like it but not the same franchise.
I'm trying to figure out how to mod Hexen II. I am generally focused on modding the audio aspects of the game.
I've been trying to find what kind of programs to use. Can someone help?
To look at the structure of how audio is set up in the game, you'd want something that can explore the .PAK archive format. As far as I know the .PAK files used by Hexen II haven't changed format in any way from the ones used by Quake, so Quake .PAK tools should work.
As far as inside the .PAK, I'm pretty sure the sounds and music are just standard wave and midi files. Some ports can also use OGG music as a stand-in for CD tracks but that wasn't standard to the vanilla game.
Your modded stuff would go in a subfolder of the game that can be invoked with the "-game" parameter.
Depending on how extensively you want to retool stuff you might want to look into the HexenC scripting as well but for a simple sound replacement it shouldn't be necessary.
Hexen 2 is pretty much the best game of the Hexen/Heretic series, Heretic 2 would be the worst game.
How and where do I download Hexen II?
jsHexen - Improved engine for Hexen II. It's amazing and best mod for this game from a russian entuthias, pls add a link and let fans enjoy.
site: Hexen2retex.narod.ru
last version of jsHexen: Narod.ru 1.21.01.rar.html
Thanks to creator, moddb and fans)
HeXen 2 one of the best game ever if u ask me
Great visual / level design
It's time this game was good today with a better graphic and added more extra idea to the game would be enjoyable. I liked play with this.