Custom robots in descent 1 at all possible?

[ShivanHunter]

I'd like to make some levels with a few custom bosses, but I generally prefer D1's gameplay to D2's (especially the hardcoded stuff like homing missiles etc). Is there any way at all to add custom boss robots to Descent 1? (I'm ok with a D1X-Rebirth-only solution if one exists)

[LightWolf]

It seems like Rebirth supports HX1 files (which are essentially HXM files). The only way that DOS supports is to hack DESCENT.PIG though AFAIK.

[ShivanHunter]

Thanks! I've already got a few maps made and I still keep waffling on whether to go on with D2 or convert them to D1 and go with that. There are still a couple things I'd like to do that require D2 (switches, actual water textures, a weird idea involving the super laser)... it just really sucks to have homing projectiles be so terrible.

The ideal would be to have gameplay options, specified in the HOG or RL2 or somewhere, such as "revert to D1 homing behavior" but there's nothing for this in D2 (obviously), from what I've read in old threads it's probably beyond the scope of Rebirth, and D2X-XL is... D2X-XL

I dunno. I think I'm just going to try to design levels around the shitty D2 red hulks. I was just really disappointed when I put one in a D2 map after not playing for so long - it was just so pitiful compared to my nightmarish memories of the later D1 levels.

[Sirius]

Retro mod and I think Rebirth 0.60 beta adjusted the D2 homers again, they at least try to track after that. Still slightly easier to dodge than in D1 without afterburner... except you're also slightly slower, so I'm not sure where it winds up on balance.

[ShivanHunter]

Hmm, just tried the 0.60 weekly and it didn't feel any different - I could still dodge them with lazy sidestepping (not even bichording). Retro is definitely a bit harder, so that's encouraging.

[Xfing]

Retro mod and I think Rebirth 0.60 beta adjusted the D2 homers again, they at least try to track after that. Still slightly easier to dodge than in D1 without afterburner... except you're also slightly slower, so I'm not sure where it winds up on balance.

Really? Never noticed that flying speed in D2 is lower than in D1, must be a real subtle difference. Wow, nice to know. They really did try to fix what wasn't broken, lol

As for the topic - well, with Pumo's D1 palette converting levels meant for D1 suddenly seems a more attractive option. You can also use my sound patch to keep all the sound assets from D1 in their rightful places. Textures can be worked around nicely enough too, so whatever loss there will be in the conversion will be pretty minimal.

[ShivanHunter]

With the player speed and all the other things I'm still wondering about all this, so I have a few more D1 questions:

Is it at all possible to alter the player's weapons in D1? I wanna nerf the starting lasers to make upgrades more valuable.

I know Rebirth can use "PG1 files" which are "basically POG files", but POG files index into Descent 2's texture list. How do you actually make PG1 files that replace Descent 1 textures? I just imported a Descent 2 POG with some replacements into a D1 HOG, renamed it to PG1, and nothing was different in Rebirth.

[Sirius]

The player weapons are in descent.pig in D1. They're in descent2.ham in D2... but HXMs can't touch weapon types, so I presume you wouldn't be able to adjust them with a .HX1. You'd need a more sophisticated .PIG hack, which... I'm not sure off the top of my head if there are any tools to edit that. If you can figure out the offsets (tedious but not impossible) it might be possible to do it with a hex editor.

[ShivanHunter]

So I imported a https://i.imgur.com/3hNgnPY.png custom texture into Descent 1 using a PG1 file. The snag: I replaced one of the smooth-looking rock textures near the beginning of the list, but this is replacing a single frame of a monitor animation. And that's fine, I expected as much since the Descent 1 texture list is obviously not going to be identical to Descent 2's. So I've found out that the index for a single frame of an exploding monitor is "DC 04" (which is 4DC = 1244 because of endianness) - this index was rock071 (or something) in D2.

So as before, my question is, how do I find out the index of one of D1's crappier textures, so I can replace it? Is there a list somewhere?

[Sirius]

I don't know of a good one. If I recall correctly you can deduce the order from a couple DLE resource files:
https://sourceforge.net/p/d2x-xl/code/H ... exture.dat
https://sourceforge.net/p/d2x-xl/code/H ... tnames.dat
The first one contains the texture indices, and the second contains the names. They're in the same order. Texture.dat is only really readable with a hex editor; each index is two bytes I think.

[ShivanHunter]

Ooh nice that's perfect! thx