The latest version of Korax' Heritage: Scattered Evil, the FPS-RPG hybrid in the world of Hexen, is now available for download on SourceForge and ModDB. Many of the ideas of the original Korax’ Heritage concept (which is nearly a decade old) have been implemented in commercial games over the years, many of these features in a much more professional way than we ever could (like a huge seamlessly connected 3D world, epic storyline with different outcomes depending on the player’s choices, etc).

However, there is one very specific and fundamental feature of the Korax’ Heritage concept that has not been implemented in any game up to this day: cross-breeding a 3D first person shooter with a fantasy RPG. There are many action-RPGs out there, but they are all RPGs in the first place, and don’t offer a simple and quick-paced fighting engine like first person shooters do. And while some shooters did add a couple of RPG elements, most of them didn’t go even as far as KMOD does.

Thus, a Korax RPG could still offer something that’s unique, and offer it for a world that has been dropped by the commercial developer.

The latest version of Korax' Heritage: Scattered Evil, the FPS-RPG hybrid in the world of Hexen, is now available for download on SourceForge and ModDB. So what is the mod all about? One strong feature of Scattered Evil is how it approaches the mixture: acknowledging there is no “perfect balance” because each gamer is different, it allows the player to mix the two elements within every single game between the pre-defined limits. A player who is very good in first person shooters can concentrate on that element of the game, set most RPG features to automatic (e.g. skill distribution when leveling up) or discard them altogether (e.g. skipping on doing sidequests and exploring dungeons), and breeze through the game more with his motoric skills than any collected items – while it is easier to defeat a uber-heresiarch at level 50 with highest quality magic weaponry that takes 10% of his life in a single shot, it is also possible to defeat this boss at level 10 with a tier one regular weapon that needs 500 successful hits to finish him off. On the other hand, the player can choose to explore every dungeon to the last cell, find and finish every small quest and reach the highest possible level and acquire the best possible equipment before attempting to face the final foe. So what's new in version 1.8? Read more for details!

A new version of Scattered Evil has been released, bringing it up to version 1.9 and is now available at www.koraxheritage.com featuring a lot of new features that further improve the complex mod:

• New Armor System
• New Feature: Carried Weight
  Inventory items (including money) now have a specific weight and depending on your character’s stats, sooner or later you’ll become overburdened
• New Feature: Banking and Finances
  You can now open a bank account at Ocadia’s Counting House and deposit some of your cash in it, both lightening the load in your backpack and earning interest with time.
• New and modified Class Abilities
• New Dungeons
  Rebuilt from scratch, The Rift is open once again, connecting The Canyon to the Dark Conclave, Hytesthani Ravine is now the target of Senior Wizard Robert’s quest for the ultimate weapon.

Scattered Evil 2.0 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

Monster Models

• Fully animated models for the Ettin and Chaos Serpent families, including damage skin variants and special overkill animations. Besides the move from 2D to 3D, many models feature additional visual changes compared to their previous sprite iterations (see the list below).
• Ettin Slingers use slingshots and chuck stones.
• Ettin Grenadiers brandish flechettes.
• Ettin Commanders carry a hammer.
• Ettin Warlords gave up their helmets and replaced most of their armor with pure gold pieces. As a warlord, you gotta show off your bling or how will your underlings know you da boss?
• All Chaos Serpents now have a standard death animation (falling down) and an overkill animation (bloody bits flying everywhere).
• Magma Serpents are now huge and their skin is infused with molten lava that only stops glowing upon death.
• Frost Serpents are a new blue subspecies that like the cold and have displaced Wendigos in the icy reaches of Charybdea.
• Flayed Serpents were first conceived in a sadistic wizard's twisted mind, who wondered what would happen if you took some young Chaos Serpents and removed their skin. They live in constant pain that only abates at those moments when they bite into the flesh of some unsuspecting adventurer to drink their blood.

NPC Models

• All animated NPC sprites have been replaced with animated models.
• All female NPC sprites have been replaced with models.
• Most non-unique male NPC sprites have been replaced with models. Some of them even learned how to sit on furniture.
• Chickens, pigs and piglets now have unique animated models.

City Updates

• The city of Ocadia has been rebuilt from scratch, leaving only some of the most iconic buildings more or less intact. Besides a more up-to-date look, it should also greatly improve frame rates.
• Annoyed by all the construction noise, the market stalls from Ocadia moved to Sichabroner. The joke is on them though, as that cityscape underwent some changes over the summer, too.
• All good things come in threes, so the city of Thystes got a facelift as well.

Gameplay Changes

• Whether health artifacts (Quartz Flask, Mystic Urn) are used automatically is now controlled through a setting in the Options menu, independent of the difficulty setting.
• While in the berserk state, now you can open the Journal (ends berserking) and the Map Scroll (suspends berserking, resumes after closing the scroll).
• Items that can be picked up now always glow, items that can't be picked up don't glow. Most of them also rotate in addition to float bob.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Built on the concurrently released Vavoom 1.34, the GNU/Linux binaries are now 64-bit (Windows 64-bit binaries will follow in a subsequent release).
• Removed a number of unused textures and compressed all non-transparent textures to optimize memory usage.
• Adopted the bugfixes present in KMOD 5.0 but not in Scattered Evil 1.9 (Fighter levelup bug, load/save screens display issue).
• You can now initiate a conversation with domesticated animals.
• You can now punch most fences and furniture.
• When looking into a mirror, the player now sees an idealized version of himself.

Scattered Evil 2.1 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB and can be downloaded.

High resolution HUD

• The HUD is now rendered in 1920x1200 instead of the legacy 640x480. Besides the improved visuals, the higher resolution also allows for more information to be displayed in the same space
• A new HUD options menu has been added, allowing customization of over a dozen different display aspects
• The HUD now has three different modes: classic (Hexen style status bar), compact (a minimalistic set of icons in the lower right corner), and none. These modes are independent of the screen size setting and you can toggle between them using the HUD options menu
• The class abilities (martial skills/prayers/cantrips) are now stored in a scroll that can be unrolled to pick the active ability
• When RPG Complexity is Off, the status bar mode replaces the nonfunctional weight, hunger and fatigue counters with a panel showing the current values of all six ability scores
• The conversation screen now uses more screen estate if the HUD mode is set to compact or none
• For the more technically minded: the numeric counter function has been completely rewritten, allowing the rendering of numbers in four different sizes, up to nine different colors, optionally as percentages, with custom vertical alignment (left/right/centered) and a built-in protection against overflow (large numbers are truncated, e.g. 105000 becomes 105k)

More details can be read below.

Scattered Evil 2.2 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB. What is it about? Korax' Heritage: Scattered Evil cross-breeds a 3D first person shooter with a fantasy role playing game in the world of Hexen. New features for the updated release are:

Journal Redesign
The Journal has been rebuilt from the ground up - not just visually, but also in functionality.

Sleeve
The left quarter of the Journal view stays the same on all pages, showing general information.

Character Information: the player's name, class, and alignments

• Player Assets: a dynamic list of the monetary value of the cash in the player's bags, items in his inventory, and his bank account
• Armor: the type of armor worn, current durability as both absolute value and percentage left, any resistance gems embedded
• Keyring: list of all keys in the player's possession

Chapters
All chapters are now single pages with dynamic overlays that change the displayed content when moving the focus to another list item.

• Main Page: when opening the Journal, the right three-quarters of the Journal view shows a grid of icons that allow access to the different sections (size and number dependent on RPG Complexity)
• Quests: a dynamic list of active, completed and undiscovered quests; hovering over a quest's title displays a short description of the current quest stage (where to go, what to do) and a map sketch of the surrounding area to make it easier to find a location
• Atlas: high resolution maps show the province and some of the regions in great detail; you can now choose to display the hero's custom notes as usual or the official place names instead
• Arsenal: a dynamic list of weapons, spells, cantrips, prayers, and martial skills; hovering over an item's name shows information about the weapon/spell or who to talk to if you haven't acquired it yet
• Codex: a compendium of information about the world and its denizens; hovering over a topic will display a detailed entry on the subject
• Notes: a section appearing only if RPG Complexity is set to Standard or Old School, it displays currently relevant notes for pending tasks and for Mansion collections; notes are removed after the associated task or collection is complete
• Crafting: see the next bullet point

New feature: Crafting

• Herbalism: find and harvest different types of herbs all over Charybdea
• Alchemy: mix the right combination of herbs to brew powerful potions
• This feature is disabled when RPG Complexity is Off

Treasure improvements

• Treasure chests can now be found in a larger selection of dungeons
• In addition to finding them hidden in dark corners, treasure keys now also drop from certain foes
• The content of treasure chests is randomized for each new game (saving before opening a chest and then reloading won't change the contents)
• Treasure chests have received visual updates to make it easier to recognize them and to make it clear when the player is already in the process of unlocking a chest
• There is now a lot more gold hidden in secret rooms

RPG Complexity differentiation

• When RPG Complexity is set to Off, dungeons now include a significantly larger number of health and mana pickups, making shopping less mandatory; the number of pickup items also slightly decreases when going from Standard to Old school complexity
• On Old School complexity, you can now find treasure (mostly gold and herbs) in towns as well

Revamped key management

• There are now clearly visible standardized locks wherever a key can be used
• Locks and keys are unique throughout the entire game, so there is no way to use the "wrong" key on a lock or doing it in the "wrong" order
• Locks and keys now have distinctive animations so it's always clear whether a lock needs a key, is in the process of being opened, or is already open
• These changes also fix previous issues with some keys disappearing from the player's inventory

Miscellanous fixes and improvements

• Ability score updates have been moved to a dedicated Character Update Screen
• Greatly reduced the difficulty of Vermin Hovels on Hard and Nightmare skills
• All monsters that drop a specific quest item or trigger an action upon their death are now protected from being morphed and thus accidentally blocking player progress
• Fixed the vertical position of many pickup items that were hovering too close to the floor
• Reorganized some of the Options submenus, including the addition of "Display Settings"; also added a few new settings and removed some old ones

A scientific approach to a DooM-related problem. And that problem is… Linear/Nonlinear maps: which is which? Wraith777 considered this to be a stupid idea but I really think that this is somewhat enlightening to me - even after 25 years of mapping. Since nobody actually tried to make such a classification and analyze maps based on it he has developed this on his own. And, off course, not everything is 100% definite – those are simply his suggestions based on study and observation of various maps and are subjects of discussion and corrective actions. The shemes and details can be found at the discussion-thread at Doomworld.com.

It happened again: Straight of nowhere, Shadow of the Wool popped out with a little development thread over at the ZDoom forums, showing off a few first screenshots and the chance to participate on beta-testing. So what is it all about? An evil, curtain-scratching and hairball-vomiting force from outer space has arrived on your peaceful home planet! They captured you and all your friends, built ugly factories everywhere and littered the landscapes with cat hair and poop. And on top of that, they took that one girl you just got together with onto one of their ships, which is heading towards outer space! Do you have the balls of wool to pack your guns, escape from your prison, and go on a journey through space to free your world from this abomination? The project features (according to the author) 3 mayhem filled episodes with 6 levels, high resolution 320x200 cartoon graphics, 265 colors, awkward english by a non-native speaker, a completely new and awes0me soundtrack in the vein of Bobby Prince and horrible puns!!! Well, this sounds twisted, and so do the screenshots look. Details? Here!