Diablo 1 HD Hellfire Mod | Awake

Hey guys,
I have played Belzebub on and off for several years now and I am still amazed at the Masterpiece that you have created (I have been a fan of D1 since 1998 : )
Your game is simply Amazing and I Thank you wholeheartedly for all your efforts!!!

I have been reading the threats and decided to post all the questions to you in one post
Please see below and I thank you in advance for the considerations:

You have mentioned that you consider Belzebub complete and you are not going to revisit it for the foreseeable future.

1. Is this because you are working on a similar project at the moment such as the Tchernobog that will address some of the “issues/balances” with Belzebub?

Expanding content and the future of D1 Belzebub/Tchernobog:
I see a lot of fans of your work who are asking if we can integrate D2 models such as the necromancer, a female version of the sorcerer or even the Barbarian into your current game. I believe as fans of D series and now Path of Exile, we are always interested in more content and how we can move the game further : )

2. Are you interested in expanding the content and the visuals with respect to Belzebub or even Tchernobog using models such as D2?

3. Are you willing to accept visual changes and to what extend with respect to the game environment such as (rain or night changes in town), character changes (such as genders for each class, visual effects etc)?

4. If not, can you please comment on what are the constraints on your side – money, coding, time/effort to prepare the proper sprites/models, proper resolutions etc?

5. Are there any technical constraints that the fans are not aware of such as (maybe) – D2 sprites incompatibility issues/ resolution or the environment?

6. Are you interested and open to receive help from the community?

a) If so, with which parts - programmers; visual designers; content creators, even funding etc?

b) Are you open to provide specs to the community and then community submits you sprites, 3D models, altered D1 images, D1 Hellfire models/characters/items based on your predefined characteristics for your approval in your game?

7. Open Source the game – have you considered to make your code available as an open source to the community to contribute?

a) If not, then is it feasible to provide some guide/words of advise to regular players like us who want to tinker with content and or visuals?

8. Are you open to consider creating a program for stats- where people can change criteria (such as creature stats; resistances and mobs) and they can test out? This can potentially generate a lot of statistical logs to help balance the game where needed?

Thank you for taking the time to read through my questions!

And THANK YOU again for all the efforts you have put. It is a really great game : )

https://discord.gg/NVT93NU
I've made discord the main tchernobog hub, best come here :p


1. Belzebub's/Tchernobog's original creator has moved on to do other stuff not related to diablo, I think it's safe to say he's never coming back to these, I've taken Tchernobog over.

2. I don't know shit about graphics, I'm a programmer and I have enough work fixing/tweaking existing content so I don't think we are going to see any new graphics/d2 ones.

3. Rain/night would be cool, but who's going to make it and what effect would it have? I guess the answer is similar to #2

4. Constraints? All that you mentioned + more

5. Yeah, I don't think d2 sprites are compatible, they require tweaking and as I've said, I'm a programmer not a graphics guy

6. Sure, in fact people are already creating spreadsheets and stuff, I'm open for collaboration with redesigning stuff because at the moment I consider Tchernobog horribly unbalanced.

a) It's hard to receive programming help as the code is private and each person added to the project is considered carefully. I'll gladly accept funds though At the moment the best help I can get is playing the game and reporting stuff that should be tweaked and/or bugs/crashes. I expect to rebalance all monsters/items/spells in the future (I know, a huge task)

b) Maybe somewhere later when I'm done with existing content and want to add new.

7. Yes but -
1) if original creator wanted it to be public, it would be so
2) I've developed my own mod called infernity - it's open source, nobody helped with it, I'm afraid it'd be the same with Tchernobog.
People would be ripping pieces of code for their own use, never contributing to it and cheating in Tchernobog would be super easy - I'm pretty sure we'd see a lot of versions with exp x99999999 etc. floating around.

a) If you want to tinker with stuff, your best bet will probably be devilutionX - I believe it will become the ultimate modding base for Diablo 1.

8. This is called cheating

Make sure to join us on discord

Thank you for your comprehensive Reply and explanations! It is very well appreciated.
As I mentioned, I feel there are a lot of community members and I just wanted to provide an outlet for people that are interested in pushing the project forward as well as get all the Q & A in one place.
It is sad to hear that the original creators are no longer involved but I can understand that they want to pursue other options.
As discussed above, if they have the necessary skills and experience they can probably get in touch with you : )

Thanks again!

qndel - "I don't know shit about graphics, I'm a programmer and I have enough work fixing/tweaking existing content so I don't think we are going to see any new graphics/d2 ones."

I'm a graphics guy and I've been trying to track down Diablo 1s original textures for quite some time. Is that something you have on hand?

Is there an inventory item you'd like overhauled? Some one frame object you'd like modified? Touching something up for the high definition era is right in my wheel house. Frankly contributing to this mod would be a feather in my cap and id like to do it.


I cant make any promises but if you have the original animation frames for the Warrior, Rogue and Sorcerer and can get them to me there's a chance I can ape them up to have a different coloration for the Barbarian, Necromancer and Assassin.

Similarly if the town of Tristram is a single image file that can be swapped out for an animated image file it would be possible to throw in some visual effects... Rain, flickering light, smoke, running water in the river/fountain ext.

Those last two things are kind of iffy and there's a million little things Blizzard could've done to keep people like me from modifying the player characters/town map but in terms of creating a sprite for the inventory or creating higher definition textures the sky is the limit.

Message me here or shoot me an email at Jaganshye@hotmail.com if you are interested.

Getting to the IMG files is no big deal. You need a few hours of experience with decompilers but otherwise it's very easy to find and modify them... and frankly if you don't have any experience with them a project like this one is a good one to cut your teeth on. Most people prefer these ones:
http://www.zezula.net/en/mpq/download.html

What I found when I tried to do what you're describing is that, bluntly, the game this mod is built around is ancient and decrepit and even relatively minor tweaks to the graphics can start causing inconsistencies pretty quick. I could barely get the files to get into an edit-able state and even when I brute forced the pixels into place it totally corrupted my copy of the game before I could even see the Assassin with the extra cup sizes I gave her. If your experience has taught you how to get around this, then more power to ya, but it'd probably be most beneficial to release those changes you make as a series of separate graphics packs, instead of trying to get them into the base version of the mod; that way people could download your changes on an at-your-own-risk basis.

Wendigo

Thanks. What a trip man. I've been playing around with the decompiler you linked me to and "Cel Maker" all day. I've found frames of the player characters walking towards you but none of them walking away. They might be hiding somewhere else in the plyrgfx folder but I haven't found them yet. Objective Number One for me is to simply make the Necromancer/Assassin dress in stylish black so I'll keep working to track the missing frames down.

Yeah I see what you mean. Hard coding each inventory square to be 28x28 pixels is a real drag and it looks like doing redraws/colorations of the old items at a higher pixel count is right out. That's a shame because thats something any half dead artist could do regardless of how much mechanical know how they have about games.

Do you have any idea whats up with the level data? Its all in very peculiar DUN files and a few cel files that Cel Maker doesn't want to open. Weird as hell that they only started throwing sane, normal, GIF files around for the Hell levels. Personally when I do this stuff for other projects PNGs work perfectly but maybe that wasn't an option in 1996.

I'll keep at it but huge respect goes to the people who have worked successfully with the idiosyncrasies of this game. I see why people queue around the block to modify Doom 1/2 but give Diablo 1 some birth. Its a shame too because the game deserves a whole lot of love.

Is Diablo 2 much the same?

I'm afraid I can't be much help beyond this point, sorry. I'm only a tinkerer with stuff like coding and game graphics, and it was all a blur to me, lol. I can tell you why the files for the Hell levels are in a different format, though, just because I remember when the game first came out; it went through several revamps and was really close to stuck in development hell (...ironic...) more than once; a lot of the games from the 90's couldn't keep up with the quickly advancing changes in technology. So they probably just stapled the newer level scripts to the old one with some glued-on code. When it was originally designed it was going to be a standard RPG and every time you met an enemy it would go into a fight screen like a Final Fantasy game, lol.

If anything, Diablo II is worst to work on. More proprietary code and more interaction screens that can bug up an entire tile set, it all sounds like a nightmare and I never took more than a passing glance at it.

6. Sure, in fact people are already creating spreadsheets and stuff, I'm open for collaboration with redesigning stuff because at the moment I consider Tchernobog horribly unbalanced.

On the subject of that (and sorry for the bump)... If and when you think Tchernobog is in a good place, would you consider moving back to Beelzebub and adding in the missing Hellfire content?