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| Interview
With Jacques 'Korax' Krige |
Interviewed
by Gwynhala |
 I'm here today with excellent mod programmer and serious metalhead Korax, who
runs one of Raven-Games.com's hosted sites, NewHexen.
Tell us a little about yourself.
OK. My real name is Jacques Krige, AKA : Korax. I'm almost
24, and I live in South Africa, in a a small town called Secunda. Not too far
from Johannesburg to give you an idea. Middle of no-where kinda thing :) For a
living I am a web developer.
And your Hexen2 engine project is called NewHexen, right?
Yes.
What's the history of it - it's based on some of your previous work, right?
Well, it actually started way before NewHexen, as a TC
we (some friends) worked on using Quake and then briefly I switched to Hexen2,
back to Quake then back AGAIN to Hexen2, then set it aside for a while because
workloads were just too much. Since that time I got lots of experience, and with
some encouragement from Phoebus, I decided to start the project now known as NewHexen.
 Why
were you switching engines like that? Did you have some things you were trying
to accomplish, technically or creatively, and just looking for the right engine
to do it on?
I was switching between engines because Quake was more
stable and simple, whereas Hexen2 gave us more features we can play with, , and
was alot more Win32-friendly... but it was alot harder to change things in Hexen2,
because it was a bit more involving. The goal would have been to have an engine
that has all the good things of both engines wrapped in one... a hybrid engine.
What brought you back to the Hexen2 engine?
A few reasons. Since I played Hexen1 I was hooked on
the epic story. Hexen1 was also the very first FPS game I bought. If Hexen was
a religion, I would have been a follower :)
So what things did you really want to add into the engines to make them better
- was it mostly visual, physics, AI, or something else?
Mostly visual things, things that most today would be
taken for granted. I would actually add anything that I know how to do that's
legitimate and extended the life of Hexen2. For example, colored lighting, interpolated
models... nobody realizes that there are older engines the this is not a given
thing. I heard one guy on the forum said, that "what's the big deal with NewHexen"...
but when he actually started up the original GLHexen2, he realized why NewHexen
exists.
 You
mean, because the visual quality of GLHexen2 is basically the original?
Yes, and the original wasn't good... for todays standards.
It also has enhanced mouselook support, scripted sky shaders, colored fog, map
preview images, and loads of other stuff. Water turbulence is updated and waterwarping
- very ugly in OpenGL - is changed.
What does a person need, in order to play NewHexen - just their old Hexen 2
CD, or are there minimum requirements beyond that?
Well, if they have Hexen2 (not pirated, god forbid) and
have patched it to the latest version, that's all they need. The engine is based
on the PoP engine (v.1.31.12) which means PoP actually needs to be installed,
but with NewHexen, that has been worked-around. I basically ripped all the essential
data from PoP (I bought it) and added it all into a small PAK file. So even if
you don't have PoP, you can just include this PAK file when you start-up, and
use all the cool stuff added to HexenPoP while playing your old Hexen2!! NewHexen
has both "Old Mission" and "New Mission" (PoP) on the menu.
What kind of changes have to be made to content - the game levels, etc - to
take advantage of your engine work?
Basically all changes were engine changes only, but it
accommodates new things, so new options for new media created for NewHexen. For
example, the level compiler tools were all updated... nhlight.exe supports colored
lighting. There's new level tools like nhsky.exe that brings supports for sky
shaders... this means you can script how you want your skies to look, independent
from the actual level. You can now compile fog too as part of your map... colored
of course :) You can add custom fog as console parameters if you feel you want
to see a map with fog.
 So
even if the map has no fog, you can "turn it on" just like you'd change the sky?
Exactly, from color to density.
What have you done on NewHexen that you're most proud of?
Ah, that must be the skyshader system, although it was
originally developed by Kor Skarn. If I should choose of my own code from the
engine it must be the ActiveConsole :) Its a high-rez console that animates and
stuff... reminds you in a small way of Q3A's console. Its hard to see the model
animation interpolation though, which is one of my cooler additions of the engine
:)
 Tell
me about that!
Basically if you play Quake1 or Hexen2 you may notice
if you look closely that the model animations aren't smooth... the animation on
models that don't have many frames its very rigid. With interpolation, the engine
generates extra "morphed" frames based on time from frame X to frame Y animation,
which means the animation is smoothed in realtime!! You can see the improvement
most easily on the sickle of the Necro.
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