Quick modding some weapon swaying & less slippery movement into Hedon (OUTDATED?)

2023 EDIT:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1072150/announcements/detail/3692433663127039177
Recent QoL patch has added the movement options natively, making this guide kind of obsolete, I'll leave it untouched though since you can extrapolate some of this for other tweaks you might want to do (& I'm lazy), not sure if weapon sway/lag is still natively in the game, though that's a lot more superficial compared to the movement tweaks.


I'm by no means an experienced modder, especially with Doom. But I really wanted to try out Hedon alongside some other high quality GZDoom content, which forced me to experiment a bit, because the feel has always been a bit of a stumbling block for myself personally, the movement in the old Doom engine, the slippery, floaty, artificially wavy bobbing movement just doesn't click with me and makes me a bit sick.
Plus I'm a sucker for some nice weapon sway that brings more life to your movement in the way you look around, making the weapon and yourself feel less static.

So, I experimented, and got the results I wanted, and thought I might share how to do this for anyone else interested in some slight tweaking to make movement feel a bit less slippery and your weapons a bit more dynamic on the screen.

This is all this guide is about, no gameplay or art changes (though you can generalize the lessons learned from here I'm sure), just two minor tweaks to make the feel a tiny bit more modern without massive changes to the core.

I would just upload a modified pk3 file and be done with it, but Steam has a tendency to delete links, so you're getting the guide on how to do it yourself.
Plus, if Hedon gets updates in the future, which overwrite the hgzdoom.pk3 file, it's handy to have the knowledge at hand on how to redo this.

Google is your friend, or getting the main mods.

First you'll want to get the two main mods that you'll be combining.
The nashmove.pk3, by Nash Muhandes, I'll link it but also tell you again, in case Steam deletes links, that google the forum dot zdoom dot org for these in that case
Less Slippery Doom Movement (May 2018 ZScript rewrite) by Nash[forum.zdoom.org]
(direct download link)[forum.zdoom.org]

Nash also originally made a weapon sway script, but it was recently superseded by a more universal one, so here's that by Boondorl, again on zdoom forums
Universal Weapon Sway by Boondorl[forum.zdoom.org]
(direct download link)[forum.zdoom.org]

Now you should have nashmove.pk3 & UniversalWeaponSway.pk3

Both can be opened up with 7-zip for instance, and you don't need any fancy text editing software for the next steps.

Let us add up

Sadly Hedon does not seem to recognize custom pk3s in the folder to automatically read into the game like some later id Tech engine games do, but oh well, hopefully these next steps won't be too much effort for people who want to tweak this stuff.

What I did, as a complete amateur, was to take the contents of the nashmove.pk3, the universalweaponsway.pk3, add them up in a way where they didn't overwrite each other, and then add that into the hgzdoom.pk3 again adding it into the existing files.

First, let's look at what nashmove has in it.
The mapinfo.txt simply reads:

GameInfo
{
	AddEventHandlers = "NashMoveHandler"
}

& the zscript.zc is the meat of the mod, handling the slippery movement tweaking.

With 7-Zip you can easily edit within the archive itself when right-clicking a file BTW without extracting.
For simplicity's sake you might want to rename the zscript.zc into for instance nashmove.zc, and this is the most important thing, open it up in a text edtior, and either comment out the very first line "version 3.2" with //, or just delete that one line, leave everything else as is.

Next, let's take a peek into the UniversalWeaponSway.pk3
If you want, just make a copy of this pk3 already for some backups, might as well start adding stuff into it.

Let's start with the mapinfo.txt, why not add into it the line from above so that it reads:

GameInfo
{
	AddEventHandlers = "NashMoveHandler"
	AddEventHandlers = "SwayHandler"
}

Next, for ease of tracking where everything is, you might want to either copy the nashmove.zc file into the sway folder, or copy it into a zscript folder, which already exists inside the hzdoom.pk3 file.
In fact, let's open it right now.

I copied the nashmove.zc into the zscript folder inside the hzdoom.pk3 archive, then, I edited the zscript.txt file to have the lines:
#include "zscript/nashmove.zc"
#include "sway/sway.txt"
#include "sway/menu.txt"
Save when prompted by 7-Zip.

Next we need to edit the menudef.txt file.
Just copy all contents inside the WeaponSway menudef file, and simply paste it at the bottom of the menudef.txt already inside the hzdoom.pk3.

We are almost done, simply copy the sway folder inside the weaponsway.pk3 file inside the hzdoom.pk3 file, you can do it all in the 7-zip by dragging and dropping, then copy the other files inside the weaponsway.pk3 that won't overwrite anything, the cvarinfo, language.enu & mapinfo text files, into the hzdoom.pk3 file.

Recap

If you did everything right, you should have:

• combined mapinfo.txt lines to include both nash & weaponsway event handlers
  
• deleted the "version" line at the top inside the zscript/nashmove.zc file
  
• copied the sway folder and the nashmove.zc file inside the hzdoom.pk3
  
• then added the #include lines into the zscript.txt file to point to their locations inside the pk3
  
• added the weaponsway lines from its menudef.txt into the existing menudef in the hzdoom.pk3
  
• copied the rest of the files, the cvarinfo, mapinfo & language.enu text files also into the hzdoom.pk3

Now, when you start up Hedon, you should immediately notice when you move around a difference in feel, and see your weapons swaying about like you're playing a more modern shooter (well, post-Half-life 2 or something).
There should also exist a menu option to customize your weapon swaying experience if you so desire.

That should be it, maybe consider copying the files into one pk3 that you can have at hand for the future in case Hedon gets updated and overwrites your modding efforts.
Hope this helps!

[Blue Jay]

Any chance anyone could upload a youtube video of this inaction?

[Nathan]

Hey that's cool, thanks!
Oh and BTW Bucketsmith, I think you can actually customize the speed and/or slipperiness in the nashmove script, opening up the .zc file in notepad you can read lines such as:

// How much to reduce the slippery movement.
// Lower number = less slippery.
const DECEL_MULT = 0.8;

And:

// bump up the player's speed to compensate for the deceleration
// TO DO: math here is shit and wrong, please fix
double s = 1.0 + (1.0 - DECEL_MULT);
Owner.A_SetSpeed(s * 2.5);

(the 2.5 is my bump now that I looked, it is default in the file 2)

[Mr Red (Oail/Pedro)]

Hope ya don't mind, I linked this guide in my own.

[Bucketsmith]

I appreciate the work, thank you. I tried it out and I like the weapon sway, but the movehandler makes my character much slower than normal, unless I am jumping around constantly. Speed in air was higher than speed on ground. It felt off.

[Muleke_Trairao]

This is a such a clear and well-written guide. Nice work!