I suppose that if ppl got stuff done, other ppl would get excited. Doom and Quake communities are driven by stuff that got done (arcane dimensions, brutal doom, {{insert cool mod name here}}). I already have a version of the Blender MDL exporter using the Hexen II palette. I'm also planning to build some tools (that are actually useful) for H2 dev besides trying to modify HoT's tools.
I like H2 very much and i would love to see more work with it. I think Q1 community lacks some ideas present in H2 to extend it's mods features even further. 

if ppl got stuff done, other ppl would get excited
Very true, if you want to do a project like this, then do it! Obviously its going to be tough, but that should not put you off the task.

Here is something I used to convert H2 models to Quake palette using QME! Unzip the contents of this zip file in the directory with the H2 MDL file. Start up QME program and load the MDL. QME will show the H2 model in a Quake Palette. Screenshot the skin window and cut and paste to an indexed PCX/BMP file.

This is not a perfect conversion and you will probably need to tone down the brightness (quake stuff is about 35-50% darker) but it is a great starting point. This is what I did for AD! 

Portal of Praevus, a fine cherry on the HexenII pie. Really a good game! Shooting sheap over the ledge! First bowshooters, yeah.

I'm not so with knowhow & engines, but it felt very Quakey from the begin. And not that dark screen palette. Got stuck halfway the castle, but couldn't leave it alone untill the end. 

Portal of Praevus is pretty decent.

My advice to someone wanting to make a Hexen 2 style mod for Quake would be to use AD as a starting point because it really does have a lot of great stuff in there.
The biggest challenge would be to create a new more medieval weapon/magic system! I feel like Quake would have been a more interesting game if it didn't bother with the base themed stuff at all. 

Thanks again to all for lots of useful data.

Quit Talking And Get To Work Already

This read a little bit to me like "put up or shut up". The reason I posted was to establish a bunch of things: 1) is this possible? It would appear that it probably is, mostly, kinda. 2) will it be hard? It seems it will be very hard. 3) will anyone be interested? That's less clear.

It would have been a waste of time for me to sit down and try to do this without having explored those questions, and the expertise of the people on this board was key in doing so.

...use AD...The biggest challenge would be to create a new more medieval weapon/magic system! I feel like Quake would have been a more interesting game if it didn't bother with the base themed stuff at all.

That is pretty much the conclusion I came to when thinking about it this morning. It would probably be easier/more practical to make a Hexen-inspired mod based on top of Quake, or in particular AD, that achieved the things I would be interested in achieving, than to try to work with Hexen 2 stuffs. For those who suggested just making a straight H2 map on top of Hammer; HoT is a great port but I have this gut feeling that it's a permanent niche/dead end because of how less popular H2 is to Quake in terms of exposure, feedback, motivation, etc.; as well as the other tooling problems people have pointed out.

That said, it would be neat to try and build hub support on top of a Quake engine. I've got a bunch of coding projects on the go at the moment (e.g. some wadc improvements and some chocolate-doom stuff) so it goes to the back of my queue.

deathkings, praevus...

Deathkings is pretty crap. I'm in the second hub and I might not persevere much further. I never really got into Praevus but I should give it a proper spin I suppose. I still have my boxed copy. 

This read a little bit to me like "put up or shut up"
I don't think anyone here means it quiet like that! I think its more like, the idea sounds cool, try it and if any problems just ask!

I've got a bunch of coding projects on the go at the moment, some chocolate-doom stuff
Wow nice! Are you the author of chocolate-doom? 

I definitely want to see some quake medieval/dark fantasy magic mod. Still i don't know if, depending on the feature set, is worth it to code into quake instead of HexenII, since map limits and other stuff in H2 can be solved fairly easy.
As for the "do something or shut up" mindset, that is not what I intended to say at all. I'm just saying that when stuff get done, everyone gets more excited to do even more, e.g. Brutal Doom brought so many people back do Doom modding it is ridiculous!

As for my contribution so far, here's Blender Hexen II exporter (adapted from Quake's MDL exporter...)
https://github.com/victorfeitosa/hexenii_mdl_import-export 

there is much more hexen2 gurus -> http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-talk/other-games/ 

Hey all, I saw this thread in my webtraffic. I'm one of the admins of hexenworld.org. I'm seriously glad that you guys found this :)

This weekend I am hoping to do some serious overhaul on the site and finish building the forums. We would love to see mod talk like this on the forums as we're planning on gearing the site towards a one-stop hub for dev and modding! We are also planning on getting some hardware to have server uptime @ 100%. If anyone is down to play a few rounds this weekend, we'll all be nearby! 

I'm not the main guy behind chocolate-doom, that's my friend Simon, who has been running it for about 10 years. I just got involved last year, first to implement sfx pitch shifting, then to work on getting the floppy disk to flickr in the bottom-right corner, now I'm doing a bunch of mostly porting work for SDL1 to SDL2 which is not quite as exciting but needs doing to enable other exciting things. Some of the stuff other people are doing is really insane, like emulating old doom behaviours that relied on memory overflows and the way DOS laid out memory for demo playback.

hexenworld.org

Is that/are you in any way related to the old hexenworld? That guy Phoebus was one of the first community people I interacted with, back in 1997-ish. Coincidentally he later ran newdoom.com which was a bit controversial in the Doom community and eventually packed up his toys and disappeared... 

No we are not affiliated with the old hexenworld in any way. We are rather a community to officially support hexen2/hexenworld and will always remain online, we're not going anywhere :) The realm of multiplayer for hexen2 has been very poor since the early 2000s. It works but up until a few weeks ago very few people have been able to play online without having to configure anything special. Now we have multiple servers running across the globe that everyone has access to. That's probably been one of the most valuable features birthed in all of this. I'm really hoping to see things grow in the next few months but time will tell. We still have a ton of work to do. 

I'm doing a bunch of mostly porting work for SDL1 to SDL2 which is not quite as exciting but needs doing to enable other exciting things

It's the stuff any good engine author has to do but no end-user ever actually appreciates. 

Wasn't there a quake mod called Future vs Fantasy or something?

Maybe contact the author and ask for the source code, might be easier to use existing magic code than write it from scratch. 

The QuakeC isn't the hard bit. 

I'm aware of that... I was a little late to the party and should have refered to the post numbers. I was replying to posts 33 and 34. 

I'm not so sure if the Hexen 2 gamecode is really GPL.

Did Raven ever release it as such? 

<quote>I'm not so sure if the Hexen 2 gamecode is really GPL. Did Raven ever release it as such? </quote>

Yes... mostly. The original source dump contained a restrictive EULA style license in a .doc file and the GPL2 in "gnu.txt". Contrast this to the original heretic/hexen1 source which was just the EULA, but was later relicensed to the GPL after a community campaign.

I think we choose to interpret the release of the h2 source as "intended to be GPL", which IMHO is fine, because there has been no complaint from the rights holders in the 14 years since they released it. 

I believe there would be larger map-making community, if not for the mentioned obstacles, which are ridiculous limits and unfinished AI. Of course not as big as Quake, but at the same level as old Heretic/Hexen. I have an entire large hub unfinished, sitting on my drive, and so as I read, I am not the only one. We talked through this several times at quakeone.com, but my hope, though still existing, that I will ever be able to finish my maps is tiny. 

I compiled my map as a Hexen 2 BSP2 format yesterday with help from Eric. So far it runs only in FTE of course. I'd love uhexen2 to get BSP2 support and to raise a few limits here and there as well. FTE is nice but depending on one engine isn't so awesome for something like this.

You use -hexen2 -bsp2 as command line arguments to Eric's version of tyrutils. Pretty simple. And these tools accept Quake format .map files so you can use any editor. 

With the Eric's tyrutils and H2 i mean.... 

If someone wants to use some of this, go ahead.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/6luu1um1bd3s9uf/qnights.zip 

Figured I'd just chime in on the topic of Hexen II level editing, but it's pretty straight forward to use Hammer and Jackhammer for it as well. (My personal setup these days is Ultimate Quake Engine and Jackhammer.)

A few years back I went on a Hexen binge and rebuilt the wads and FDG to try to be as complete as possible. This was due to finding out that previously released packages were missing a lot of content. I also converted the models into a format usable by these editors for the 3D views, and created a converter that switches the Version 220 map files into the old format so that they can be compiled with any of the tools out there.

UQE Hexen II: http://www.jacqueskrige.com/resources/downloads/games
Wads/FGD/Models/Converter: http://www.ogier-editor.com/mapconv/

If anyone is interested in mapping, I'd be happy to hear from them!
OldDoodle1 OldDoodle2 

I used those Hexen II models and FGD as a base to plug into TrenchBroom 2 for mapping.

Although I don't think I ever finished that 100%..

**scratches head** 

If anyone is interested in mapping, I'd be happy to hear from them!
OldDoodle1 OldDoodle2 

Thanks for the links. Those tutorials and files are quite useful.

By the way, the file for Quake 2 you have there on the webpage of the MapConv is missing the .fgd it says it has.