Getting Hideous: How to start playing Hideous Destructor for GZDoom

Hideous Destructor is a free and open source mod for the GZDoom engine that turns Doom into a tactical shooter. Here's how to get it up and running.

March 9th, 2021

I've been playing a mod for Doom recently called Hideous Destructor (which I will abbreviate to HiD for the remainder of this article). The gist of it is that it turns Doom into a tactical shooter. It does some of what you would expect, such as adding more weapons and refining and expanding upon the weapons already present, sure, but it also does so much more. It adds way more challenges to things like moving around, recovering from wounds, picking what to carry with you and how much you want to carry into a fight, way more equipment and mechanics to work along or potentially aide you in the increased challenge, and so much that it's almost arguably a completely different game than Doom. However, even if it goes against a lot of what makes Doom hold up, such as fast and free movement and no carry limits on weapons, it is executed really well and provides an experience that neither Doom nor ARMA or Rainbow 6 can compare to.
I'll write an in-depth review of Hideous Destructor later on explaining exactly what I like about the game so much that makes it the perfect bridge between the gap of Doom and Arma and how both of those other genres of games can take notes to provide a unique experience, but for now, I'll just write about how to get this thing set up so you can try it for yourself, because while there are plenty of tutorials explaining how to play this thing, and setting up the mod itself is the same as any other GZDoom mod, it took me a while to figure out all the options and controls and features I had access to as a player, and I outright didn't have any idea that I was actually able to perform certain actions or do certain things until I had been playing the game for several hours. While some of that discovery over time was fun and added to my experience of the mod, some of it would have been good to know earlier on.
This article will go over how to set up GZDoom and the mod itself, and setting up your controls and loadout and starting the game, as well as understanding not just what to configure and do, but why and how.

Getting a ZDoom sourceport to play Hideous Destructor on

There's three sourceports in the "ZDoom" family of sourceports, but I'm going to narrow down the differences and which one you should download for yourself:

• ZDoom is the original, but it's outdated and hasn't been touched since 2016. It probably doesn't support all the modern features that HiD needs these days. Don't download it to play HiD, and don't download it in general since it's old and outdated.
• GZDoom is the latest version that supports a huge number of cool features. It also makes use of the latest in graphics technology. Pick this one if you have a fairly recent computer made sometime within the last 5 years or so (doesn't have to be powerful or specialized for gaming, just recent. The computer doesn't need to be super beefy and powerful to make it work, it just has to support a modern graphical feature set. You can turn down those settings if they actually slow down your computer.).
• LZDoom is a version of GZDoom that has some of the super advanced graphics stuff cut out. It doesn't have as many nifty cutting edge features, but it also has vastly lowered minimum hardware requirements compared to GZDoom. Pick this one if you have an older computer that might not support OpenGL 3 or Vulkan or whatever.

So, for example, I'm using LZDoom because I've run HiD so far on my 2012 Thinkpad X230 and my Raspberry Pi 4, but if I return home to my gaming PC and I decide I want to run some ZDoom mods including but not limited to HiD, I'll be running GZDoom on that one because I know it's new enough to support the latest graphics standards.
On Windows, you can just extract the zip file for it somewhere and run it from there. On Mac, you likely install it system-wide, or you might unzip it and run it somewhere. On Linux, you can install the Ubuntu/Debian package if you have one of those two distributions, or you can try to find it in your distribution's package repository, or you can download and compile the source code to yield a binary.

Getting an IWad to play Doom

Even if you want to just go straight to Hideous Destructor without playing the original Doom, you still need what is called an "IWAD" that represents the base game. I'll explain in a later article on Doom modding what WADs are, but right now, you just need to know that an IWAD is a WAD file containing the data for the game that your choice of Doom engine needs in order to launch. It contains levels, the soundtrack, monster sprites, and all sorts of other stuff that aren't just provided by the engine and the game logic inately. You need one to load other mods, such as HiD, on top of. HiD is compatible with two of them, and you only need to pick one:

• The original Doom 1 and 2 IWADS.
  • These are pretty self explanantory: they're the original IWAD data files made for the original DOOM games by Id Software themselves!
  • While the Doom engine itself is free software, the data files for the game are not free, neither in terms of license freedom, nor in terms of price.
  • However, you can still buy the original Doom games on GOG or on Steam for only $5 a piece, and if you wait for a sale on either one of these platforms, you can get an even better deal. I think I first bought Doom on Steam for only around 99 cents.
  • I would recommend picking up Doom 1 and 2 if you have some money to spare and you care about the original games. If you just want to play Doom mods and you have money to spare, skip Doom 1 and pick up Doom 2, since most mods are made for Doom 2 due to Doom 2 having more monsters, more level textures built in, the beloved double barrel Super Shotgun, and all sorts of other swell things for map makers and mod makers.
• The FreeDoom IWADS.
  • When Doom's engine went open source without the original levels going Creative Commons or something similar, some people were concerned that Doom would get lost to time anyways because maybe the original IWADS would be harder and harder to buy or find legally, and that it would become impossible to play Doom legally in the future. So, they got to work on building their own IWAD file with all the same compatibility and features as the original Doom IWADS, and they made it completely free to use for any purpose.
  • Note that this isn't quite the same as Doom, though. Because the story and setting and sprites of the original Doom are all copywrited and proprietary and all that, all the sprites represent the same things but are different. For instance, the zombies look completely different, Doom Guy isn't called Doom Guy and his mugshot is completely changed, none of the level textures are the same as the original Doom (although the themes and design of the textures are vaguely similar), the story is completely different, the enemies look completely different while functioning the same as in the original Doom, the weapons look and sound different than the originals, the soundtrack is completely different, etc. It's Doom's gameplay (exactly the same on paper, since the movement and monster behavior and weapon functionality is all defined in the open source engine code for the Doom engine), it just looks and sounds off brand from the original. However, it's free and open source, and there's no chance of it ever disappearing like there once was for Doom's original IWADS.
  • FreeDoom was also made to be compatible with map packs and mods for Doom.
  • HiD was actually designed primarily for FreeDoom, but it works great for regular Doom as well. Just because you're using a free IWAD that's offbrand from Doom does NOT mean you're getting a second class HiD experience. Likewise, using the actual Doom IWADs won't deliver you an inferior experience either. Both of these hold up just as good to one another in the case of HiD.
  • If you don't have any money you're willing to spare on games or HiD, or you just don't care about the original Doom games but you do care about this novel tactical shooter, you'll want to pick up the FreeDoom IWADs.

When you download your IWAD of choice, make a directory on your computer's storage somewhere for all your Doom things, and put your IWADs in there. Ideally, this shouldn't be far from the directory where your ZDoom executable is if it isn't installed system-wide.

Getting Hideous Destructor

You can pick up the mod from this forum post.
Download it and put it somewhere in your computer's file system, ideally a place you'll put other Doom mods too, ideally near the same directory as your ZDoom install. Don't even bother unzipping it, because both ZDoom versions can load the mod straight from the zip file.

Launching and configuring ZDoom itself

To launch ZDoom (I'll use this one to refer to either one of the engines since they both function the same with a different feature set, just don't use actual OG ZDoom, use LZDoom or GZDoom), you need to launch it from within a directory where it can scan for IWAD files. This can mean opening a command prompt, navigating within that prompt to where your IWADs are, and then executing ZDoom's command, or it can mean dragging your IWAD files into the same directory as ZDoom and running it. If you're unfamiliar with using your OS's command prompt or terminal, I would reccomend that latter option.
Do this, and you'll successfully launch Doom (or FreeDoom). This is great, because Doom is awesome, except you clicked on this article in order to learn how to configure HiD! However, it's a good idea to boot into regular Doom anyways to learn how to launch the sourceport you're using by default and to verify that you've got it working right. That, and you'll want to configure ZDoom's settings. Go into the video settings, the render settings, etc. Make sure the resolution is set right for your screen. Check which rendering engine you're using (I strongly recommend the OpenGL renderer for ZDoom, especially so for mods like HiD, but the software renderer might get better performance on really old or really basic computers), and if it's OpenGL, you're using, go into the OpenGL options, find the option for "Texture Filtering" and turn it down to "Closest" or "Off". Texture Filtering is a great option for modern 3D games, but with Doom's chunky, low-res textures, it just makes all the sprites and textures, including those of monsters, look blurry and ugly. Turning it off will make them look pixelated and give that classic Doom feel as God intended. Lastly, configure your movement controls; make sure you're using WASD to move around, the E or F key to interact with objects (more on that in a minute), Space to jump, Shift to run, and Control to crouch.
Once you're confident you've configured everything to your liking (and you can jump straight into the game if you want to test some stuff out), you can quit the game and get to trying to run HiD.

Getting Hideous Destructor all set up

So, if you're savvy with computers and the command prompt, all you need to know is that you can launch the ZDoom executable from the same directory as your IWAD files and with the path to your HiD zip file as an argument, and it'll load ZDoom up with the Hideous Destructor mod up, and bam, you're up and running. Do with that information what you will, whether it's just manually typing the command to run it directly, or writing a shell script/batch script to make that process simpler.
If you're not so savvy with computers, I'll help you out a bit. First you need to navigate in a file browser over to the directory where you keep your ZDoom executable file. Then, you need to make sure your all your IWADs are in that directory. Finally, I believe that on most systems including Windows, Mac, and user-friendly Linux distros and shells, that you can just drag a file over another file to try opening that file with the other file. Drag the zip file for HiD over the executable file for ZDoom, and ZDoom will open the HiD zip file as a Doom mod, and bam, you're in the game.
If you're OS doesn't allow you to do that, instead you'll have to create a shell script (or batch script as it's named on Windows) to launch ZDoom with the HiD mod. This is a reasonably simple process. First, make sure your LZDoom executable, your IWADs, and your HiD zip are all in the same folder. Next, rename the HiD zip from whatever its name is to just "HID.zip", and rename your ZDoom executable to "lzdoom" (or GZDoom if you're using that, and make sure you leave the ".exe" on the end if you're on Windows. Don't fret if you don't see it at first since Windows hides known file extensions like .exe by default.). Open up your text Xeditor of choice (make sure it's a plain text editor, not a word processing program. MS Office won't work, but Notepad on Windows or the Text Edit program on MacOS will.
Type something to the effect of the following without any quotation marks: "./lzdoom HID.zip". The lzdoom bit should be renamed to whatever you named your ZDoom executable, and if you're on windows, it should have the ".exe" bit at the end of the executable file name, and it doesn't need to start with "./". Now, save this file. Save it in the same directory as your ZDoom executable as "run_hid.sh" (or "run_hid.bat" on Windows). On a Unix system, like MacOS or Linux, you'll need to change the file permissions of this shell script before you can run it. On Mac, you can just use the Finder GUI to add executable permissions by right-clicking on the file and clicking the "Get Info" option, but on Linux, you'll have to open a terminal, navigate to the directory of the shell script, and use the chmod command to make it executable.
At this point, you can double click on the shell script to run it, and your ZDoom engine should launch with HiD loaded as a mod. You're just about ready to play HiD at this point, but there's some more controls that you should bind.

(Note: A recent update to Hideous Destructor has consolidated some of these options into the HD Options menu. Select that one if you don't see "HD Controls" or "HD Loadouts" and you want to access either of those.)

What controls you'll need in Hideous Destructor, and why

HiD might have more controls than the average Doom mod, but it's not impossible to get the hang of, and you'll get used to it once you have a set up you're comfortable with. HiD could perhaps abstract some of these controls to some in-game menu so that you have less buttons to press, but I was able to learn all the real important ones without too much trouble.
Most of these options are in the "HD Controls" menu. I'll not only tell you what they do and why you should bind them, but what keys I use by default. Keep in mind that I put frequently-used functions near my movement keys, and lesser used ones on the end of the keyboard farther away from my movement keys.

• "Weapon Reload". Pretty self explanatory. Press it quickly to reload as fast as possible, dropping your weapon's spent magazine on the ground. Hold it down to tuck the empty mag back into your inventory before slotting in a full one, which is useful for reloading the magazine with more cartridges later on.
• "Weapon Zoom". Not as self-expanatory as it sounds. HiD avoids using simple crosshairs for aiming, but it also avoids a dedicated "press a button to aim down your sights" mechanic. Instead. your character has their weapon shouldered in a state of "high-ready", and your sight-picture is visible in the center of your screen at all times, but it only takes up the amount of space that a crosshair would, and it automatically bobs and sways and disappears and reappears depending on your movement speed and your character's ability to aim. It's very natural, and it works well once you get used to it. The weapon zoom key simply triggers additional functionality that builds on top of this mechanic, such as adjusting the zoom of a variable scope. I use the middle mouse button for this.
• Weapon fire mode. Adjusts your weapon's firemode, usually between automatic and semi-automatic, although some weapons have other functions.
• Mag manager. Brings up a menu with all the magazines you're carrying for your weapons, so you can load them, unload them, or drop them if you're not going to use them. This one has controls of it's own, so put in a bit of practice in this menu down at the range. I use the "G" key, memorable via "Gear" or "maG".
• Weapon unload. This strips the weapon you're holding of any ammo it has loaded in. It can be necessary to do this for the Z66 Assault Rifle, as sometimes it jams, and the only way to unjam it is to just take the loaded mag out and start slapping the thing (with the R key) until whatever was jamming it clears up. I also use this key to pick enemy weapons off the ground and to strip them of all their ammo so that I can use it in my guns. I use "U" for "Unload".
• "Drop weapon". Forgot to mention, after taking a gun from an enemy's corpse to unload it, I use this key to chuck the empty gun back onto the floor. You'll want to do that too, as you won't want 40 empty shotguns from dead zombies clogging up your inventory.
• "toggle run". Used to toggle between a standard jogging pace for movement and a slower but more accurate walking pace. Jogging is pretty good most of the time, but sometimes I just like to walk for more accuracy and to take a corner slower.
• "Crouch". Exactly what it says on the tin. Crouching is useful for making yourself a smaller target and assuming a more stable firing position. For better or worse, HiD has no "prone" stance, so this is the lowest to the ground that you'll get. I use the "Left-Control" key for this one.
• "Jump/mantle". Very useful, but not exactly the same as other games. If you're up against a wall that's not too tall over your height, you can just climb and mantle the thing by holding this button, especially if you holster all of your weapons before doing so. Oh, and I'm not talking low obstacles like waist-high picket fences or windows or tables, no. I'm talking about walls that are just a little taller than you are, where you reach your arms up, barely grip the top with your palms, and you just use your big bad space marine core strength to do a pullup and pull yourself over the wall. By contrast, jumping doesn't send you high (since that's what the mantle is for), but rather far; you can use the space key to quickly do a horizontal jump that sends you a short distance extremely quickly. I use this to dodge fireballs or to get myself out of a dangerous area yesterday. Don't abuse it though, it drains your stamina quickly if you do it too frequently. I use the spacebar for this one, just like in other games.
• "Strip-Equip body armor". If you ever want to heal yourself with a medkit, you have to take off the armor and backpack you're wearing for a moment in order to inject the meds (this key can strip both depending on context). You can put it back on when you're done. I use the single-quote key for this because reaching across with my mouse hand to hit it feels a little like I'm reaching across my chest to take off some armor or whatever.
• "Lean left/right". Leaning around corners is a very important tactic to use in HiD. You can avoid a great deal of potential harm by leaning around stuff. Use these options to set individual keys for leaning left or right. Most games use Q and E, but I have E bound as my use key, so I went for the alternative option described below. (I could have just bound F to use, G to drop, and M for Mag Manager, but I'm stubborn, and I have bad habits.)
• "Lean (use strafe keys)". This key acts as a modifier key that temporarily turns your strafe keys into lean keys when held. If you already have dedicated lean keys bound, I recommend just ignoring this option, but if you don't want to give up E to use or you're using Q for something, this option is a must. The only downside is that you stop strafing if you hit this key, but I usually just "stutter step" with this key if I need to lean and peek around a corner slowly, and my gameplay hasn't suffered a great enough deal for it for me to rebind my keys. I have mine set to V because V looks like it's slanting both ways, meanwhile it's just above my space key, making it accessible for my right hand to hit.
• "Use medkit/bandages/stimpaks". This key is optional. I'll explain what it's for. This game has a health system that is just a tad more complex than in regular Doom. When you get hit, you'll likely start bleeding. You can use a medkit to stop the bleeding over time and seal your wound using futuristic meds that restore your flesh (at the cost of pain and flinching over time as the meds do their thing, plus taking off your armor to do so), or you can use bandages to stop bleeding temporarily without taking off your armor or causing additional pain/flinching to your character. You can use a stimpack to improve your character's performance when injured, as well as to reduce (but not stop) bleeding and other ailments. I have my stimpacks bound to "[", and my medkits bound to "]". However, you can access these items in your character's "Inventory" if you don't want to bind a button for them, and you can access your bandages with the 9 key by default (even if it doesn't show up in the "use bandages" button, it's there).

Still with me? There's only one more control left, and it's not in the "HD Controls" menu. Instead, you'll want to go back to the main menu, navigate to "Options", then "Customize Controls", and finally "Inventory".
ZDoom introduces a basic "Inventory system" that doesn't normally change anything about vanilla Doom, but that mods can take advantage of in various ways to introduce new gameplay elements. HiD takes advantage of just that, and you'll need to bind your inventory keys in order to be able to use all sorts of vital equipment. I personally have my arrow keys reserved for the task. I bound the right and left arrow keys to scrolling between the "Next" and "Previous" items respectively, meanwhile the down key drops one of whatever item is selected on the floor and the up key "activates" it. For most of these items, "Activating it" doesn't activate it right away, but puts it in your hands and gives you instructions on how to use it. For example, "Activating" a stim pack gives you a text popup about how to use the stimpack and what it's for, as well as a warning label reminding you not to take one too many and overdose, which can kill you if you're not careful.

Ok, it's time to start playing the mod proper!

Select the "New game" option, pick your loadout, select whether you want to go to the firing range or to actually start playing through Doom's levels, select your difficulty, and you're off to the races!

Now what?

• Go to the firing range to get adjusted to your controls, your arsenal, and equipment.
• Play through some of Doom's levels! Have some fun!
• Learn more about the weapons, the items, the movement, etc.
• Try out the various loadouts, try out all the different pieces of equipment and weapons.
• Consider even writing your own loadouts using the simple code system that the game supports. It's real easy to do, and it's not "programming", but rather "Markup". The game even includes a few "Filler" loadouts that you're supposed to overwrite with something else if you want to make custom loadouts. I spend plenty of my time in HiD screwing around with different loadouts and pieces of equipment, as well as tactics. Here's a few images of what I'm talking about.
• You can hold E with any item or weapon equipped to bring up a list of that item's functionality and controls. You'll be surprised how much depth everything packs, even including "Simple" tools such as your fists!
• Consider firing up some custom maps that work well with HiD!

If you want more resources to learn how to play Hideous Destructor effectively, here's some resources that helped me that I can recommend:

• The Hideous Destructor HQ, an unofficial community site that shares tips, loadouts, and all sorts of cool information and the like related to HiD!
• Youtuber Fort of Hard Knox's tutorial series on HiD. He's working on a new and improved one with way more polish and more up to date information than his older tutorials. They're mostly done, but there's a few videos in this series that he's still working on. The ones that he's already done up to this point are more than enough to get started with the game. If you don't check out any of the other ones, I recommend checking out his tutorial on healing from wounds.
• Finally, the Hideous Destructor manual itself, available on the Codeberg page for the mod, is well organized and contains a bunch more specific information, as well as some lore particular to HiD that explains a bit more about the Doom universe. To paraphrase the creator of this mod when contacted by PC gamer, HiD doesn't alter Doom's setting or weapons or story, but instead tries to rationalize it and make more sense of it than what was there in the first place. You can see this in multiple areas of the game; instead of "non-tactical" old-school weapons like the double barrel shotgun being stripped away, they're given more lore and functionality to justify their existance in the mod not just canonically, but also in terms of gameplay (reloading a pump-action shotgun is way slower when you're wounded, but the same is not at all true when loading the double-barreled alternative, and ammo is easier to manage when you don't have a side rack, a tube, and a chamber for the shells to potentially be in).

If you want some of my own tips and findings from experience regarding this mod:

• You can hold the E key to list your equipment, as well as the controls for whatever is in your hands (unless they're empty, at which point the game lists all the controls for your fists). There's lots of depth to discover within numerous factors of this mod, and holding E and skimming the functionality and controls of a weapon can show you more aspects of a weapon that aren't obvious at first glance.
• Figure out which weapons, equipment, and tactics are your favorite, and make a loadout with those. You can have a lot of fun in this game just trying out different loadouts and weapons.
• Sometimes the explosive barrels are possessed. If you see them move any on their own or you hear them make any weird noises, shoot the offending barrels until they explode, lest they turn on you...
• The Z66 assault rifle may seem finicky and unreliable. That's because it is. But, feed it fresh magazines (with a visible red tip) to avoid ammo-counter error, and fire the gun in semi-automatic, and yours will likely last just a tad longer without jamming.
• Hand grenades are extremely versatile. Not only can you bounce them around corners, but you can also cook them if you desire by pulling the pin before throwing them, or you can even hit a button to use them to set simple tripwire traps.
• Don't enter dangerous rooms or monster closets yourself if you don't have to. Instead, find a way to use your expanded arsenal and equipment to make the situation much less dangerous or to give yourself an advantage. Use your DERP robots to shoot demons in a room or an area without even setting foot in it. Throw grenades into crowded rooms so that you don't have to step into the hail of gunfire yourself. Use HERP robots to cover your six, or to cover an angle in a room that you won't always be able to watch. HiD makes loads of these sorts of fights nearly unpractical when approached directly, but it also gives you a multitude of creative tools to deal with these encounters anyways.


This area from the second level of Doom 2 is real dangerous. You have to drop into one of those two holes full of demons to grab the necessary blue keycard in order to complete the level. Doing so in Vanilla Doom only really requires good reflexes and a fast trigger finger of the player in Vanilla, but can get you killed real fast before you even have a chance to jump through either hole as the demons pelt you with gunfire from inside in HiD. However, HiD also gives you tools to think through the situation and make the drop less dangerous. Personally, I like chucking frag grenades in the holes at different angles so as to clear the bulk of the room, making it much more preferable and survivable when I drop in.

• Don't like a certain part of a level? Just use your expanded arsenal and movement capabilites to sequence break and skip it! HiD introduces some very basic terrain-destruction mechanics useful for destroying thin sectors, such as doors, walls, and other thin sectors. It also introduces climbing mechanics, a ladder equipment item that you can put at the top of a ledge, and even a jetpack you can equip to fly around. Climb ledges that you normally can't, break open various thin doors or barriers to pass through (with explosives, a "door buster", a chainsaw, or lots of automatic fire from a rifle, depending on what surface you're dealing with and what resources you have). The demons are more dangerous, your character is more vulnerable, you have to be more careful overall, and everything else about this game is more realistic. So, why not take a more sensible approach? Why chew through a horde of demons when you need to get through some thin red bars that'll melt when you spend less than a magazine of your rifle on them?


(This image is from the second level of Doom 2. Normally you need to get the red key to open these grates, dealing with a monster closet and a small fort full of angry zombies. This encounter is totally doable in Hideous Destructor if you set traps near the monster closets and you're real good at gunning down the zombies and taking your corners slowly, but it's dangerous. Instead, I opted to break these red bars and just climb through, effectively bypassing half of the level, saving me lots of ammo and trouble. I was able to pull this off with a chainsaw, as well as a rifle dropped by one of the zombies.)

• Don't underestimate your fists! They're a valid weapon and can deal substantial damage to a demon up close if you know how to use them. They never run out of ammo, they never jam, they can be readied in a pinch, and my fists (plus a jump or a lunge to close the gap between me and my foe) are what I resort to if my gun unexpectedly runs out of ammo or jams in the middle of a fight, or if a demon gets too close for comfort.
• Pay attention to what armor a zombie is wearing. If it's wearing body armor, you'll need either employ a rifle to take it down, or you'll need to shoot it in the legs or in the faceplate. Certain weapons deal certain damage against armor; buckshot from shotguns is nearly worthless against armor, while rifle bullets are much more potent against armor and can often punch right through.

Good luck on your demon-slaying crusade, and have fun!