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Build 2 Released by Ken Silverman

User is offline   Zaxx 

  • Banned

#61

View Postnecroslut, on 10 March 2018 - 11:39 PM, said:

Even remaking it from the ground up like Reloaded would be highly problematic as the level designs themselves are done with the same low detail in mind.
Recreate it faithfully and it will look empty, bare and unrealistic. Fill it with details and you will have a cluttered, unreadable mess. Reimagine it in a modern way and it will no longer be the same level design and won't play the same...

Yep, that's what a remake usually does. At the end you made a new game based on the original instead of simply upgrading the graphics. Can't say I wouldn't like that, imagine a full Duke 3D remake on something like Unreal Engine 4.
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User is offline   ryche 

#62

Not sure if it's entirely relevant here but here's a post (supposedly) from Scott Miller talking about Ken and his BUILD engine:

https://m.facebook.c...981965782057365
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User is offline   cybdmn 

#63

Its the same as on the 3DR website.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#64

So I had another quick look at Build2 out of curiosity of how it handled certain things. I've noticed a few interesting things that I don't think have been explicitly mentioned yet.

From what I can tell, it has no kind of manual wall shading, and seems to rely purely on dynamic lighting, meaning it's not a complete superset of build features, unless I'm missing something.
>You can finally scale textures on the ceilings and floors.
>You can rotate textures on both floors and walls! However there's no 'relative alignment' key, and I can't find an automatic 'snap to wall' feature, meaning everything needs to be rotated by hand which could be a bit tedious.
>The hinges (for sloping floors and ceilings) only apply to additional sloping going forward. I.e if you slope a floor from one wall, then change the hinge to a different wall, the slope is still set according to the first wall. This decouples the slope from the 'first wall', meaning two things:
---The floor and ceiling can be sloped in different directions.
---The slope no longer has to be 90 degrees to a wall, and can essentially be an arbitrary direction.

The hinge feature means that terrain is much easier to pull off. it's certainly a much more flexible engine to work with than eduke32 in terms of what is possible in maps.

Of course, the editing features and documentation are still pretty bare bones. I haven't been able to auto-align a sector slope despite trying a few variations of the apparent keyboard command.

This post has been edited by Micky C: 22 March 2018 - 04:26 PM

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User is online   Danukem 

  • Duke Plus Developer

#65

If Build 2 is going to be used to make games, then Ken should either support it with documentation and updates, or release the source code. I'll bet if you contacted him directly, he would be willing to answer some questions.
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User is offline   Forge 

  • Speaker of the Outhouse

#66

View PostTrooper Dan, on 22 March 2018 - 04:31 PM, said:

If Build 2 is going to be used to make games, then Ken should either support it with documentation and updates, or release the source code. I'll bet if you contacted him directly, he would be willing to answer some questions.

Considering some of the issues with it, and the computer resources it takes to run when the map starts getting anywhere near a decent size, source code release would be optimal.
Unless I'm mistaken in what I've read, this is more of a novelty than a useful tool.
I could be wrong.
People with code knowledge would know better.

This post has been edited by Forge: 22 March 2018 - 08:01 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#67

I'm waiting for a genius programmer to figure out what's possible with EVALDRAW. It's fascinating to me but I don't know enough to take advantage of its potential. I love that you can "code live" though.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 22 March 2018 - 08:54 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#68

Man the slope features are really cool indeed. Like Micky said, when you slope a floor or ceiling and set a new hinge point it doesn't reset the slope level and you can continue sloping in a different direction on top of your initial slope which results in some really interesting slope variations/combinations. And then the ceiling is independent from the floor on top of that. Really neat! I wish Ken was working more on this! I feel like if he had released this a few years ago it may have given him motivation to continue working on it and adding features.

EDIT: Just fooling around with SOS Building. Creating sectors while in 3D mode is really useful to this end!

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 23 March 2018 - 07:12 PM

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#69

View PostTrooper Dan, on 09 March 2018 - 05:43 PM, said:

Right now I see this as a great platform for making a quirky high-concept build game with dynamic lighting and voxels, possibly experimenting with procedural map generation. I already have an idea for a game where you start deep underground and your goal is to explore and dig your way to the surface. But, in the absence of staples like hardware acceleration and transparency, I have to agree with Hendricks266 that it may not be viable for most serious projects.


Procedural map generation is something I would be interested in, somebody I knew on YouTube claimed to have a working version of it using eduke32, but when I received a demo it was only the output, there was never any script files or code to work with.

I wanted to build a No Man's Sky mod for Duke Nukem because there was a lot of hype around it at the time.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#70

It also looks like sprites can be rotated in all degrees of freedom which is fantastic. I can't imagine what kind of fantastic maps that veterans like Davox could pull off with this kind of flexibility.

Of course there's this really annoying visual glitch where level geometry flickers through sprites.

This post has been edited by Micky C: 24 March 2018 - 01:20 AM

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User is offline   Mark 

#71

deleted

This post has been edited by Mark.: 24 March 2018 - 04:50 AM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#72

Yes that glitch is really annoying. Does that have anything to do with the fact that it's all CPU rendered?
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#73

One big problem I'm having right away with SOS is being able to edit the cross-sections in 2D mode. Creating and manipulating sectors in 3D mode (short of moving vertices around which is the only thing really that you can't do) helps a bit but it's still cumbersome. I've been trying to make a two-story house with a roof you can climb on top of and I keep running into problems. I've tried a few different approaches. First starting from the floor and building and expanding up, and starting with the roof and creating and expanding down. The problem comes with opening up holes between sectors that are on top of eachother. I can't figure out how to do that effectively yet. And forget about carving windows into the sides that open up into the outside unless you build the sectors like that ahead of time. Mapster32's approach is more thought out, but it seems like, if the things that Mapster32 took into account were taken into account for Build 2, I think Build 2's SOS would be more versatile and allow more freedom, as Build 2 isn't limited to have an entire area with a "fake ceiling" portal to the TROR sector above it. Build 2's SOS sectors can be mixed and matched without requiring that portal-ceiling to cap a whole area evenly. I even made a floating sloped/angled block of wood floating in the air that you can walk and jump all around just in the middle of a sector.

I also noticed that if you float outside the inhabitable areas in the void and go underneath the map, look up, and then switch to 2D mode it shows you the view underneath everything instead of top down. This makes me wonder if there is (or was planned) some hidden functionality to view SOS's in a cross section. It seems pretty important, anyway. Because unless you create vertices in the positions you want them you can't edit SOS sector vertices independent of their upper/lower counterparts because you can't move vertices in 3D mode which is more than a little frustrating. Also side view 2D mode would be nice, but I don't know how possible that would be.

Definitely some kinks to work out. I may email Ken and see if he's interested in working on these functions further if he sees there are people interested.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 24 March 2018 - 05:54 PM

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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#74

Yeah that’s part of what I was talking about when I mentioned ease of use. I couldn’t see a way of distinguishing between different SOS sectors when editing in 2D mode, which is a pretty critical component.

As others have said, the package isn’t really practical in its current state due to limitations, bugs, incomplete features, and potential performance issues. If you’re going to email Ken, could you ask his thoughts on releasing the source if he’s not going to work on it further?
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#75

I would love to try this out but my PC detects a virus and deletes the file every time. How are you guys using it? :s
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#76

I don't have virus protection. Try to make an exception in your software or something.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#77

You need to go into the settings of what antivirus you’re using, and set it as an exception.

I haven’t had much luck actually playing any of the levels though.
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#78

Have you played the demo maps Ken made? You have to launch Evaldraw with one of the .KC files as a parameter. All game logic is in the .KC files. So logically you could, I suppose, copy the .KC file and replace any reference to one of his MAP files with yours (if you want to copy his game logic/scripting, which is at least a good place to start anyway). I haven't tried that yet, but I have played his test maps.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 24 March 2018 - 08:46 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#79

Progress of my attempt at making a two-story house that you can jump on top of as well. Getting the hang of the process. Still maddening that you can't carve holes in ceilings/floors or join/extend SOS levels. You've got to have everything mapped out ahead of time before you actually map it, ironically. That is, you have to have a good idea of the layout of your house. In this attempt I made the floor, then the second level, then the roof sectors without any walls. For the stairs I had to cut away a portion of the house entirely to reserve space for where the stairs would be because there only needs to be two SOS levels instead of three because the stairs shares the floor (bottom-most adjoining sector) with the bottom level and the roof with the second level. There's no way to add stairs to a second level inside already SOS'd sectors. At least not without pulling your hair out...I couldn't do it. It just creates the problem where lowering the floor for stairs from the second level to the first creates walls around it and you can't see it from the lower level (and vice versa if you try going from the bottom level up).

The walls are the last thing I'm doing. But you have to be careful because the sloped roof sectors won't line up so what you have to do is join the sectors of the roof's floor and the wall's floor. But when you do this it deletes the space for the wall sector for the SOS levels underneath the roof. Meaning you can't change it. I suppose you could drag vertices around in 2D mode so that you can get a look at the bottom-most levels and carve sectors into them...but it's not pretty. Just easier to do it ahead of time. You can see what I mean in the images below. I'm leaving space for windows on purpose.

Also, one thing that Build 2 doesn't really do that Mapster32's TROR does is allow deleting vertices in the same position across SOS levels. In Mapster32 you can have a different set of vertices entirely but in Build 2 all vertices have to coexist on each level. At least, there's no way to delete them in 2D mode without deleting them all copies of them in all the different levels.

Posted Image
Posted Image

Side note, I really like how you can see sector boundaries in 3D mode. Makes making sector levels flush with other sectors a lot easier.

EDIT: I just tested editing the maptest.kc file and changing the call to doortest.map to my own map and it worked. All my light sources are flying around when they shouldn't be (because that was a feature in Ken's cage2.map) but I'm sure that just involves erasing some code. Then once you do that you can open the menu and select "Make standalone EXE" which allows you to play the map without the Evaldraw interface. Pressing ESC quits.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 24 March 2018 - 09:21 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#80

Finally successfully "finished" my two-story house SOS test map. I included the map files at various stages, the KC file, and the standalone EXE. It's not furnished so it's an empty house, but given that you can create sectors in 3D mode it makes that a little easier. Just sharing to show what SOS can do, even if it induces a measure of frustration.

Attached File(s)



This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 25 March 2018 - 08:06 PM

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User is offline   Forge 

  • Speaker of the Outhouse

#81

referring to the your prior post with the screenshots:

were you able to create the second floor's floor and roof as free-standing entities, or did you have to have a piece of wall there to extend off of?

part 2:
If you were able to create a free-standing platform with no need for walls - just a floating platform that the player can walk under or on - couldn't you create a free standing set of stairs at the height of that second floor, then 'slide it in place' so the second floor also has a set of stairs going up - kinda like snapping separate Lego creations together?

This post has been edited by Forge: 25 March 2018 - 08:25 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#82

View PostForge, on 25 March 2018 - 08:21 PM, said:

referring to the your prior post with the screenshots:

were you able to create the second floor's floor and roof as free-standing entities, or did you have to have a piece of wall there to extend off of?


No, no walls needed. You just look at the floor or ceiling of any sector (child or otherwise) and hit 'F' and it creates a sector above it separated by a "floating floor". I created the floor first, then the second floor, then the roof. Just by hitting "F" twice.

Quote

part 2:
If you were able to create a free-standing platform with no need for walls - just a floating platform that the player can walk under or on - couldn't you create a free standing set of stairs at the height of that second floor, then 'slide it in place' so the second floor also has a set of stairs going up - kinda like snapping separate Lego creations together?


I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding you, but I think so. What I did was create 3 layers of SOS sectors for the house and then carved a shape off of it for where the stairs would be and then created a SOS layer above it by pressing "F". So it's basically just next to the floors and not part of it. I then built a wall sector all the way around (while making holes for windows and SOS'ing those sectors too). Does that make sense? Basically connecting two sets of lego blocks, yes, and then surrounding them both with another (walls).

Also, I emailed Ken with some questions and he emailed me back. Here's some of the questions (abbreviated) he answered:

Quote

> -Are you planning on continuing to work on Build 2 and update/maintain it?

I am unlikely to do much more work on it as I am quite busy with Voxon at the moment. The only reason I would consider revisiting it is if multiple groups were asking for the same relatively easy to implement features.

> -Would you consider releasing the source if you're not planning on developing it further?

Perhaps in another 10 years : P

> -Is there a reason why you made all the rendering CPU-only as opposed to OpenGL?

Yes. OpenGL is a pain in the ass. There are always compatibility issues with OpenGL or GLSL code working on one video card but not another. With the CPU, you test on 1 machine and you're done. Also, it's a lot more fun being limited only by your imagination rather than relying on some buggy driver that restricts what you can do.

> .. setting a specific value for light intensity values .. and/or colour via keyboard rather than mouse and the +/- keys.

Is quantization of color really that important? +/- on the keypad work and you can copy shade using Tab .. Shift+Enter.

> Currently I can't figure out how to set vertices in SOS sectors ..

The implementation of SOS is far from perfect and quite tedious for complex scenes. If it was easy thing to fix, I would have fixed it a long time ago.

> .. is there some kind of hidden (or planned) functionality to view SOS sectors in cross-section?

No.

> How about side view (I know that's a little more complicated, to put it mildly)?

No.

> .. how about being able to move vertices in 3D mode like you can in 2D mode?

You can do that. Hold the right mouse button first, then with it being held, drag with the left mouse button normally.

> -Can there be some kind of way to open up holes between SOS layers?

I can foresee a lot of problems with trying to do that automatically.


So, yeah. I don't foresee Build 2 being used for very much if he can't really devote time to it and won't release the source...being able to move around vertices in 3D mode is a HUGE help though!

Also, Micky, using HOME to auto set a sector's slope to the height of an adjoining sector works but you have to have the hinge set to the opposite wall of the sector you wish to slope to. I did it countless times with the roof for my house.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 25 March 2018 - 10:24 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#83

Another couple questions he answered last night.

Quote

> .. What about setting a specific height for a sector?

There are 2 ways:
1. Hold the 'End' key as you drag from one sector floor (or ceiling) to another.
2. Hold the left mouse button on the sector floor (or ceiling) and press 'T' to enter the console. You can now release the mouse button. At the console, type /z=[number] to set the Z value directly.

> Mapster32's TROR method .. (SHIFT+CTRL+PGUP and SHIFT+CTRL+PGDN ..

Yikes. That's a lot of keys to remember! I guess I once thought about doing something like that but never got around to it. There is a little trick that doesn't come close to this, but might still be helpful: if you hold the shift key while dragging, only 1 vertex will be selected instead of all of them. There is no way to control which one is selected, so for now you just have a drag a bunch out of the way, look in 3D to see which is the one you wanted, then clean it up from there.

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#84

Some more work. changed the lighting to a night setting, gave the roof a lip over the walls of the house, and added beds and a basement. Some nice shadows on the stairs in the basement (which are SOS).

Posted Image Posted Image
Posted Image Posted Image
Posted Image Posted Image
Posted Image

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 26 March 2018 - 11:32 AM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#85

I noticed that when you try to set a colour tint on the floor texture of a sector it actually sets it for the ceiling instead. I notified Ken and he is going to push an update in the next couple days that fixes it.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#86

Man that looks great, has a real charm to it.

Did he say anything about that sprite flickering bug?
Also, not sure how sarcastic he is about releasing the source, or if he really will do it down the track Posted Image

Perhaps it's good that Eduke went with TROR after all. Having a large amount of sectors be at the same height really makes it easier to edit them. Build 2's SOS, where each sector can have a completely arbitrary height, really makes it quite finicky to work with in terms of easily editing a large number of sectors without jumping through hoops.

This post has been edited by Micky C: 26 March 2018 - 11:20 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#87

View PostMicky C, on 26 March 2018 - 11:18 PM, said:

Man that looks great, has a real charm to it.

Aw, thank you. I don't consider myself a great mapper.

Quote

Did he say anything about that sprite flickering bug?


No, I haven't mentioned it. I've been trying to remember all the questions I had. Also trying to not bombard him too much. Just emailed him another couple questions about the flickering and some Evaldraw stuff. Specifically, how to make light sprites invisible so you're not seeing big spheres floating around everywhere. He told me a way to reference a sprite in Evaldraw by index number, but that's a value you can't set and working with multiple maps in one .KC file wouldn't work too well with that approach. I wonder if there's a way to reference sprites by custom tags instead. Will see what he says.

Quote

Also, not sure how sarcastic he is about releasing the source, or if he really will do it down the track Posted Image


Either way, it won't be any time soon. :P

Quote

Perhaps it's good that Eduke went with TROR after all. Having a large amount of sectors be at the same height really makes it easier to edit them. Build 2's SOS, where each sector can have a completely arbitrary height, really makes it quite finicky to work with in terms of easily editing a large number of sectors without jumping through hoops.


I don't know, I appreciate that big wide areas don't have to all be TROR'd. I recall one of the rules of Mapster32's TROR was that it wasn't recommended to have any TROR layers smaller in height than the player himself. Making things like the SOS basement stairs in my map would be entirely unfeasible. As long as you take the proper precautions it works quite well. I'm really getting the hang of it. Of course, in true Build fashion, if you mess up in can screw up your whole build. I started building a garage next to the house and I was almost done. Just needed to complete the doors. Messed up on a wall in 2D mode and deleted a whole sector. Had to start over from scratch. I think that's true of anything in Build or Build 2 though. Just the nature of working with sectors I guess. It takes a lot longer than a true 3D engine to make simple-looking geometry, but it's still quite fun and looks great afterward. Mapping with build is just ultimately so much easier to me than in Quake/HL or Unreal. I haven't even bothered with UDK4+ or whatever.
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User is offline   OpenMaw 

  • Judge Mental

#88

Working in Unreal 4 is more like working in a 3D modeling application. most of the work is done in Max, Maya, or Blender once basic blocking is done.


You did an amazing job with that house.
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#89

View PostMusicallyInspired, on 26 March 2018 - 11:31 AM, said:

Some more work. changed the lighting to a night setting, gave the roof a lip over the walls of the house, and added beds and a basement. Some nice shadows on the stairs in the basement (which are SOS).

You've done quite impressive looking work with that house. Overally I'm quite impressed by the capabilities of this engine, seeing that it's fully CPU-powered and programmed by a single person. However currently it's stilll far from a complete engine. My quick tests with maps imported from Build engine show that BUILD2 can't handle complex maps with reasonable framerate (working almost an order of magnitude slower than old Build engine for same geometry complexity even without light sources). Also I'm concerned by the lack of 'overbright' RGB lighting near the light sources, what renders whole lighting system totally impractical. Mirrors are also unsupported.

Still that's a handy addition to Evaldraw environment functionality. I've been using Evaldraw since 2004 for prototyping stuff, and BUILD2 incorporated into the same language means that one can easily prototype full-3D games with it.
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#90

Another exchange with Ken that resulted in another new update:

Quote

> .. any way to flip/mirror textures vertically/horizontally like you could in Build?

You have found another simple thing that I have overlooked. Please grab the latest version and you can now use dot on the keypad (KP.) to mirror a texture.

> There's no way to change the index value of a sprite, eh?

No. This is actually a feature because you can rely on sprite indices not changing on you. If you want to group sprites, make an array of sprite indices.

> Or is there another way to label a sprite and then reference it?

You could use the ‘tag’ field. You could also draw a simple KV6 for lights and compare filename at map load.

> .. intense flickering issue with 2D objects (sprites, text overlay, sector boundaries, etc) in both Build 2 and Evaldraw.

This never used to happen. It is probably my DirectX9 code not being emulated properly in Windows 10. Lowering the frame rate can sometimes help. Since this affects a lot of my old projects, I will probably fix it in the not too distant future.


This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 28 March 2018 - 05:47 AM

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