Duke4.net Forums: Redneck Rampage on Eduke32 - Duke4.net Forums

Mateos, on 20 June 2013 - 02:06 AM, said:

Ouch, my bad...

LAW, on 20 June 2013 - 02:53 AM, said:

I think you misunderstood my post. On my setup they look better too - mosaic effect is almost gone on second screen.
By the way, I use 1600x900.

The skybox issue annoyed me so I def'ed in my own hires skyboxes and I run Erampage in Polymer in 32 bit mode.

Today I understood something. Some foliage maskwalls displayed wrongly in the Polymost, while they were perfect in the Software mode and in the DOS Redneck. Jon was using Polymost and aligned the textures to look good in the OpenGL, thus making them look glitched in the Software mode. I, on the other hand, optimized everything for Software. It just doesn't make any sense. Sofware should be the native environment for all settings and optimization. Not, the inaccurate colors, fake shading, glitchy Polymost by the big ego Awesoken. I am really pissed off and I for sure won't work on this shit anymore.

Now go and downvote me.

Is there a way to have the things compatible between these different mods, before throwing everything? ._.

LAW, on 20 June 2013 - 08:11 AM, said:

Newer versions of EDuke32 don't have those problems.

So was it a bug in the Polymost itself or Eduke error?

Hard to make a distinction. It was in Polymost but Polymost is a part of BUILD which is a part of EDuke32. It's not specific to EDuke, but about the only other thing it applied to is JFSW.

LAW, on 20 June 2013 - 08:11 AM, said:

...the same guy who made the Classic renderer and the entire freakin' engine?

Well, what I meant is Awesoken has once said:

"I saw no sign of somebody working on a true hardware-accelerated port of Build, just people saying it wasn't possible. Eventually, I realized the only way this was going to happen was for me to do it myself."

I didn't find this renderer to be that great and it upsets me that people tend to use it over Software, despite the number of its inaccuracies.

Of course, I know Awesoken created Build and THE renderer. Eternal respect from me for the first achievement for sure. I have had a brief cooperation with him on the Voxlap. The quoted sentences reflect that cooperation to a small extent, with big ego and ghey/aristocratic manners. Even Awesoken makes mistakes - it's the fact, which some people tend to overlook.

Anyway it's is not the topic for this and I don't want to go any further.

Does anyone have ladder.wav (ladder climbing sound)? It seems to be neither included with the RR groupfiles nor with the ERampage files.

I just looked through the original game's con files and I couldn't fund a clue as to which sound file is used for ladder climbing. Maybe I missed it because its not an obviously named sound file.

Mark., on 22 June 2013 - 08:19 AM, said:

It's just a leftover. Original Redneck didn't have a "ladder" sound, its port won't have it either.

Today I replayed all three games and discovered a few additional bugs (using a toilet from the backwards, two yellow sprites in the level edited by me & minion-boat spawning underwater ), but generally the playthrough was a really neat adventure. Taking into account the lack of TROR and Polymost glitches there is no reason to support this build. Compiling and hacking a new one means no Windows 2000 support though I can't work on something I couldn't play and I don't like using notebooks. No worries, maybe someone smarter will take on from here or TerminX will succeed on secret mission or I will upgrade

I apologize for the harsh (but honest) rant from the previous post. From SOTAJ (my SW map) I have became an aligning maniac and every error of this kind pisses me off.

What I found today is that I was unable to complete the final map of the first episode ("Smeltin' Plant") in the original RR campaign. Problem: The boss was not present in the "showdown" room.

I was playing in "Wuss" difficulty with Polymost, 1920x1200 @ 32bpp. If more details are needed, I'll let you know.


And regarding the ladder sound:
I guess you can manually fix it by opening erampage.con and deleting these two lines (or just commenting them out):

define LADDERSTEP               161
definesound LADDERSTEP     ladder.wav     -128 128 240 0    0

NightFright, on 22 June 2013 - 11:59 AM, said:

LOL he is always present, but sometimes he falls into the chasm in the middle. It has been happening in the original RR from time to time too. I was thinking about making the boss 'always stayput'. Bad luck man, or dyn-o-mite his ass from above All maps are intact, because I completed the trilogy today.

Quote

Too lazy to do that, it doesn't make any errors and doesn't complain about missing sound

I am finished with the first RR episode now and I have made it past E2L3 "J.Cluck's!", so here is a first impression:

1) Overall, it is a very stable and solid port adaption. I didn't have any crashes or major showstopper bugs (besides the one in the last level with the boss, as mentioned above).
2) So far, I had two minor visual glitches with Polymost: A blurry ceiling in the observation room next to the E2L2 "Nut House" operation chamber and a door with some kind of HOM effect after opening it in E2L3 "J.Cluck's!" (in the grinder rooms, on top of a short ladder). Details if needed.
3) What's still a bit annoying are the screwed player size, misplaced numbers (activation percentages, "Auto" etc) of inventory items in the HUD and the hardly legible level stats (kills, monsters, secrets).
4) Also bothering (but not a fault of the port) are the tiny, extremely hard-to-spot keys. Some optional feature should be added to make them more visible, e.g. make the sprites flash, add arrows above them or something. You can easily run past them without noticing. Some weird placement of switches (I just say sewers, cough cough) is beyond salvation though, I guess...
5) Upgrading to a newer EDuke32 version would also make handling of the several addons easier due to the grpinfo feature. This would also eliminate the requirement to have several copies of the same file in the subfolders.

I will continue playing of course, so if I find more, I'll let ya know. So far, I am enjoying this, especially for its atmosphere (reminds me of "Kingpin" a lot) and lighting. Some enemies are totally overpowered (like that Vixen), but at least those are rare.

Its been so many years since I played the original game. Did those Imps and dogs crawl underneath the player like they do now?

Second RR episode finished. No major issues found actually, I was just a bit confused that the boss of that episode looks like one of the standard enemies. I thought: What a letdown, just another of these biatches again, where's the real guy (Duke would say: "What, there's only ONE of you?")? And then I got owned by it... xD Maybe this gets addressed before v1.0.

And the cutscenes don't play for me, either, but that's rather a minor issue right now. The maps themselves seem to work fine so far. I just hope map design gets better in the addons, I really don't like "What did that switch do?" / "Where do I have to go now?" / "Omg, another maze!" passages.

Another thing:
Does anyone know the original CD track mapping for the episodes? The GOG.com release also gives you the music as MP3s, and I managed to get them working ingame after converting them to OGG. Right now however, I just arranged it the same way all the time, i.e. track01 for map 1, track02 for map 2 etc. Not that the music would fit the maps too well in general, but you know... I'm nitpicking again. xD

*UPDATE June 29*
Route 66, "Big Billy's Brewery": I wasn't able to push the box to the blown-up crack leading to the courtyard.

NightFright, on 26 June 2013 - 12:26 AM, said:

I apologize for bumping this, but how did you do this? I could only get menu music working

music { id "intro" file "music/Track02.ogg" }

works

music { id "E1L1" file "music/Track02.ogg" }

doesn't work

I found GitHub mirror for the source
https://github.com/ttyborg/erampage

does anyone work on erampage ?

Not that I know of.

I'm confused about something: If I'm not mistaken, Shadow Warrior's and Blood's respective source codes were never released, like Duke Nukem 3D's, right? If that's true, would eduke32 add support for those games or would they get their own source ports?

Shadow Warrior's was released. Hendricks266 (one of the eduke32 devs) is confident that one day it will have full support for Shadow Warrior. Having said that, the devs are also confident that eduke32 will have finished multiplayer and a next-gen renderer, yet those features have been stalling for years. There are several ports existing for Shadow Warrior at the moment, including the commericial "Classic Redux", and SWP.

Hendricks also said some stuff I didn't understand that would result in Blood being fully playable with eduke32, but of course that's less likely/a lower priority/more work than Shadow Warrior. Free time to work on eduke32 is the limiting factor.

I have a few questions:

Was the damage always this high in the base game? When those shotgun guys get you at close range, all it takes is 2-3 shots at full health to kill you.

No plans for music support?

You can't climb up certain ladders. I had to use NoClip in order to climb out in the 2nd level. That is until I realized that in this source port the Cowpie acts like the Jetpack in Duke 3D.

Shotgun guys are always dangerous, especially if you go close. Pigcops can do severe damage too in Duke.

What I truly hated in RR are the dogs. Those critters were awful, high damage, high agility and lots of hit points.

Noticed a very weird thing:

I drag and drop the Eduke port in the same folder as Redneck Rampage. I can play through the first game but I cannot climb up ladders and several items and weapons behave like in Duke 3D. For example; the dynamite behave exactly like the Pipebomb and the Cowpie (instead of replenishing health) acts just like the Jetpack.

However, I create a new folder with all of the Eduke port files. I drag and drop the Redneck.GRP file onto the main folder for this Eduke folder. But now Dynamite behaves like it does in the original game, all the items behave like they do in the original game, and now I can climb ladders. But, I can't play the original game but only Rides Again. Not a huge loss because I think the original game is kind of bad. The level design is so boring and cryptic in the original game. Rides Again has slightly better map design and gives you some vehicles to drive.

Bruno Mattei, on 04 May 2018 - 11:00 AM, said:

The shotgun guys are the equivalent of pig cops and they do the exact same damage as pig cops did in Duke3D, which means 49 damage if all 5 pellets hit you.

Speaking of Redneck Rampage, now I know I will get some hate for saying this (especially if there are some people on the forums who like/love RR) but I personally think the RR games are pretty much mediocre at best, I mean I played all 3 games last summer (using some Family Reunion iso I got from some site, which included all 3 games) using DOSBox on the 4th skill and got pretty much every secret using YouTube walkthroughs (only one secret I didn't get was one of unreachable secrets in one of levels of Route 66 I guess) and I didn't find anything special about these games. I wanted to originally post this into the topic "Redneck Rampage corner" many months ago but have forgotten since then and since this topic got bumped recently, I thought I might as well post here.

Now what I didn't like about RR is that it plays pretty much like a shitty version of Duke Nukem 3D. The level design (especially in the main game) is pretty terrible (example the Sewers level), the redneck humor is fucking awful (though I admit some of the lines made me laugh but otherwise too much toilet humor and just unfunny humor in general), there is a lot of backtracking, the weapons feel lackluster, the keys all look the same and are very hard to see, the enemy variety is low and some of the enemies are pretty shitty (no pun intended), the art style is quite ugly (though the textures are higher quality and pretty good) and sometimes there is little health or ammo laying around in some of levels. However unlike other people who don't know too much about how mechanics work in this game, I got used to the mechanics quickly, like the alcohol and food meters. The best is to have both in the green zone because some people don't know that if you have one of the meters in the green zone, you take LESS damage from attacks. For instance, having either meter on the green means 25% damage reduction from attacks (example you take 15 damage instead of 20) and if you have BOTH meters in green zone, you have 75% damage reduction from attacks, so you take like only 5 damage out of 20. However due to the way Duke3D code works, you may notice the following oddities:
-You always take one less hp damage than the damage inflicted number (mostly to hitscan attacks), example if an attack does 20 damage, you actually take 19 damage (and only 14 or 4 respectively if you have the meters in green zone), now I don't know exactly why 1 point of damage is omitted but this is something that happened in original Duke3D as well (you may have noticed pig cops doing like 9 damage) and not sure what causes it.
-The "armor" system in this game (that consists of having the meters in the green zone) is also sometimes ignored if you are low on health and an attack that you are supposed to survive with armor but you don't, example: you have 14 health left and have both meters in green zone but someone hits you with a bullet that normally does 19 damage but was supposed to only do 4 damage here and you still die. This is something that also happened in original Duke3D with the armor that didn't save you from an attack that did the amount of damage either equal or more than current health you had. I think this cause is because of code that checks first for amount of health instead of checking for armor available and because of that if finds that health is not enough, you die anyway (armor also becomes 0 when you die, no matter how much you had before).

Well anyway aside from all these details that are too boring to list, I also found the game quite buggy at times, like one of the levels having broken door that even with key can't be opened and that means you must use some trick with the moonshine to jump on top of building if you don't want to use NOCLIP cheat. And enemies also felt very buggy at times, suffering from poor hit detection (especially the animals) and the dogs especially also having a weird bite attack that eats 10 health away very fast (thankfully with the meters at green, they aren't that bad), sometimes happening even if you just start to run from them, as soon as they attack, they will always hit you, so you must stand far away from them if you don't want to lose a lot of health. Of the normal enemies, I think the worst are the alien hulks and alien vixens, though the hulks could be easily killed with their own weapon and then their corpse had to be blown up quickly, otherwise they resurrect. At least upon exploding, they would always drop their gun which was really good in general. And as for the vixens, well let's say they can be very nasty sometimes due to their...well guns.

I could go on the whole day to point out all the issues about this game. On the other hand there are some good things about RR like the superior level design in Route 66 (I think they had the best designed levels of the RR games, as R66 was done by Sunstorm Interactive who also did Duke DC, Duke Caribbean, Cryptic Passage and Wanton Destruction) and the level progression felt much better and level design overall felt better, better enemy placement, etc. The sequel Rides Again also improved over the original game but in my opinion not as much as Route 66 in terms of level design but at least the new enemies, weapons and the ridable vehicles also improved the gameplay significantly.

As for health and ammo available, earlier I said there were some situations where there was lack of health and ammo but it depends a lot of the level, as there were some levels that had a lot of supplies. And then there were few levels that took away all your weapons but it was no problem getting the guns back in short time. Usually ammo was plentiful and sometimes at end of episode I ended up with full ammo on all weapons, as I knew to conserve ammo for each weapon and not go blindly with just shotgun for example. As for health, it depends a lot what and how you use the types of food and drink and how you balance the meters. Just be careful to not drink too much or if you get drunk, then you must wait some time to make the meter lower or else you are screwed as it's hard to control the player character, especially if you have the alcohol meter in red zone, in which case the image rotates (like if you looked left/right in Duke3d) and stays like that until you vomit. I also read before that it's possible to make the player fall down after drinking too much and sober up a bit later but I never got that to happen in my game, like I said maximum I could get to make view distorted and vomit to return to normal with no loss of health.

Despite all what I said, I don't think it's the worst game I have ever played but I don't think it's as good as some people say it is, as judging from lots of comments on YouTube (especially on GGGmanlives' review of main game who was right in nearly every aspect of the game, yet a lot of people criticized him in comments), people overlook the game's issues with the nostalgia goggles just because they played the game when they were young. I didn't and I'm glad I didn't play it (I didn't even have it anyway) as I would have probably hated it. Instead I grew up with much better games like Duke3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and so on. And even if I also didn't play Blood and Shadow Warrior as kid (as I also didn't have them), I actually found them to be pretty good when I found them about 10 or so years ago and the nostalgia isn't even there in this case, or at least not as much. As such, I prefer Blood and SW over something like Wolfenstein 3D, which I played as kid but didn't found the game that special, though I do realize it was groundbreaking for its time but it didn't age well.

From the big four (or big five if we include the recent Ion Maiden) Build Engine games, I think RR is the weakest of all of them. It has some good moments (especially in R66 and RA) but the game as a whole, feels like a slog and you feel like you want to finish it as soon as possible, so you don't have to play it again.

I still hope the game gets supported someday to EDuke32. With all the game's faults, it will still be a worthy inclusion to the EDuke32 port.

I played through a little bit of the 1st episode of RR and it was so goddamn boring. Way too much backtracking, the areas are too big, and the designers loved to put in an area with enemies and some health/ammo/weapons but no actual level progression. No keys, no paths, no hints, no nothing. And when you apply oldschool FPS logic, you check every possible spot looking for that key or secret path or secret stash of goodies. Then you get to the sewer level and it's probably the worst sewer level I've ever played in an FPS. It's confusing as fuck and there's very few enemies. I had to use NoClip just to end it.

Rides Again was better even though it still has that problem where there's areas with enemies and health and maybe some weapons, but upon clearing out that area there's no actual progression.

I've yet to get Sucking Grits working with the E-Duke port.

This is one of those games crying out for a remake. Or some kind of weird retro throwback thing. Take the same sprites, give them more frames of animation of course, same weapons, and same overall plot and setting. Then change everything else. Better map design, more varieties of enemies, less emphases on key hunting and lever switching.

The overall experience is thoroughly mediocre.

Bruno Mattei, on 05 May 2018 - 10:05 AM, said:

It might make for a better experience than trying to get the originals running at this point.

I know Interplay went out of business, yet again, and were selling off their IP's. Someone could grab Redneck Rampage for cheap and do it right. Hopefully it won't be Digital Homicide or someone like that.