[axl]

I have nothing against NDS. I think it's great to have a studio that brings back classics. However in this case, I just don't see the point as there are already 2 ports that are far more accurate. It's already the third patch for FS and it's still fiddled with inaccuracies:

- In E2M1 I can still jump to the ice platform holding the tommy gun from the water;
- The recoil for the shotgun is still way too heavy;
- I can still blow up walls instantly with the alternate firemode of the aerosol can;
- ...

After a while regulary updates for FS will probably stop. For NBlood however, since it will receive regulary updates alongside EDuke32, support is essentially guaranteed. I mean: all the older games, they continue to be alive thanks to the communities : Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Half-Life ... In the end, I have far more trust in the communities to keep my favorite games alive than in some company.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Zaxx, on 07 June 2019 - 09:24 AM, said:

That's only partially true. KEX is not a game engine per se but more of a framework for "hosting" the functionality of other game engines. It's not something like Unity or Unreal at all.


It's obvious if you look at it: Nightdive's remasters always have an expanded feature set, some graphical changes / improvements and in general they like to slightly improve the gameplay (in the case of Blood: custom difficulty, added voxels, AO, AA, auto crouch, powerup timers, improved hit detection etc.).


Except they don't, I mean just remember how shitty Duke 3D Megaton / World Tour and Shadow Warrior Classic Redux were. Did they ruin anything in the long run? Not at all, in fact I'd say that both games got quite a bit of new blood thanks to those remasters (okay, not World Tour).

Blood FS is miles above those ports in quality, it provides a cheap and easy to set up option for people who want to play Blood and you can already see that the groundwork was laid down for the eventual console ports. I don't see how that could hurt the game at all, quite the opposite: it's going to help it tremendously. A lot of new people started playing thanks to FS, now I can talk about the game with some of my friends and that's just me... it's back in the broader gamer conscience to use fancy words.

As for FS's problems with fanmade content and whatnot: they are fixing that shit and the game supports a ton of existing fanmade content out of the box. I hope you're not going to suggest that their first priority should have been getting all the mods to work instead of polishing up the contents of the original 6 episodes.

Now you're trying to muddy the waters between what is a game engine and what isn't. A framework? Well, woopdedoo. They are literally advertising the engine on their Youtube channel and website for other devs to use. I never said it was Unreal, lol. EDuke32 isn't Unreal either.

The expanded feature set was never the issue and I assumed your comment about scope/goals was in relation to the gameplay inaccuracies I brought up. I mean, it's kind of a stupid thing to say that they had different goals, therefore they got the gameplay wrong and broke a bunch of mods that relied on Build engine peculiarities.

Megaton was cool because it included all the expansions and yet they all played the same as the originals. See the difference?

Anyway, I've said enough. I see that it's just gonna go round and round with you.

[Zaxx]

Quote

In the end, I have far more trust in the communities to keep my favorite games alive than in some company.

With that said it's not any company's job to keep a game alive after the post-launch support period is over. Nightdive is pretty good at that thankfully so we can expect at least a few years of support.

[Zaxx]

thricecursed, on 07 June 2019 - 09:48 AM, said:

Megaton was cool because it included all the expansions and yet they all played the same as the originals.

Except they didn't. If Megaton is accuracte to anything it's accurate to JFDuke.

Really, you're going to praise Megaton compared to FS now? Dude wtf.

[axl]

Zaxx, on 07 June 2019 - 09:50 AM, said:

With that said it's not any company's job to keep a game alive after the post-launch support period is over. Nightdive is pretty good at that thankfully so we can expect at least a few years of support.

"a few years of support". And afterwards ? That's exactly what worries me ! That's why we need the communities.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Am I praising Megaton? It didn't have the level of gameplay inaccuracies as FS.

[Zaxx]

axl, on 07 June 2019 - 09:54 AM, said:

"a few years of support". And afterwards ? That's exactly what worries me ! That's why we need the communities.

Of course we need the community but a new official release won't affect that. When it comes to the bigger picture and the general compatibility of things though it's good to remember that we're not living in the wild 90s and early 2000s anymore and the tech behind FS itself is very future proof so I don't think we'll ever hit the "fuck, this is no longer running on my new OS" part again.

[Zaxx]

thricecursed, on 07 June 2019 - 09:54 AM, said:

Am I praising Megaton? It didn't have the level of gameplay inaccuracies as FS.

I agree on that but Megaton didn't even really look like Duke because its piss poor renderer made no effort to recreate the visuals accurately. After a few hours the only thing I've used that release for was dropping the GRP files into EDuke32. FS looks like Blood and it plays like Blood apart from the remaning "oh, why I can I do this now?" issues.

[Phredreeke]

From what I can tell they didn't convert the original SMKs, they used the AVI files (I have no idea why those were even on the disc) which were really crap quality compared to the SMKs and converted those to Ogg Theora

[Hendricks266]

Blood: Synthetic Substitute is an illegitimate impostor. NBlood and BloodGDX are both viable ways to truly play Blood. Which one works better comes down to the details of what you're looking for.

[NightFright]

What makes BloodGDX a clear winner for me is its superb custom content support. It made me explore addons and user episodes for Blood for the first time. I was shocked about all the excellent content I had been missing for all these years.

[Zaxx]

Hendricks266, on 07 June 2019 - 10:25 AM, said:

Blood: Synthetic Substitute is an illegitimate impostor. NBlood and BloodGDX are both viable ways to truly play Blood.

But I like playing multiplayer.

[Tekedon]

Hendricks266, on 07 June 2019 - 10:25 AM, said:

Blood: Synthetic Substitute is an illegitimate impostor. NBlood and BloodGDX are both viable ways to truly play Blood. Which one works better comes down to the details of what you're looking for.

Well said!

[Zaxx]

When it comes to the engine argument I have to say I'm over that phase in my life where I value the engine more than the game itself. Sure, Blood FS is an impostor, it's not running on Build...

But Build is a piece of tech that's held together by a lot of duct tape to the point where it affects the gameplay experience. And this is especially true for Blood because the game is considered to be pretty difficult + aiming and hit detection really matter when the game balance is centered around throwing dynamite and crouching a lot. Build was just never good at 3D aiming because the engine itself was never meant to be 3D but Blood loves precise aiming since it's kind of the love child of Duke 3D, Doom and Quake. Ditching Build helps a lot with all that, proper 3D "point n click" gameplay is a lot more satisfying than using the original auto aim. I found a new kind of love for Well Done and Extra Crispy since I know that my dynamite will always hit and hitting a moving target from a great distance with projectiles without any kind of auto aim is siiiick because I'm a fucking monster now no longer held back by Build's limitations. I'm no longer playing Build, I'm playing Quake now in Blood and the frags just keep coming.

And really it's been proven time and time again that you can recreate game logic and certain engine behavior under different tech. Apart from Nightdive being quite successful in that there are examples like Outcast: Second Contact where the original game logic was implemented to Unity as a module and the result was so accurate in the remake that even some of the original bugs managed to stay in... with none of the old compatibility issues.

Is FS and impostor? Could be from a certain perspective but to me it feels like a much needed "blood transfusion." Aaand I think we've just maxed out blood puns.

[Psycho87]

Zaxx, on 07 June 2019 - 11:36 AM, said:

When it comes to the engine argument I have to say I'm over that phase in my life where I value the engine more than the game itself.

Same here. I used to want near-perfect compatibility but now I don't care anymore. Blood: Fresh Supply is great and it'll only get better as they release more patches. The only thing I really want right now is a more modern map editor and Steam Workshop integration.

[Zaxx]

Yes, it would be really cool if they made the KEX Editor compatible with FS somehow but I doubt that's going to happen sadly because FS is still using Blood's original map format. I have no idea if that was the case with Turok EX or not but I really don't think so.

[Tekedon]

Now that the game has been handed over to Atari again. Who thinks they will care about it and still fix bugs? I hope they will but I have some doubts.

[Kyanos]

Tekedon, on 10 August 2019 - 12:46 PM, said:

Now that the game has been handed over to Atari again. Who thinks they will care about it and still fix bugs? I hope they will but I have some doubts.

Rumour is that the last fixes were done for free by some of the Nightdive guys, and that it won't happen that way again. It's all on Atari and we all know they have already forgotten they own it.

[Tekedon]

Photonic, on 10 August 2019 - 12:52 PM, said:

Rumour is that the last fixes were done for free by some of the Nightdive guys, and that it won't happen that way again. It's all on Atari and we all know they have already forgotten they own it.

I bet they have, but I hope not. The game is still not accurate at all compared to BloodGDX or NBlood and it has alot of bugs. I do like the smooth mouse aiming though.

[axl]

Tekedon, on 10 August 2019 - 12:46 PM, said:

Now that the game has been handed over to Atari again. Who thinks they will care about it and still fix bugs? I hope they will but I have some doubts.

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Even Kaiser said on kex discord:

""just use NBlood. Move on. Hopefully it'll take lessons from the scripting capabilities in FS and adapt it for itself."

[Sledgehammer]

Is Atari so desperate for easy money or something else happened? Kind of unexpected, even though it was clear that sooner or later they would stop supporting the game with updates, like it usually happens with paid products in general.

Pretty disappointing news either way, dropped the game on release and waited for more updates so this port would be much more stable with more necessary features to play it again, oh well.

[HulkNukem]

axl, on 10 August 2019 - 01:02 PM, said:

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Even Kaiser said on kex discord:

""just use NBlood. Move on. Hopefully it'll take lessons from the scripting capabilities in FS and adapt it for itself."

That honestly seems really scummy.
Release our product for a price then after initial sales tell people to play the game on other free ports.

[Tekedon]

HulkNukem, on 11 August 2019 - 11:37 AM, said:

That honestly seems really scummy.
Release our product for a price then after initial sales tell people to play the game on other free ports.

They've made their sales, then people want more. "Fuck the people" they say..

[Radar]

I thought the dude was pretty humble to admit NBlood was the way forward.

[Phredreeke]

I don't think it's Kaiser that's scummy here, it's Atari.

[Morpheus Kitami]

Well, now I'm really glad I didn't shell out for the FS, its not a good sign if the creator is telling people to use other source ports.

One question I'm curious about, someone in this topic compared it to BloodCM and elsewhere Kaiser is quoted as saying comparisons to other source ports are fair game, except for BloodCM. I never really payed any attention to source ports for the longest time, what's the deal with BloodCM?

[Jimmy]

Is there some kind of hot goss I'm missing? Did Atari just pay NDS to develop the port then ditched them?

[MusicallyInspired]

That's really bizarre a move. The whole thing is a shame. Blood seems to never be able to get a good break. This is the closest it's been, though. Atari needs to just wise up and release the source code already. I was never a big fan of Blood because it's no in my nostalgia. I never had it to play it so it doesn't bother me as much, but I can certainly sympathize.

[axl]

Morpheus Kitami, on 11 August 2019 - 12:05 PM, said:

One question I'm curious about, someone in this topic compared it to BloodCM and elsewhere Kaiser is quoted as saying comparisons to other source ports are fair game, except for BloodCM. I never really payed any attention to source ports for the longest time, what's the deal with BloodCM?

Blood Crossmatching was M210's project before GDX. It was more like a total conversion of Duke Nukem and thus absolutely not very faithful to the original Blood.

[Striker]

Really hate how FS has been abandoned with a plethora of bugs that still break a number of maps (even official ones, like in Cryptic Passage, portals really like to glitch out), and multiplayer still messed up, such as it being missing a majority of sounds on clients, or clients being unable to move through blasted cracked walls in co-op.