[Aleks]

Telee, on 20 January 2021 - 04:47 PM, said:

Love the design on those light fixtures Aleks. Those other screens on ModDB look great as well. How did you pull off that reflective floor?

Thanks! The reflective floor is just made with semi-transparent sprites on the "floor surface" and manually recreating the entire reversed room upside down below the level of these sprites (also using bottom-swap on all wall textures so they can be correctly mirrored). It's one of the first rooms I created in the map, it was done back in 2008 or so actually :P

[Sanek]

Oh yes, I remember the days when this "effect" was considered super-cool and edgy!
I believe it appeared in Nuclear Winter for the first time.

[Telee]

Ah, that's pretty simple actually. I'd imagine you can only use stayput enemies anywhere near that hall though, since if they walked over it they wouldn't reflect and would kinda ruin the effect.

Funny that Nuclear Winter used it since the level design in that expansion wasn't great, that's pretty innovative.

[Micky C]

Aleks, on 21 January 2021 - 03:57 AM, said:

Thanks! The reflective floor is just made with semi-transparent sprites on the "floor surface" and manually recreating the entire reversed room upside down below the level of these sprites (also using bottom-swap on all wall textures so they can be correctly mirrored). It's one of the first rooms I created in the map, it was done back in 2008 or so actually :P

There’s a mapster script that automatically turns sectors upside down. You can then join it to the original with TROR for the reflection effect.

[ck3D]

Micky C, on 22 January 2021 - 02:17 AM, said:

There’s a mapster script that automatically turns sectors upside down.

I suspected that but it's cool to hear a confirmation as sooner or later I'm going to tackle doing something like this on a rather big scale. Not that inverting values 'manually' especially sounds bad to me though given what I have in mind after all. I'm guessing that script only inverts sectors and not the height coordinates of spritework? If everything reacted to the mirroring, that would be the ultimate way.

Aleks looking forward to your map as you know, loving the mini in-game universe.

[jimbob]

working on my mod, progress is slow but steady. have the first episode mapped out roughly, going to do artwork for the germans soon ( damn pandemic )
heres a few WIP shots.

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[Aleks]

I've updated the Submachine page on ModDB with some new screenshots if anyone's interested. Hit the 14k walls mark yesterday, started working on a new area after spending most of my mapping time last week on quite complex sequence (I'm quite satisfied how it worked out in the end, especially considering I had quite limited mapping time too). Posting screens of "Klingon door" that I made some days ago, seeing these in one of Star Trek Next Generation episodes made me instantly want to build it in Duke. No TROR or custom textures are involved, just pure good old Build (well, Mapster with texture rotation actually).

[Mike Norvak]

Aleks, on 27 January 2021 - 03:27 AM, said:

I've updated the Submachine page on ModDB with some new screenshots if anyone's interested. Hit the 14k walls mark yesterday, started working on a new area after spending most of my mapping time last week on quite complex sequence (I'm quite satisfied how it worked out in the end, especially considering I had quite limited mapping time too). Posting screens of "Klingon door" that I made some days ago, seeing these in one of Star Trek Next Generation episodes made me instantly want to build it in Duke. No TROR or custom textures are involved, just pure good old Build (well, Mapster with texture rotation actually).

Klingon_door.png

Probably I'm missing something but how this can possibly be made just with regular sectors? really impressive!

[Aleks]

Mike Norvak, on 27 January 2021 - 04:02 PM, said:

Probably I'm missing something but how this can possibly be made just with regular sectors? really impressive!

Thanks! The part of the door that's above the ground is made from masked wall between invisible parallaxed ceiling and floor, which are inside another sector with parallaxed ceiling and floor to be invisible. Then the floor and ceiling is covered with a sprite, so the parallaxed stuff can't be seen. Also the "inner" masked walls had to be made pal 4, to create the impression that the "teeth" is full inside (if it wasn't a moving slide door sector that cannot transport sprites, the floor/ceiling could be also masked with sloped sprites), as the "negative" masked wall sector is hollow inside.

[Merlijn]

That's really impressive Aleks. :o
I remember Alejandro's military madness having a similar effect for a 3d swing door, but this is taking it to another level.

[ck3D]

I could never bother to try and figure out those parallax sky tricks myself, so I'll always love them when I see them when put to such original use. Nice one for sure!

@jimbob style is really sweet, especially in screens 3 and 4. Screen 1 has a root sprite that appears to be floating in mid air, just reporting in case you didn't catch that.

[jimbob]

ck3D, on 28 January 2021 - 08:36 AM, said:

I could never bother to try and figure out those parallax sky tricks myself, so I'll always love them when I see them when put to such original use. Nice one for sure!

@jimbob style is really sweet, especially in screens 3 and 4. Screen 1 has a root sprite that appears to be floating in mid air, just reporting in case you didn't catch that.

thanks, yeah, i noticed it and fixed it already :)

[Aleks]

Merlijn, on 28 January 2021 - 08:25 AM, said:

That's really impressive Aleks. :o
I remember Alejandro's military madness having a similar effect for a 3d swing door, but this is taking it to another level.

Thanks! Yeah, Alejandro also did the same trick in HydroStation (which was earlier than MM IIRC) - although looking back at it, doesn't seem like the best way, as instead of regular swing doors, the "floating" swing door could have been created with ST30 and SE0/SE1 which moves sprites and a spritework (and this way, it could be "closed" from top and bottom instead of relying on blackness). Slide doors unfortunately don't move sprites, and 2-way trains require some minimal distance (~4096 units) to work properly.

[Maarten]

Nice to see so much activity in here and also seeing some old faces back as well!
@ Aleks: that door trick looks amazing :o

Meanwhile, inspiration keeps coming to me. I think it's save to say at least 50% is finished. I actually made the whole "basic gameplay locations". The map will have more nature as well this time around :)
Don't wanna show too much yet, but here is a WIP shot of a cave section:

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[jimbob]

fleshing out some of the maps, adding secrets, places to discover, foreshadowing and adding lame puns.

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[Slap McBald]

So, I got sucked into Doom modding for a few months and I basically abandoned Blood and Ice.

Now, I am trying this again -- another fucking awful BETA IS BETTA mod that'll never get anywhere.

This new mod of mine is called Duke Nukem 3D:Metal Future. Metal Future was DN1's working title according to Wikipedia. Please take this bit of info with a grain of salt, as Joe Siegler says that DN1's original title was Heavy Metal, and didn't mention anything about the Metal Future name.

We, Duke4 users know how these mods go -- reusin' Cage's shit*, maybe using some of the official asset pieces that were posted in Duke4's Discord, zero effort, some beta-esque (non-official) assets taken from wherever without proper credit (trust me, I know. Yeah I'm fucking looking at you Timmyboy1980.), barely anything unique, the list goes on.

But for this project, I'm trying my best to do things...erm, right. Instead of trying to make some unappealing garbage, I'm trying to make something that looks "decent", has interesting and unique ideas, has some story slapped on that the players will probably ignore, etc.


This mod is set in an alternate reality Los Angeles in the year 1998, where Earth is unified under one government with the City of Angels as the capital (as gross as that may sound).

Somewhere in darkest corner of the Milky Way, the queen of an unknown hostile race is having her troops construct a DNA bomb that will eradicate all life on Earth, while leaving
all of the planet's buildings intact -- allowing them to come in and build a new colony.

However, they have already suffered a major setback -- when the alien army's high officials (Suran Korando, Ignatius Baranar, Carnon Hendor, and Mileena Sanura) heard about this plan, they immediately rushed over to Earth's capital building, the Central Office. There, they told the president every, single, thing they heard about the project. The president (Darnell Geraldson) responded by calling the only man who could stop the plan in its tracks...Duke Nukem.

This story is not...that great. It's something.

Development's been going since November 2020, and I'm not sure how it's going to end...it'll probably fail yet again because I'm a lazy twat.

Here are some shots you'll probably hate:












*Okay I'll admit this: I'm using Cage's assets, just because they look cool.

[ck3D]

^ There's really not much to hate about those shots, I recognize some classic areas from LameDuke and beta screens, some others I'm not sure might be your original creation but in the end it all looks really clean (a lot cleaner than Blood And Ice if you allow me) and fun to explore with good use of the available space, that and the Duke Nukem 1 reference kind of sells it for me, honestly (I'm big into the idea of reusing Duke 1 and 2 lore myself, I also grew up with those games). I'm curious now, did you learn anything from Doom modding that you're applying here? Only asking because there's a lot to learn from Doom mapping and here it looks like you did. Besides that, theme has been tried over and over but to my knowledge, no 'clean', playable and fun beta mod was ever released I don't think (including Blood And Ice, haha), at least I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

Don't call yourself a lazy twat in advance, too - making a mod by yourself (even though you're partly reusing assets here, I know) is hard enough on yourself as a person that you don't need to do that. So far it's looking all good and thus it's pretty obvious to me that you can totally do it (unless at some point you yourself choose to give up, which would be fine too). Just keep it up, and maybe remember to respect your own workflow by doing things as you feel like doing them, never before - that's typically how one starts feeling imaginary pressure and burning out for, in reality, no reason.

[Slap McBald]

ck3D, on 03 February 2021 - 05:56 PM, said:

^ There's really not much to hate about those shots, I recognize some classic areas from LameDuke and beta screens, some others I'm not sure might be your original creation but in the end it all looks really clean (a lot cleaner than Blood And Ice if you allow me) and fun to explore with good use of the available space, that and the Duke Nukem 1 reference kind of sells it for me, honestly (I'm big into the idea of reusing Duke 1 and 2 lore myself, I also grew up with those games). I'm curious now, did you learn anything from Doom modding that you're applying here? Only asking because there's a lot to learn from Doom mapping and here it looks like you did. Besides that, theme has been tried over and over but to my knowledge, no 'clean', playable and fun beta mod was ever released I don't think (including Blood And Ice, haha), at least I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

Don't call yourself a lazy twat in advance, too - making a mod by yourself (even though you're partly reusing assets here, I know) is hard enough on yourself as a person that you don't need to do that. So far it's looking all good and thus it's pretty obvious to me that you can totally do it (unless at some point you yourself choose to give up, which would be fine too). Just keep it up, and maybe remember to respect your own workflow by doing things as you feel like doing them, never before - that's typically how one starts feeling imaginary pressure and burning out for, in reality, no reason.

I apologize for the pessimistic opinions I have on my creations. The thing about it is that I feel that other people don't see this project the same way I do; I get this feeling that they probably think it's subpar and uninteresting, and I can't help but believe that their "thoughts" are correct, even though they probably aren't thinking that.

As for what I learned in Doom modding, I learned how to use a grid properly...'cause I didn't know how to at the time I was making Blood and Ice, as you can see in this old pic I've got
(Look at the sidewalk)

[ck3D]

That's art in a nutshell, though - you have a vision, and then it's literally the craft of a lifetime working on developing the technical skills it will take you to more or less accurately and successfully communicate that vision to the rest of the world. That just seems to apply to every possible field and level (or game) design is no exception. There's a very clear improvement between your new work and your (not so) old work, which hints at how you really like doing what you're doing and thus naturally progress so if you keep at it, there's no reason why your final product won't bear the exact feel you want it to bear. The less you'll doubt yourself, the more you'll be focused on the actual qualities of your output and in the end those are what will speak. But you don't have to apologize, I'm just saying self confidence is quite crucial and also totally compatible with remaining open to criticism, so don't sleep on it!

I'm also glad you're mentioning the grid as that's actually such a basic element of the editor in the first place and yet it's so practical once you fully know how to use it (with a grasp on how Build units work and how many x of them roughly equate to, or on how it applies itself and works with texture dimensions and resolutions and relative alignment, etc.). I'd say when one starts looking at numbers a lot in Build and regularly fake using the wall drawing tool just to measure distances for instance is already past one important point in the learning curve. Good luck with your project!

[jimbob]

learning how to use the grid is a fine art, one i still havent really mastered. often i create things and they seem just a tad bit larger than they should be in real life. and to see what some of the build magicians here pull off these day makes me feel inadequate :D

[Danukem]

Personally I think its fine if objects are somewhat bigger than real life, as long as the scale is consistent. In fact, I find that maps done to accurate real life scale feel way too cramped and are miserable to navigate through, especially if there is combat. With player movement speed being so high and the primitive clipping of build, giving the player more space is generally a good thing.

[Ninety-Six]

Danukem, on 04 February 2021 - 04:37 PM, said:

Personally I think its fine if objects are somewhat bigger than real life, as long as the scale is consistent. In fact, I find that maps done to accurate real life scale feel way too cramped and are miserable to navigate through, especially if there is combat. With player movement speed being so high and the primitive clipping of build, giving the player more space is generally a good thing.

Perhaps that's the real reason his sprite is so small and his eye-level so low.

[ck3D]

Yeah I've said it before but I agree with Dan on that subject. There is what I would call practical oversizing which really makes sense once you've translated your real-life-inspired environment into the language of the game's physics in how it functions, and performs in-game, and then your average rookie mapper oversizing where the author lacks the perspective to realize that his constructions really are too big, and it doesn't serve the gameplay. But more often than not, I'm inclined to think it's undersizing that's bound to get in the way and not the opposite. Making a map is utilizing allocated space and turning it into a fun environment to roam around, feeling sandwiched in between layers of colored walls and sprites protruding out of everywhere all the while being fed two angry Enforcers is never fun (and a waste when the same encounter might just as well happen in properly designed space to begin with).

By use of the grid I did mean it as a guide but not necessarily for scaling, more like a way to create patterns within your level that you can easily manipulate, exchange or copy paste on the fly as opposed to doing everything by sight and having to make do with mathematical imprecisions. Learning how to break away from the grid is important but, maybe funnily enough, learning exactly when to actually rely on it (again, mostly for consistency in values and distances) also is, and perhaps just as much.

[jimbob]

i use x amount of gridspaces for general guidelines, like say normal grid space 4 wide for doorways, wich seems fine ( normal gridspace for me is going from no grid to press G 3 times, wich seems the default grid in build iirc. )

making walls in about intervals of 8 grid spaces, sidewalks about 4 wide, roads about 8 to 16 for single or dual lane, 8 grid spaces for crates, 4 for small ones, you get the idea :)
the thing i still struggle with from time to time are diagonal gridspaces, i just 'feel' those because im not going to calculate the actual spaces needed to get 8, but diagonaly :)

[Aleks]

jimbob, on 05 February 2021 - 02:40 AM, said:

i use x amount of gridspaces for general guidelines, like say normal grid space 4 wide for doorways, wich seems fine ( normal gridspace for me is going from no grid to press G 3 times, wich seems the default grid in build iirc. )

making walls in about intervals of 8 grid spaces, sidewalks about 4 wide, roads about 8 to 16 for single or dual lane, 8 grid spaces for crates, 4 for small ones, you get the idea :)
the thing i still struggle with from time to time are diagonal gridspaces, i just 'feel' those because im not going to calculate the actual spaces needed to get 8, but diagonaly :)

It's perhaps easiest to just base the general guidance for size of things on how 3D Realms did it in Duke and the general "consensus" that 512 X/Y units in Build and 8192 vertical units are equal to 1 meter. Duke's F7 sprite is generally a bit flawed here, but this makes indeed for "4 3rd grid spaces" for door width and 16 "page ups" for doors. As for diagonals, it's either good to base it off diagonal square flat sprites for proportions or just make the area without diagonals, then select and rotate it with ALT+< to make for a smooth rotation (again in Build units, e.g. 512 being equal to 90 degrees) - then just connect the remaining lines. Also remember that when drawing lines or moving vertices, the newer versions (not sure how new) will show you explicitly the line length in Build units, also there's an option to show markers for halves/centres of the lines which I find super helpful too.

[ck3D]

That's a good point about diagonals being a difficulty at first - personally, to work that out I figured out my own patterns of values I'll regularly use for such angles and they're going to be different (although relatively close) from the ones I use for straight lines (the classic 1024/2048/3072/4096 etc.). Which leads me to agree on how what matters the most is consistency, unless you're deliberately making a creative exception and something you especially want to stand out (but so that's not in a bad way, it'll still have to remain coherent enough). Also variation in angles is nice and all if you want to bother but personally I tend to use straight diagonals a lot (so at perfect 45 degree angles), usually those suffice to do the trick of breaking the linearity - and you don't really want to always submerge the player with infinite directions either - and are generally easier to work with later if you're going to add splits, sprite work and whatnot.

A good example of how important respecting the regularity of your dimensions is for instance, let's say you want to make a tunnel with an arched ceiling and so you first make one square section with the archways and then copy paste it a few times, connecting all good since you're not changing anything and then let's say you want a 90 degree corner with a 45 degree transition that keeps the arches, if everything is perfectly coherent and you respected the grid, the transition in between the rotated sectors will be easy to draw as every default value will be correct once you draw the diagonals and auto-adjusting the slopes will work right away too, whereas as a beginner it's easy to completely lack that scope and just spend hours making individual little touches and refining everything until it looks worse.

Also I also can't be arsed to ever make accurate mental divisions while mapping, but the grid is of great assistance here as the different scales can do a big part of the job for you once you know what you're doing.

Aleks, on 05 February 2021 - 02:58 AM, said:

It's perhaps easiest to just base the general guidance for size of things on how 3D Realms did it in Duke and the general "consensus" that 512 X/Y units in Build and 8192 vertical units are equal to 1 meter. Duke's F7 sprite is generally a bit flawed here, but this makes indeed for "4 3rd grid spaces" for door width and 16 "page ups" for doors. As for diagonals, it's either good to base it off diagonal square flat sprites for proportions or just make the area without diagonals, then select and rotate it with ALT+< to make for a smooth rotation (again in Build units, e.g. 512 being equal to 90 degrees) - then just connect the remaining lines. Also remember that when drawing lines or moving vertices, the newer versions (not sure how new) will show you explicitly the line length in Build units, also there's an option to show markers for halves/centres of the lines which I find super helpful too.

I admit I have a bit of a gripe with such rigidity in measurements (trying to match real-life door sizes and whatnot) because in Duke I feel like the physics are just completely different from what you can do in real life and so even something that aims at translating real-world stuff that accurately looks like a replica is likely to fail at allocating the player a comfortable amount of space. Real distances will look right graphically but most often won't be optimally practical. I guess it's really a matter of style at that point though, and whether or not the author is down with visual abstractions, but what I mean is I don't think emphasis on visual quality and coherence and emphasis on photorealism are the same. To be fair though, you know this is coming from someone who loves spacious areas these days. I like how accurate you are and meticulous your own style is, which is a big part of why it's unique but I think it's also cool to get looser and go wild with big stuff that's just fun to jump around on with literally zero hindrance. I know you'll agree but I still felt like that point had to be made, to mitigate!

[Merlijn]

And here I am, mostly basing the size and distances on "what feels right". :D

All kidding aside, I adopted a similar approach to ck3d by slighty exagerrating the size of locations. Back in the day, red4 was too cramped because I went for realism.
Nowadays, if something is cramped it's by deliberate design (because I want that particular part to be claustrophobic for example).

As for SG4, I did hit a bit of a writers block the past few weeks, which slowed things down. The good news is that I finally figured out what I wanted to and now the map has great momentum again.
So basically in this map you will enter the lions den, which means you'll be descending deep into the earth (after cleaning out The Kompleks).
One of the things you'll encounter on your way down is this big underground river of slime, consuming the last remnants of Emmerichville:

[jimbob]

pretty much finished my farm map for the Global Kerfuffle mod, only need to 'script' some sequences in order to hinder the player, and do some finishing touches.

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[Micky C]

Nice work on the milestone of finishing a map. Are you going to add shading and shadows though?

[brullov]

Personally, I find some beauty in full bright scenes on the Build Engine.