[Mister Sinister]

The epidemic is the perfect time to resume working on DN3D maps.
Here's a thingie:

[ck3D]

Nice thingie! Pretty classic looking, the fact that your loading dock incorporates lights probably calls for stronger contrast in the shading of that section though. For instance it makes little sense that the diagonal wall on the right appears to have the same shade value as the one further back (with the large door) when they are positioned at different distances from the light sources, or that the ceiling is looking so uniformly dark. As it is right now, this room is actually the opportunity for some great lighting/shading, I'm guessing you plan on considering this type of stuff later but in its current state already, I think it would lend itself very well even to some simple lighting effects (working/blinking/cycling lights etc.).

Besides this little nitpicking, I like the vertical action, structure/geometry of the room and trimwork.

[Dukebot]

Mister Sinister, on 14 April 2020 - 10:30 AM, said:

The epidemic is the perfect time to resume working on DN3D maps.
Here's a thingie:

This is looking good! It reminds me a little bit of quake1, maybe for the geometry of the map, not sure, but it's really nice!

[Mister Sinister]

Here's another thingie and that's it for now.


Thanks for the lighting tips. I'll see what I can do, but for now the main focus is getting the layout of the map done and all things gameplay.

Quote

This is looking good! It reminds me a little bit of quake1, maybe for the geometry of the map, not sure, but it's really nice!

It is a bit quake inspired though not through the obviously restricted colour palette, but in the way the difficulty is implemented. Play HEALTH to see what I mean as this new map is part of the series I plan to release.
The general look and feel is a bit of everything: Doom, Quake, classic DN levels - you name it.

[ck3D]

Wow I just realized I don't think I ever played Health. Adding it to the never-ending (sigh) queue of sweet looking maps I'm trying to play when I can. Kinda waiting for the right impulse to go on a map marathon and catch up with tons of releases I've been missing.

The layout of that room looks like a lot of fun by the way, digging the use of the vertical axis/jumping mechanics (or so I'm assuming) and that detail with the broken frame is well done and a welcome addition to the atmosphere. Most of the time this type of detail in user maps can feel forced, but here it totally fits right in with the style and environment.

[Darkus]

I'm thinking to regroup the official addons in one directory, and giving them the same treatment that I did with my GAME.CON fixes (maybe more by adding some remade enemies that are in the community stockpile):



Anyone knows if that feasible?

[Ninety-Six]

I can't comment to the feasibility, but I am certainly in support of the idea (to the con fixes at least if nothing else. Ever since I discovered your fixes I've pretty much refused to play without them. Seeing the same done to the expansions would be awesome and bring total cohesion to my Duke 3D setup).


Actually, I may have one suggestion. Some time ago some dude did something similar for Doom, wrapping up every single official classic doom release into one single file. He wrote an external program to do this, extracting data from those official wads (as proof you owned them) to create the combination (there were some minor texture glitches so the result wasn't perfect, but that's neither here nor there). I admit my knowledge on how this all works is limited, but in theory you might be able to pull something similar. However I would imagine the result would need to place the new textures in different tilesets that don't overlap, and probably adjust each individual map file so that they redirect to the appropriate new locations. Probably something similar for the enemies too since some of those enemies overwrote the base monsters. No idea how the caribbean weapons would work though...

I don't think this will apply for PnP though, since currently the only real way to play it is through the TMTC, with all the chunky PS1 textures and sounds. There is that unofficial PnP recreation, but having played both pretty thoroughly several times... the recreation was nice before the TMTC was done, but is not really very accurate. It lacked all of the new art and pig varieties, and a lot of the level design was a bit buggy. There would need to be some kind of demake/remake/remastering I think, unless there is some way to insert all of that as-is into this theoretical supergroup file. But that's also way beyond even my limited (and possibly entirely wrong) understanding.

[Mark]

Sounds like it might overlap some of what Firefly Trooper has been working on. Maybe combine ideas or work already done if possible.

[oasiz]

Problem is that in build things are referenced by index numbers and not letter tokens.
There is a ton of hardcoded behavior, CON needs to be compiled on bootup and whatnot.

To get a "seamless" experience, you'd have to hand construct a lot of things painstakingly.
Each textured enemy variant in carib would need to be a new enemy essentially in order not to overlap existing things.

TCs outright overwrite elements, they do not co-exist with the original game data.

Closest you could get without tons of manual labor is some way to soft relaunch the whole game with new assets but this again would need something specifically planned for eduke, i.e. a mod template that tells what assets to load, etc... There have been discussions but that's all.

[Phredreeke]

Ninety-Six, on 19 April 2020 - 03:09 AM, said:

I don't think this will apply for PnP though, since currently the only real way to play it is through the TMTC, with all the chunky PS1 textures and sounds.

For most part they still use the same tilenums. For my upscale pack I replaced the textures with ones from the PC version recoloured to look like the PS1 counterparts.

Ninety-Six, on 19 April 2020 - 03:09 AM, said:

There is that unofficial PnP recreation, but having played both pretty thoroughly several times... the recreation was nice before the TMTC was done, but is not really very accurate. It lacked all of the new art and pig varieties, and a lot of the level design was a bit buggy.

There are several. The one in the Duke Nukem addon compilation is rather basic, but there's another one that uses the ripped PS1 art and gets pretty damn close

[Ninety-Six]

Phredreeke, on 19 April 2020 - 08:38 AM, said:

For most part they still use the same tilenums. For my upscale pack I replaced the textures with ones from the PC version recoloured to look like the PS1 counterparts.



There are several. The one in the Duke Nukem addon compilation is rather basic, but there's another one that uses the ripped PS1 art and gets pretty damn close

I only knew of the former, but that second one could be a possible candidate I suppose.

[Fox]

Darkus, on 19 April 2020 - 01:51 AM, said:

Anyone knows if that feasible?

There's a lot of conflict between the code of each one.

If possible, it's not really worth the work it would take.

[Lunick]

How does DukeGDX load them all?

[necroslut]

oasiz, on 19 April 2020 - 05:04 AM, said:

Each textured enemy variant in carib would need to be a new enemy essentially in order not to overlap existing things.

You should be able to use mapart for that. Of course, you'd have a copy of the enemy art for each map, which would be very wasteful. It would be useful to be able to define art files per map through con, sort of how we define level music.

[oasiz]

Lunick, on 19 April 2020 - 08:52 PM, said:

How does DukeGDX load them all?

Not sure but I think it doesn't have full support for on the fly loading and even then I think it probably does a soft restart.

necroslut, on 19 April 2020 - 10:35 PM, said:

You should be able to use mapart for that. Of course, you'd have a copy of the enemy art for each map, which would be very wasteful. It would be useful to be able to define art files per map through con, sort of how we define level music.

I would say that per map/mod def would make more sense.
Ideally one would distribute a map that defines what things to load in/out per map, be it art/music/sounds/maps.
Ideally it could have a stub that allows you to define an episode as well so that map packs and mods can be made truly modular instead of overwriting.
A new map format could help resolve a lot of this since you could basically start referring to assetblob + index instead of just index.
Adding such indexes during conversion would be trivial and this could allow some degree of simultaneous loading even.
During map load each assetblob could have a list of valid hashses (version differences are usually irrelevant with assets) and it would search for said files and "mount" them.

Problem is that CON needs to be compiled and CON nowdays dictates a LOT of stuff besides just the stuff you see after "new game".
When defining enemies and such "again", the copypasta enemies would attempt to define many duplicate variables, states, etc..
You'd have to re-tool a bunch of it.

Duke was designed to be moddable but how you load these is rather "vertical".
Considering you load modified code and everything, it's not too far from even comparing the end result to a very user friendly romhack.
Maps and such are very naive, they just point to resources, which in this case occupy same indexes.

As a stopgap, something what WON HL1 did would be nice where selecting a mod/map would just perform a quick soft-reboot and sort of seamlessly allows you to jump between mods. I have a huge interest on getting something like this working as I believe that the rather difficult mod loading is one of the biggest reasons why people mostly stick to stock assets as it's impossible to keep track of what launch params each mod needs, reducing the amount of people who even bother to try. Someday maybe..

[Ninety-Six]

Maybe it could be a community-focused effort or something?

[oasiz]

I can surely be.
Map format however is not extremely simple, once a map is loaded in, the tag fields, extra and such work as rudimentary scratchpad ram during runtime for effects, actors, etc..
This has been extended over the years but that also just bloats the struct each time.

eduke devs have some ideas and it's roughly in the pipeline somewhere.
However this won't really solve the modding issue yet, but a first step.

[necroslut]

oasiz, on 19 April 2020 - 10:57 PM, said:

I would say that per map/mod def would make more sense.
Ideally one would distribute a map that defines what things to load in/out per map, be it art/music/sounds/maps.
Ideally it could have a stub that allows you to define an episode as well so that map packs and mods can be made truly modular instead of overwriting.
A new map format could help resolve a lot of this since you could basically start referring to assetblob + index instead of just index.
Adding such indexes during conversion would be trivial and this could allow some degree of simultaneous loading even.
During map load each assetblob could have a list of valid hashses (version differences are usually irrelevant with assets) and it would search for said files and "mount" them.

Problem is that CON needs to be compiled and CON nowdays dictates a LOT of stuff besides just the stuff you see after "new game".
When defining enemies and such "again", the copypasta enemies would attempt to define many duplicate variables, states, etc..
You'd have to re-tool a bunch of it.

Duke was designed to be moddable but how you load these is rather "vertical".
Considering you load modified code and everything, it's not too far from even comparing the end result to a very user friendly romhack.
Maps and such are very naive, they just point to resources, which in this case occupy same indexes.

As a stopgap, something what WON HL1 did would be nice where selecting a mod/map would just perform a quick soft-reboot and sort of seamlessly allows you to jump between mods. I have a huge interest on getting something like this working as I believe that the rather difficult mod loading is one of the biggest reasons why people mostly stick to stock assets as it's impossible to keep track of what launch params each mod needs, reducing the amount of people who even bother to try. Someday maybe..

This goes a bit beyond (and aside from) what I meant... I was talking only about art replacements, not code/sounds etc, and specifically for maps inside a mod/episode rather than per mod/episode. Now, I don't know if "mapart" even works inside an episode or if it just triggers when loading a usermap, but I imagine expanding it wouldn't be too difficult if not.
There are many cases of episodes or mods where, for instance, a reskinned enemy is used only in a level or two (such as a secret level), or just one episode out of several – sort of how Plug&Pray does it.
Currently this requires duplicating the entire enemy/character (both art and code), even if they're identical aside from art and even if it is intended as a complete replacement.
One might also want to use a feature like that to change the player's outfit between levels, like in Time to Kill/Zero Hour.
The reason I brought up con is that we already have user.con where episodes and levels are defined. As mapart is already implemented, adding something for per-map art in user.con would only slightly expand on what is already there.

I do agree about the way Half-Life handled mod loading though, with the Custom Game (or Select Game or whatever it was called...) menu. I think I've suggested something similar for ED32 way back... Still, that would only be relevant for changing between mods easier, not for handling changed content within a single mod.

[oasiz]

mapart is still a hack around the actual issue I think.
There should be a way to load in multiple assets from various expansions.

Sure you can remap the tiles but this will result in maps that require a very specific hacked tile order vs. just using "hints" (Use this tile from this GRP)

[Mark]

An audio clip from one of many little side actions you'll encounter while walking around in "Suburbs".

Attached File(s)

•  shootbitch.mp3 (118.95K)
  Number of downloads: 169

[Mister Sinister]

One more.
HEALTH, HUSH and HASTE starting rooms. May change a bit in the future, but that's what I have now.

Spoiler

[Ninety-Six]

Oh, there's three now? Crap I must have missed the second one.

[Mister Sinister]

Not yet, but there's going to be three more.

[Sanek]

Mister Sinister, on 20 April 2020 - 07:19 AM, said:

Not yet, but there's going to be three more.

So is it going to be the episode or single user maps?

[Mister Sinister]

According to my plan it's a map pack with a little extra thrown into it.

[Ninety-Six]

Another pack on the horizon? sweet

[ck3D]

Oh man, now I'm kind of tempted to postpone playing Health till the whole pack comes out so I can enjoy the whole series the way it's intended to be!

Really consistent aesthetics and clean looks throughout and the concept is really cool - looking forward.

[Maarten]

Great to see so much activity in here! Looking and sounding good, all!

---

Meanwhile my map is 1350+sectors, 10800+ walls. Going steady Lately the focus is on the gameplay as well.
Most of this shot was made a few months ago, but felt like sharing it haha

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Ninety-Six]

Looking like 2020 is going to be a pretty good year for duke maps. Unless I'm entirely wrong about the release forecasts but I'll play them no matter what year they come out.

[Radar]

Folks have lamented that fewer maps are being released with each coming year. But the quality of maps being released are the highest it's ever been.