[High Treason]

Description

Enjoying semi-retirement, living out his days in a top floor penthouse, Duke is startled by a series of missiles raining on the city. Hearing his old EDF communicator chattering in his pocket, he sets out to destroy the alien menace one more time. Duke must make his way across town to the old church, board a train, take a ride on a plane and confront whoever is responsible for this attack. You know the drill, rip 'em a new one.

New Invasion is a user episode targeted towards the original MS-DOS Atomic Edition of the game. While the episode includes CON files, these serve only to change the level and music definitions, as well as a single quote string, meaning the eight levels are entirely vanilla. The levels are fairly short and the episode's play time is probably under an hour total, though in that time it pushes the game quite hard and, maybe, it might also test the player occasionally.
The episode was largely made just for fun, as a personal challenge and as a learning exercise, as it forced me to finally read through the source code again. At times it was tough and certainly a lot of things are far from perfect.


Installation

Unpack the ZIP file to somewhere and run INSTALL. Alternatively, you can open DNNIFILE in a utility such as PKZIP, WinZIP or 7-Zip, as it is a standard 16-Bit SFX archive. Further details are contained within DNNIHELP, regarding installation, credits and even walkthroughs for each level in case you get stuck.

Beware that a lot of things in the episode won't work properly or at all in most of the modern ports. Some of the older, more accurate ports such as xDuke should work and you're free to try them, but the target was always solely the original MS-DOS version of the game, be it running on actual DOS, in a DOS-on-Windows-9x session or in an emulator such as DOSBox. Details of the development system are also included in DNNIHELP.

As of November 23rd, RedNukem is confirmed to be mostly compatible and the startup BAT has been modified to accommodate this. I don't inherently support this approach, but if you can't run the MS-DOS Atomic Edition or xDuke, then this might be a viable alternative.


Pictures





Download

DNNI1_1R.ZIP (2.77MiB) (Updated September 16th - only a few small bug fixes)
ModDB: https://www.moddb.co...tirement-ruckus

My Server: http://dxzeff.com/trash/DNNI1_ER.ZIP

For those who absolutely insist on avoiding the EXE file and can't extract or rename it: http://dxzeff.com/trash/NIFILE1E.ZIP


Known Bugs

Several. See DNNIHELP. I will not have much free time to fix anything unless it's a serious bug with a fairly certain possibility of a fix.

Some day I would like to make another episode, so anything minor will probably wait until then, as I intend to pack both episodes together at that point.
I know this thing isn't for everyone. That's fine.

Thanks to Stojke for stepping in at the last second for testing.
Also thanks to Aleks for testing as much as limited time allowed.
Everyone else either didn't have time or just went dark, so blame those unnamed people who ran off without a word.
Thanks to Thiemo Kreuz for allowing the use of a modified TVIEW utility, which is used to display the help file. This guy also made a handful of maps in the 1990s.

[Dr.Panico]

Okay, so I'm playing this now. This is really impressive stuff. Loved all these cool effects. Shame it has to be played on MS-DOS (I say that because, atleast on DosBOX, it's pretty crash prone).
I think some parts of the episode are a bit janky, and sometimes the solutions to the puzzles are a little contrived, like...

Spoiler

How the hell was I supposed to know that you have to kill the babe in order to progress on level 5?! Besides, HAVING to kill a babe on a Duke3D just feels...wrong.

I'm stuck on level 6, though. I'm cracking my head to figure out the second puzzle in the office, but I can't figure it out even with the walkthrough. Where can I find the solution?

[High Treason]

Well that's nice to hear.
Regarding Level 5:

Spoiler

Because I'm a troll and know it bothers people to kill the babes. The official line is that she was an alien in disguise, which may or may not be elaborated on in a future episode.

Regarding Level 6:

Spoiler

This level was designed to be cruel. The solution is located on the next level somewhere. the screen behind you, if you noticed, will beep and add the text "QUIT TO TITLE" after a little while, though you don't have to wait for it to do this. The third demo gives you the solution. Figured this was too unusually cruel to go unused and would seem annoyingly obvious once discovered.

There definitely is some jank, no shortage of it, and I'm sure more will be discovered. If you're on one of the PCs that crashes (some do, some don't, and it only seems to be machines made past the mid-2000s) and you happen to find the secret level, save before you hit the nuke button leading to said secret level, as that map is very prone to making the game crash almost instantly on such machines. That way if you do crash upon entering, you can load the save and at least go to the end, still. Seems to be a memory allocation thing that certain newer computers really don't like.

[Dr.Panico]

Regarding the demos: for some reason they refuse to play. I think what happens is that, when I run DNNI.bat, it renames the DMO files to DMQ. I don't know what to do in order to circunvent this.

[High Treason]

The DMO files in the directory are the ones which came with the game. When renamed to DMQ (or really anything that the game isn't looking for), the DNNI demos contained in DNNI.GRP should play instead. I'm not sure why they don't, unless there's some weird version mismatch I'm unaware of - so far as I know, Duke 3D V1.5 is Duke 3D V1.5.

In any case, I'll try to figure out what's going on, probably by installing the game from random CD images and seeing if any of them fail to play the demos. Thus far I only know them to work on a UK V1.5 CD install and a US V1.4 to V1.5 patch.
In the mean time, if you can't find the combination:

Spoiler

1 4 8 7

Entry of the numbers tends to go smoother if you use the pistol instead of shoving your face against them and mashing USE. There are no more monsters in that level (you're basically at the exit anyway) and you get given a decent amount of ammo at the start of the next stage anyway.

[juvenite]

The demos are running fine here. When I have some time to play, I'll give it a shot!

[stojke]

The mod was awesome , I had some great fun while testing it. It is a bit tedious with some specifics like jumping on the train or figuring out the cryptic puzzle on level six , but once you get it you feel fulfilled and glad you did it.

And now for some fan art

[zykov eddy]

I was too lazy to play this in DOS Duke 3D, so I just ported it to EDuke32. So far, no serious game breaking bugs. Even puzzle in the beginning of level 2 works.

This is an extremely well crafted episode. I love the use of cool gimmicks and fresh ideas, and even amazed that they even could work in DOS. I'm on level 3, currently.

[Ninety-Six]

When you say "original DOS version" are we talking 1.3d or Atomic?

[High Treason]

zykov eddy, on 11 September 2024 - 12:49 AM, said:

I was too lazy to play this in DOS Duke 3D, so I just ported it to EDuke32. So far, no serious game breaking bugs. Even puzzle in the beginning of level 2 works.

This is an extremely well crafted episode. I love the use of cool gimmicks and fresh ideas, and even amazed that they even could work in DOS. I'm on level 3, currently.

Thanks.
Last I knew the collision updates, among other "fixes" resulted in many things not working, but if it does indeed work in that port now, that's cool.

Ninety-Six, on 11 September 2024 - 06:46 PM, said:

When you say "original DOS version" are we talking 1.3d or Atomic?

Atomic Edition. Edited the post to specify this. I do keep meaning to experiment with 1.3D eventually, though if I ever get around to giving this project a sequel, that will almost certainly be on a modified 1.5. Anything 1.3D would likely just be a one off map on its own and have nothing to do with this.

--------

There's a small chance I may try to get a small update done at some stage, as I discovered a pretty nasty flaw in one of the levels and a couple of other things that could be fixed quite quickly. Can't say if and when because my schedule is still quite full and the weather still far too warm to spend extended periods of time running the Presler XE I'm currently stuck with.

[High Treason]

Well this should be the last update, at least for a good long while. As of now, the ZIP Only version (NIFILE1E.ZIP) has an updated BAT file that will launch the episode with RedNukem. Compatibility should be about 90% and all levels are playable to completion with only a few visual bugs and some small mechanical bugs. The most notable being that only the second method works to progress you past the start of Level 2.
I only test played once in this port, so I cannot guarantee it will always work, but I also can't see any obvious reason it shouldn't. Seems the port matured from the early build I had before.


I have also completed the commentary free walkthrough video:


Currently I don't have access to PKZIP and my files in the same place due to LAN issues, so I haven't updated the EXE version with the new BAT yet. I'll probably do that over the next couple of days.

Edit: EXE version now updated. Nothing changed in the episode itself, only the startup script was altered to search for and start the afore mentioned port.