[porkblerg]

(EDIT: Dukeworld, not Doomworld. I'm a dumbass. I used to lurk on both.)

Hello everyone. I'm a longtime Duke fan. After more than two decades of lurking on the Dukeworld forums and enjoying your creations, I have finally gotten around to making an account. I've completed a small project very special to me, and I'd like to share it with you.

The truly oldschool among you may remember the TC Vixens 2: Resurrection, released by Troy Studios on Dukeworld in 1999. (Disclaimer: I am not the mod's original author Charley Raj, who seems to have disappeared from the internet entirely shortly after the mod's release. Frankly, I don't blame him, if I made this mod I wouldn't want to be identified either.) Infamous for its explicit adult content and its crass violence, even by Duke Nukem 3D standards, Vixens 2 didn't make a big splash on Dukeworld at the time, though I occasionally see it surface when a horny teenager (or a former horny teenager feeling nostalgic) pops into these forums to marvel at how excessively horny it was, or to complain they can't get it to work anymore.

I'm going to be honest, it is not a very good TC. The maps and encounter design are surprisingly good but full of hall-of-mirrors bugs and misplaced triggers, the scripting in the CON files is poorly written and full of strange bugs and even stranger intended behaviors, and the second map appears to be plagiarized from another TC that was popular at the time (I can't remember which). Even the adult content--ostensibly the main point of the mod--is mostly stolen from PUSSYCAT.MAP, a then-contemporary userlevel that was little more than an elaborate spam advertisement for an American adult film distributor. It was very obviously an ambitious byproduct of some sexually repressed teenager out there teaching himself how to mod Duke (why else would Duke and enemy corpses so often randomly spawn rats, under elaborate and bizarre conditions?), with the player's enjoyment secondary to that learning experience.

You'd think it wouldn't be a huge deal, then, that Vixens 2 is one of the few TCs that doesn't work on modern Duke sourceports. But this mod really stuck with me over the years, more so even than many more competently put together mods. That is for one reason and one reason only: for all his obvious inexperience with CON scripting, mapping, level design, and sex, Mr. Raj was a master of atmosphere.

Look at these screenshots, man. This isn't the gritty, quasi-realistic red light district from E1M1 and E1M2, nor is it just wall to ceiling deep-fried porn like other adults-only maps of the era. It is a rare, perhaps totally unique, opportunity to walk through and explore the Skinemax extended universe, the bizarre imaginary gel-lit, smoke-machine-fogged, midnight neon BDSM sex dimension that only existed in R rated low budget erotic thrillers on nineties late night cable and never will again. A place that is violent and dangerous, but the danger is sexy instead of terrifying, with vampy latex dominatrices prowling streets lined with vintage advertisements for adult CD-ROMs while All Saints and Madonna blare from smoky dive bars where leather-clad femme fatales lie in wait with concealed explosives. This mod is a snapshot of a lost era that never existed, and exists in this TC alone in the medium of video games: not anything like the sex industry in real life, back in the nineties or now, but it is the tantalizing fantasy of sex from the perspective who has never had it before. That so much weird shit happens in it--spamming bloodpools, runaway ascending gunsmoke, latex assassins ripped from William Shatner's TekWar moaning like late night radio DJs at no one particular as they inexplicably rise from the grave after being riddled with bullet holes--just adds to its surreal, dreamlike neo-noir feel.

It is also a fascinating historical artifact in its own right. Some of the posters for porno CD-ROMs in the mod's wall textures are now incredibly rare, their producers having gone under long ago. Immoral Combat, for one, is so obscure that Google only turns up a US Library of Congress database record and a Reddit post by someone speculating that he has the only copy left in existence. Folks here back in the day said it was dumb to turn to this mod for porn since you could find free porn anywhere else on the internet, and they were right, but now you cannot even find this porn on the internet anymore.

Since first playing this mod I've come of age and been all the way through early adulthood, and I've really wanted to play it again. But I couldn't for many years, because this mod has a unique installation procedure. Unlike nearly every other TC, you can't just drop it into eduke32 and go. It comes bundled as a bunch of self-unpacking archive EXEs, which unpack a program called VIXENS.COM that you are supposed to run it with instead of your duke3d.exe executable. Obviously source ports skip all that, so you can open the maps in eduke32 and play through them with the custom weapons and enemies and everything, but a lot of the custom behaviors are missing, and that throws off both the tone and the challenge of the mod. Worse, the original release doesn't support the Atomic Edition, and the patch Mr. Raj released to fix that breaks the mod.

I'm embarrassed it took me this long to reverse engineer VIXENS.COM and figure out that all it does is swap out three custom CON files (VIXENS1A.CON, VIXENS1B.CON, VIXENS1C.CON) in the GRP file, run duke3d.exe, and revert that change when you quit, which is easy enough to get around. It took a bit longer for me to go into the CON files and fix the many critical errors in VIXENS2B.CON (the mod's custom GAME.CON) that duke3d.exe will tolerate but eduke32 will not, including one very nasty infinite loop that will hang eduke32 and eventually crash to desktop without an error message. But after a weekend of work I've finally done it, and it plays just as I remember--I even managed to fix a whole bunch of bugs that noticeably changed the mod's behavior in sourceports as early as JFDuke3D. I'm sharing the fixed mod here in case any of you also miss the Skinemax Dimension and would like to visit again with the experience of a modern grownup who understands it now.

"I know what sex is...(grabbag.mid plays)...but I won't tell you!"

{ download }

Yeah, it's a MEGA link, I'm sorry. This is Vixens we're talking about, after all. I'd submit it to Dukeworld, or hit up Charley Raj himself for permission, but I think I'm probably at least a decade too late to do either. Enjoy.


Things I fixed:

Quote

- Now runs with intended ruleset on EDuke32, without crashing or getting stuck in infinite loops
- Fixed Atomic Edition compatibility (the Atomic patch officially released by Troy Studios corrupts the mod)
- Fixed: Secret cheat laser gun is no longer unobtainable (stand on any body of water except the ocean and mash the Use key until Duke starts shooting lasers)
- Fixed: the secret cheat laser gun explodes if Duke takes damage (this never worked before)
- Fixed: Duke is pushed back by enemy damage (this never worked before)
- Removed: 1/255 chance of spawning a rat at Duke's position every frame
- Fixed: Vixen Trooper / Captain in ATROOPSUFFERING action is intangible
- Fixed: Vixen Troopers playing dead cannot be moved
- Feature: Vixen Troopers playing dead can now be coup de graced with the use key, just like actually dead Vixen Troopers
- Feature: Changed the pitches of the Vixen Trooper, Vixen Captain, and Babe Cop's voice barks so that it is possible to tell them apart
- Removed confusing code that spawns two rats every time a Vixen Trooper / Captain dies (this now happens only 32/255 of the time, as was likely intended)

Things I have not fixed: any of the numerous corrupt map errors and HoMs in the maps. I'm not a mapper, sorry.

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[porkblerg]

I've started some work on more ambitious changes in another branch (sprite changes, removal of some more annoying features like the blood spam at low health, an overhaul of coup de grace and pushing downed enemies around, less violence and more sex), but they're not included in this release, because the point of the Restored Edition is to preserve the player experience of the original mod, warts and all. Ship of Theseus, and all that. Maybe I'll just spin it off into a different TC altogether, leaning even more heavily into the edgy BDSM nineties straight-to-VHS erotic thriller vibe while keeping it R-rated instead of the mod's NC-17. If folks are interested I can share more when it's a little more presentable. (But also if that's too close to straight up porn for this forum, I understand.)

[zykov eddy]

I love the fact that more people are doing fixes and remasters for older DN3D fan projects. I remember playing the original and being amused by it, especially the choice of weapon sprites. Gotta check this out.

[MajorTom 2417]

The story of Vixens: Resurrection by itself would get the project utterly destroyed today. Kudos for preserving it and getting it to work with modern EDuke32, but looking back at it and looking at this restored version, it's pretty damn obvious why there was never a Vixens 3.

[porkblerg]

MajorTom 2417, on 10 November 2025 - 06:52 AM, said:

The story of Vixens: Resurrection by itself would get the project utterly destroyed today. Kudos for preserving it and getting it to work with modern EDuke32, but looking back at it and looking at this restored version, it's pretty damn obvious why there was never a Vixens 3.

Yeah, no kidding. The ending promises a Vixens 3, but that's pretty rich when Troy Studios didn't even finish Vixens 2. The third map (E2M1) is visibly a WIP and the fourth map (E3M1) is just the floating box from the first map, as a placeholder. I remember their website had all these Daz3D models in lingerie and bondage gear that weren't even in the mod. It's pretty obvious Troy Studios had bigger ambitions, but didn't have the time and ability to make them happen.

As for the story, I don't know, it's pretty fucked up and follows a sort of surreal porno logic, but I don't think it's more offensive than most pseudonymous amateur BDSM smut written on the internet today. I did think it was funny that they overlooked that by their own timeline, when the Vixens arrive, Duke has been on vacation for something like a hundred years.

[Fantinaikos]

If this restoration has been done on the 2nd, it means the first episode (1.09 from 1998 for Atomic Edition 1.4/1.5) work more or less flawlessy as it is?