[MrFlibble]

On a side note, with good, high-quality scans it should be possible to get pixel-accurate versions of screenshots (but of course with colour inaccuracies due to the specifics of the printing process) if the source images are large enough. Sadly much of the stuff available online are scans that are a) not in the highest resolution available, b) often mangled by high levels of JPEG compression and c) may be not perfectly aligned vertically, distorting the images.

To give you some idea of what I'm talking about, here's my attempt at restoring a screenshot on this page:


Compare it to another screenshot in original quality:


It's not 100% perfect but you can see that the ARMOR and HEALTH text, the compass, ammo counter and the SAFE indicator are pixel-accurate in the restored image compared to the original screenshot. The left side is somehow mangled a bit, perhaps due to some inaccuracies during scanning (?). I got this by cropping the screenshot from the scan, resizing it via Nearest Neighbour to 1280x800 (4x the original size), applying Gaussian blur at 1 pixel radius, then downsizing everything to 320x200 with the Bicubic interpolation method (all done in GIMP).

Note that the quality of the scan is far from excellent; I'm hoping that with better source images, even more accurate results may be achieved.

[Sanek]

Extracted from Fox's archive...it sure looks cool!

Attached File(s)

•  B1.JPG (30.64K)
  Number of downloads: 796

[jet_nick]

Fox, on 01 December 2017 - 10:26 AM, said:

I have collected these from the Internet:

https://imgur.com/a/5V2Cu

Hi Fox,
add them to your collection
https://imgur.com/a/bLmz4

[Fox]

Loved the Battlelord concept art:

[Fox]

[MetHy]

What are those photos from? Disneyworld?

[Fox]

Magic Kingdom (not sure about the first pic).

[Daedolon]

Page 2 of the Hickston Hog (Redneck Rampage manual) has text for the full page that you can't even see due to another page being shown on top of it, but if you view it with a PDF viewer, you can copy the text from underneath.

[NNC]

Babe Land is the biggest miss of the entire game. There are some worse levels, but Babe Land is the map that should have been truly magic and legendary. Instead, we got some depressive leveldesign and something doesn't even remotely remind us as a theme park.

[Phredreeke]

Hmmm... imagine if Mr. Splashys from Life's a Beach was given a Babe Land makeover...
That said I don't dislike the level, and the designers of DN64 apparently thought the pirate ship was cool enough to use for a dukematch map

[NNC]

As some of you might know, Levelord had a weird habit of adding lotags to the keycards in his maps of the first 3 episodes (also in Sewer and Sweeney, and one clearly Levelord/Shrapnel City style area - the water part - has a similarly tagged key in XXX Stacy). These tags refer to the keyslots, despite being meaningless as Blum and others never tagged keys and you can use and colored key on any keyslots of the actual level.

However, in Bank Roll the red key has a lotag number 4744, while the keyslot number is 7667. Since there are no tags with number 4744 anywhere on the map, this clearly indicates it had an extra part scrapped for the final release. The many unused pigcop and enforcer respawns in the safe entry might belong to that place as well.

It's a common thing in Shrapnel City I guess. As TX said on Discord, 4 of the episode's levels (Raw Meat, Movie Set, Tier Drops and Fahrenheit) were planned as multiplayer maps and rushed at the end to them being a single player compatible for the final product. The other 5 Levelord levels (Bank Roll, Flood Zone, LA Rumble, Rabid Transit, Hotel Hell) however were intended to be single player levels from the start, but all of them had scrapped areas in the end to match the expected fps of that time. The unreleased maps, Sewer and Sweeney (especially Sewer) might look different a bit because they were left in their original state (albeit with some unfinished errors and higher enemy count), and they need more time to finish (ie 10-11 minutes instead of the par time of 5-6 minutes of the retail maps).

[Fox]

[Lunick]

Wow, very nice!

[Perro Seco]

Nice, but I was first.

I found it while searching for lunar landscapes to make a skybox for my TC.

[Fox]

I didn't remembered that. Your picture is also better...

[NNC]

I've found a nice old pre-release podcast with Randy, Allen and others who added some insightful information about DNFs history.

http://www.dukenukem...y/podcasts.html

But what I found really interesting is this comment by Randy on part 7:

Quote

RANDY: I remember back when we were working together, like when we shipped the Atomic edition? I don’t even remember there being a debate. It was just like of course there’s going to be a sequel and we just kept doing stuff. And Al was tinkering with the build engine and there were some things that were going on that Ken Silverman did to the engine to allow voxels; to add voxels to the engine and some things some guys had done to allow us to fake 3D with room over room and stuff. And everybody just kept doing stuff. Like Allen started building maps in a kind of upgraded Build engine, I remember Brian just started making weapons and crap with voxels. And then I remember one day George just showed up and “Oh I licensed Quake” and we were like, alright, and handed us the disk.

Are these builds available somewhere? What kind of maps Allen did back then? Randy later said they were cool stuff with ROR and voxels. I know some leftover voxels by Chuck Jones, but I'm not sure any kind of mapping survived from this era.

[MrFlibble]

Yes, that would be interesting material if it has survived and can be made available (even if only test maps). BTW, any idea of how this development phase relates to Shadow Warrior time-wise? I mean, what is described in this quote is pretty much like the pre-final SW stuff with fake ROR (e.g. part of the first level in the leaked beta) and voxels.

A sequel to Duke3D with SW engine additions would have been so much fun.

[Sanek]

Interesting fact about the last original Build game.

 WW2GI3DR.JPG (120.75K)
Number of downloads: 1047

Accidentally found it on the old Infogrames site (circa 2002).

[pogokeen]

 titleHiddenInitials.png (83.63K)
Number of downloads: 795

Found this while working on some stuff for Ion Maiden. There are hidden messages in Duke3D's title screen, only shown by modifying the base palettes or palswaps. The specific colours in the base palette that need to be modified to reveal these are at index 96 and 160.

Scott Miller initially suggested that "GIZ" & "LSO" could be the aliases of two of the members of the 3D Realms/Apogee graphics design department at the time, but wasn't 100% sure. Joe Siegler reached out to Allen H. Blum III, who said:

Quote

Haha... I can't totally remember, but i think that's true. "Giz" is James Storey. Don't remember what his LSO means. I'm pretty sure James fixed that image so it looked good in our palette, and he put that hidden in there while we were working super late one night. (like usual)

Joe explained that during development, "Storey used to sleep under his desk at the office sometimes," and had this photo of Storey to share:
 jamesStoreyUnderDesk.jpg (12.98K)
Number of downloads: 819
Joe continued, "The word on the bottom of his monitor there is 'Grizzle Skip'. That was the name of one of the bands one of the guys who worked in our order/shipping department was in on the side. I still have one of their cassette tapes from the old days."

There was some question about why "A.B." & not the usual "AHB"; Blum added that A.B. was him, but written by Storey. "No idea why not the H as well."

Sadly, James Storey passed away in 2015. His legacy continues to be remembered. You can find 3D Realms' touching in memorium here: https://3drealms.com...p-james-storey/

[Marphy Black]

While searching for Cam Nash (of all things), I came across this picture of the cancelled Duke Nukem D-Day game for the PS2 that I don't recall seeing before:


This is from the portfolio of Michael Bacon, a former developer at n-Space. He mentions working on several levels for the game, including a fusion of Normandy and an alien Death Star which is presumably what's shown in this screenshot.

And unrelated to D-Day but still in regard to Duke Nukem, he mentions that he was the one who did the Grabbag rendition for Land of the Babes, although it seems he didn't work on the game itself.

[NY00123]

Here's another random addition for all of you...

Anybody here remembers that EDuke32 was originally started as a kind of a merger of JFDuke3D and Enhanced Duke (i.e., EDuke)?

Concentrating just at EDuke, ever had problems with the old EDuke 2.0 patch i.e., eduke20.exe? Even if you were so sure you had the right Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition v1.5 files?
Chances are you had the game as coming with that Kill-A-Ton Collection's CD, or any another such re-packaging. There may also be any other reason.

Eventually, an alternative eduke20a.exe patch (also compatible with DOS) was made available, compatible with the files from Kill-A-Ton.
Both patches output the exact same eduke.exe file (internally identified as version "2.00.23 FIRST RELEASE").

What makes eduke20.exe different, other than being a Windows-based patcher, is that it also checks the modification times of the files.

Following a few experiments, I think that I've found the correct modification time & date for the files. No guarantee this'll work for you, though!



It's Dec. 11 1996 at local time 01:50:00PM (emphasis on "local" - this may depend on the currently set time-zone and anything like DST).
A hint for this is that 01:50 stands for version 1.5, as commonly done for other Apogee titles beforehand.

Note that if any of you is trying to run the patch under Linux with Wine, you have to make sure the observed times in the Wine environment are correct.
You can try running "wine cmd", followed by a "dir" in the Wine prompt. In my case, I could see an offset of one hour (compared to the output of ls --full-time -l).

Finally, there's still no guarantee this will work for you.

[MrFlibble]

NY00123, on 25 April 2018 - 12:13 PM, said:

What makes eduke20.exe different, other than being a Windows-based patcher, is that it also checks the modification times of the files.

The patch is using the RTPatch technology, and date checking is actually optional. I'm not sure if you can force turn it off using some command line on the patch executable, but PocketSoft had an evaluation version of the RTPatch tools that you can use to configure the options manually, including disabling date checking and making a backup copy of modified files, which in this case will be saved with proper date stamps even if they did not have them on your machine (IIRC).

You can get a very old evaluation version of the RTPatch tools via the Wayback Machine here.

UPD: Try running the patch from the command line with the -NOTIMEZONECHECK parameter, might work.

[NY00123]

MrFlibble, on 05 May 2018 - 02:29 AM, said:

The patch is using the RTPatch technology, and date checking is actually optional. I'm not sure if you can force turn it off using some command line on the patch executable, but PocketSoft had an evaluation version of the RTPatch tools that you can use to configure the options manually, including disabling date checking and making a backup copy of modified files, which in this case will be saved with proper date stamps even if they did not have them on your machine (IIRC).

You can get a very old evaluation version of the RTPatch tools via the Wayback Machine here.

UPD: Try running the patch from the command line with the -NOTIMEZONECHECK parameter, might work.

Thanks for all of the information given above!
Unfortunately I can't seem to find a compatible input RTP file for the RTPatch evaluation version, not even right before/after eduke20.exe's internal copy of RTPatch fails to patch one of the files.

There's also one more thing I wanted to mention (and forgot about); Not that it'll necessarily assist anybody reading this, though.

Titled "EDuke installer bug fix/workaround v1", there's this old file named EDUKEPT.ZIP (see http://dukeworld.com...c-eduke-patchs/) with a small patcher intended to correct the "offending" modification dates of commit.exe and duke3d.exe, for owners of "non standard" Duke3D discs like Kill-A-Ton.
Note that this is a DOS tool, and it might *not do what you expect it to* under DOSBox, DOSEMU or any other such environment. Real DOS might be the only way, if not also NTVDM.

As stated above, you can manually correct the modification times on your own.

[MrFlibble]

NY00123, on 07 May 2018 - 01:21 PM, said:

Unfortunately I can't seem to find a compatible input RTP file for the RTPatch evaluation version, not even right before/after eduke20.exe's internal copy of RTPatch fails to patch one of the files.

I very vaguely remember being able to extract the RTP file from the EXE (or run the EXE as an RTP) using one of the tools, but maybe not from the package I pointed you to.

You can try the RTP tools available here, they might be from a later RTP trial (I remember tracking the contents of those two packages back to PocketSoft's website though).

[NY00123]

MrFlibble, on 12 May 2018 - 04:25 AM, said:

You can try the RTP tools available here, they might be from a later RTP trial (I remember tracking the contents of those two packages back to PocketSoft's website though).

Thanks for the links, I've successfully patched the data from Kill-A-Ton!

For reference, SE_RTPatch_RIPer_1.04.exe (SE_RTPatch_RIPer_1.04.rar) successfuly created an eduke20.rtp file out of eduke20.exe.
Afterwards, using RTPatcher.rar from the above link, I could tell it to load this RTP file, and read files from "." (the current working directory).

I did have to tell it to ignore the timezone, in the configuration. Apparently it's possible to save it for later use. Not sure where is this saved (maybe in the registry).

However, if the timestamps of the files are *significantly different* (say from 2010), expect it to fail either way, with a message like this (say for commit.exe):

Quote

error ept0036: Old File not found. However, a file of the same name was
found. No update done since file contents do not match.

[Sanek]

Legal question I'm intrested in:

Before Fred Schreiber absorbed 3DRealms, he ran his company under 2 names, Interceptor and then Slipgate studios. I find out recently that there's yet another studio called Slipgate, that makes misc VR things and games of their own! How come you can name your company by the name of the existing company? Isn't there a chance of lawsuit possibilities, on account of trademark infringement or something?

[High Treason]

Whilst streaming today, I noticed that a 'mirror' is actually 'working' in Duke Nukem 64. The bathroom in E1L1 has a mirror that appears broken, but if you look really close you can see sectors drawing behind the boards, Duke does not appear, this does beg the question why it was removed, perhaps that area is simply lucky enough not to take much of a hit in performance and they just forgot to remove the sectors - didn't they have to copy the sectors instead of just using a tile like the PC version or something? Sure I heard something about that once.

Tired now, may come back with screenshots tomorrow.

[High Treason]

Here we go. Indeed these sectors do exist, as we knew;


Though I've never seen anyone talk about the fact they do get drawn in the game, perhaps it's lucky that the output on my N64 is kinda crappy as it makes this easier to spot;


The most obvious thing to look for is the row of sinks. The fact that these sectors are drawn does make one wonder if the feature was really removed for performance or if, instead, it was dropped more because of how hard it would be to implement. Notice that Duke Burger has a little sector left behind which does nothing, imagine trying to place a mirrored copy of the room there, you'd probably have to butcher the surrounding area significantly not to have something overlap in ways it shouldn't. The mirror in Freeway has some visual problems but I think this is more due to there being a wall behind it that's too close, there are no mirrored sectors back there. As for Duke Burger;


For those who aren't technical, in the PC version you do have to place a sector behind a mirror, but it can be any shape so long as it's large enough to 'contain' the area to be reflected, you don't have to copy the sectors manually. There are actually slight differences in the resulting effect between 1.3D and 1.5 but those have already been talked about.


Another mildly interesting discovery is that among the many alterations made to Dark Side, the Pig Cop near the start of the level was removed;

Which makes its existence a further curiosity to me. Damn if there's any level from the protos (on the PC) I'd like to play with it'd be Dark Side, but anyway, the tile is definitely being loaded and there just isn't a sprite there now, the later one is still there though;



As a last note, another one I'm sure we knew but it made me laugh, this room is still in Movie Set;

I don't remember who ripped the maps now, but thanks for doing that, it made things easier.

[Perro Seco]

High Treason, on 10 December 2018 - 11:22 AM, said:

The fact that these sectors are drawn does make one wonder if the feature was really removed for performance or if, instead, it was dropped more because of how hard it would be to implement.

Very interesting. That might be the reason why the bathroom from E1L1 was changed from the original PC version. Reminds me of Tekwar, where mirrors are made with fake reflected rooms, where a sprite representing the player follows your movement.

[Fox]

I don't think there ever was a Pig Cop (alive) in the PC version of Dark Side. Officially Pig Cops are mutated Humans, so I presume the corpse represents a Human being experimented on.

I never noticed the "reflection" in Hollywood Holocaust. I don't have access to a N64 console, and emulators don't reproduce that effect. However I'm going to throw a guess that it's a problem with all masked walls, not just mirrors (in Hollywood Holocaust it's not even a two-sided masked wall). Can you check that?

About the sectors behind the mirrors, according to Nick Dry interview with Nintendo Player, they weren't worth the hassle. The effect from the PC version is something which is very hard to port to another rendering engine. Based on the hidden sectors in Hollywood Holocaust, the direction they were aiming for was to have the mirrored area pre-built, as most games would have done. However the true 3D rendering engine wouldn't allow for overlapping sectors, meaning they would be forced to redesign many areas. Indeed not worth the hassle, and it would be better to put the effort on something else.