[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.



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

[pogokeen]

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:

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.

[Fox]

*not even a one-sided masked wall

[High Treason]

So as suspected then, a bunch of hassle and a need to butcher the levels, although it seems they could have overlapping sectors to some extent at least, such as the vents;

This would never be 'visible' to the mirror though, so who knows.




Otherwise the bleeding appear to exist on at least some maskwalls;


This one is much harder to see. It is possible that it affects more than I can find but the differences are so subtle as to be indistinguishable from the noise, that or the sectors behind them only draw on certain ones.
Here's the source video in case you want to play with the contrast yourself, the best place to focus on is where the shading changes in the vent;
 20181211144106.zip (6.5MB)
Number of downloads: 457

Confirmation this is a maskwall;



I don't think Dark Side's pig was ever alive either, it's just odd that it's there because it's the only level in Episode 2 to have them in any capacity. I think TX once hinted that it was left over from whatever enemy it was prior to being the Pig Cop. My personal suspicion is that Dark Side was the space equivalent of LameDuke's E1L6 and was probably used to test everything out, but that's just pure speculation.

[Martin Howe]

HEADS UP: In case any of you haven' t bought World Tour, it's now only £2.99 GBP on the Steam store, they are having a sale with a massive discount. Don't know if this applies outside the UK or for how long, but why not check it out?

[Mark]

In the future please use this thread. https://forums.duke4...le-free-thread/

[Martin Howe]

Mark, on 27 December 2018 - 01:21 PM, said:

In the future please use this thread. https://forums.duke4...le-free-thread/

Thanks Mark - hadn't noticed that thread; have reposted it there.

[MetHy]

I'm going to share this here as well, since when I mentionned it it seemed to be new for other people as well.

A little bit of trivia regarding Blood's Cryptic Passage's third map: Gothic Library.

At the end of the 2nd map, Old Opera House, you can see as an unreachable area the entrance of Gothic Library copy-pasted.
If you noclip and wander in it, you can see that some of the supplies were left in and not deleted:





However, the real interesting part is this staircase on the left of the main entrance, which does not exist in Gothic Library:



Mr. Fox pointed out this quote from the Blood wiki:

Quote

"I worked on a commercial add on for Blood called Cryptic Passage. But don't ask me how you could get a hold of it. I don't even have a copy myself... I did the mine level, and the the library's exterior and first floor, as well as some technical stuff like making areas over areas and 'subways' work properly. I don't remember if I did anything else for it. The mine level is the better of the two levels as far as gameplay goes. The guy that finished the library level did so in one day, so a lot of the puzzles I'd planned for it, as well as the basement I think, got tossed by the wayside. But the library looks better. I modelled it after a local library which was built in the 1920's or something. Making the second floor visible from the first in the reception area was a real pain in the ass, because with that engine the 'sectors' in areas-over-areas had to be split up just right or you would get a hall-of-mirrors effect from the sector not being drawn. I think the issue was that you couldn't see a vertical slice of the first floor's walls at the same X as a vertical slice of the second floor's walls at the same time."
--Shawn Swift

Everything seems to indicate that this staircase led to this cut basement area and served as a b-entrance to the library.
The way it is constructed, as a door way with a sector going in, hints that there was a door there, probably either a double swing door opening inwards or a double slide door.



Furthermore, if in Gothic Library you noclip through the unreachable at the start corresponding to the end of Old Opera House, you can see a very similar thing: the inner rooms were deleted, so was the door, however the doorway was left.




Finally, while the staircase was cut in Gothic Library, the walls for it are still there:




It may also be worth noting that Gothic Library has 4 secret places while the max count indicates 3. Also, maybe it is just me, but I can never get 100% kills and am always missing 3 enemies. Both things may, or may not, also indicate the map was meant to be more than it is. I've always thought it was quite short compared to other maps in the add-on myself and lacked the "b-path" and "unlinearility" factors most of the other maps have.

[fgsfds]

Found something interesting a while ago. There are 2 textures that were used in multiple Build Engine games.
The earliest one would be Lot7P that was released in 1994.
The theory is that these were included in some textures collection devs were using back in the day, but we weren't able to find the source.


Legend of the 7 Paladins

Fate

Blood (inc. leaked Alpha)

Powerslave

[Lunick]

Gothic Library Uncut when

[Nuke.YKT]

 fgsfds, on 19 April 2019 - 02:02 AM, said:

Found something interesting a while ago. There are 2 textures that were used in multiple Build Engine games.
The earliest one would be Lot7P that was released in 1994.
The theory is that these were included in some textures collection devs were using back in the day, but we weren't able to find the source.

Strife also has both these textures in a modified form
https://imgur.com/a/fPqIDhp

[fgsfds]

Great find. So they are not exclusive to the Build Engine games after all.

[Fox]

Avaiable in image banks:

http://tt.qingmo.com/66629.html

Also the fuck is this game



And this PowerPoint presentation

[Phredreeke]

looks like a cross between Worms and Lemmings

[MrFlibble]

It reminded me of Lamers, a silly game that is supposedly a parody of Lemmings.

[Fantinaikos]

The game is polish, this is the official site where you can download the first two games and a demo of the third: http://sadist.art.pl/glowna.php . Seems abandoned anyway, since the last update dates back to 26.11.2012 and the message itself point out a six years of inactivity.

[MetHy]

 fgsfds, on 19 April 2019 - 02:02 AM, said:

[/size]Powerslave

Small correction but it looks like you used the wrong palette:



Edit: OOPS! No you didn't; it's just that there are 2 versions of this texture, the one I showed is #179 and yours is #180.

Edit edit: and there are 3 4 5 more variants:

#221:


#245


#248:


and #323->325 used underwater:




I don't think some of these variants are even used at all in the game.

Edit again:
#584:

 Lunick, on 19 April 2019 - 02:03 AM, said:

Gothic Library Uncut when

I wish! Who knows if the cut part of the map still even exists somewhere today.

[ck3D]

Recycled texture talk reminded me of this I just found out about a few days ago, I had heard of the texture 'recycling' phenomenon in Duke Nukum before but didn't expect it to be that fierce: https://web.archive....m.de/news/duke/