[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: 384

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/

[Phredreeke]

Non-power of two textures are tricky. Only recently was eduke32 made able to display them correctly in Polymost without disabling hightiles

Turns out Gearbox wasn't able to get it working (screenshot taken by manually loading E1L1.MAP from Duke 3D Atomic Edition in the 20th Anniversary Edition)

[Radar]

Is the 20th Anniversary renderer based on polymer/polymost? Or is it a completely original renderer?

[Fox]

They seem to have reverse engineered a lot of the Polymer code.

[Phredreeke]

Is it really reverse engineering if the source code is publicly available?

[Fox]

I guess it's plagiarized then.

[Hendricks266]

It's not plagiarized. Nerve reimplemented Polymer's features themselves.

[Mark]

Did they get a better result concerning framerates? ( or in general? )

[Phredreeke]

WT has VSync on by default and no in-game option to turn it off, so you have to force it off in your GPU's control panel.

WT has a fairly high FPS advantage over Polymer, even on my GTX 980, I'd think the difference would be even larger with an AMD card. Outside the cinema in E1L1 I get around 550 fps in WT and 70 fps in Polymer (this is loading the WT versions of the maps with the stop gap, setting dynamic lights to map only and turning dynamic shadows off which I think would be the closest match to WT in terms of feature set)

eduke32's classic renderer does have the edge over WT's though. I've been told that WT limits it to 720p and upscales to whatever resolution you choose, so I ran both at 1280x720, and got around 300fps in WT and 500 fps in eduke32 (same spot outside the cinema as previous test)

[MrFlibble]

I was just browsing 3D Realms' Duke News page via the Wayback Machine and found this. This is the back of the Duke action figure packaging, with high-res shots of the Battlelord, Pig Cop and Octabrain models. The Pig Cop appears to be carrying that double-barrel gun seen in some pre-release shots such as

[MetHy]

MrFlibble, on 20 May 2019 - 01:55 PM, said:

I was just browsing 3D Realms' Duke News page via the Wayback Machine and found this.

The 2nd screenshot, the one with the Pigcops and Recon car, is also unknown to me. Not that it's a very interesting screenshot.

[gibfrag]

All those models are also found in the XBox 360 Duke 3D theme you could purchase with the DN3D XBLA version of the game.

I have seen that screenshot used elsewhere, with the pigs and the RPV... I can't remember where but I do feel that there exists a png/bmp version online.

[MrFlibble]

MetHy, on 23 May 2019 - 12:44 AM, said:

The 2nd screenshot, the one with the Pigcops and Recon car, is also unknown to me. Not that it's a very interesting screenshot.

Actually it's from the back of the game's box, that's why I did not mention the screenshots.

I don't remember any of the screenshots on the original release box being available anywhere in digital form except for the one in the top left corner which was posted here in JPEG a while ago.