[dnskill]

Top is from the Official Duke Nukem 3D Strategy Guide, the in-game screen is from the E3M9 level walkthrough while the images of the map are from the CD that is only included with the 3-episode version of the book. Bottom is of course from the final game.


The top version of the map resembles this from V1.2:



Here's where things get interesting, the strategy guide says the following:

Quote

By now you have probably figured out that you need to climb on the bleachers as soon as possible. And if you take to the air, the better off you will be. If you hop on the bleachers, you want to draw the Cycloid Emperor as close to the bleachers as you can. When he bumps against them, the Emperor's hell-bent nature will keep him trying, in vain, to climb. This renders him practically immobile. If you manage to climb as high as you can in the bleachers, you will also have succeeded in severely limiting the Emperor's fire range. His projectiles might land close, but without much of an angle, you can breathe somewhat tenuously as you plan your next move.

Thing is.. you cannot get the Cycloid Emperor to come near the bleachers in the final game, at all. He gets stuck on the edges of the field near the field goals. You can't get him to appear where he shows up in that photo seen in the guide. Other than that paragraph, the rest of the walkthrough sounds quite normal to what was in the final version of Stadium.

The author also wrote in the book he had been in contact with 3DR's in relation to DN3D since 1995. I don't find it strange that the guide could have some pre-release material, as it was likely being worked on between shareware and retail release, but I do find it to be interesting they made this change to this map so late.

[ck3D]

^ You may already know this, but in the final game the Cycloid Emperor is coded in such a way that it won't venture out of any sector that doesn't have a Lo-Tag of 3, basically making it a stayput actor by default instead of having a designated tile for that sort of behavior and that's unlike every other enemy in the game, meaning I'm sure it was originally supposed to cover more terrain than it does in the game. I'm guessing that was a rather late choice from the devs, the evolution of the terrain changes also seem to reflect that, for instance I'm sure he should have been able to maneuver around that earthquake (or perhaps actually not and that's where the Lo-Tag 3 idea originally comes from, so that he could avoid those sectors in addition to the bleachers?). That earthquake looks so sick by the way and would have made the fight so much better with some evolution in real time, I have no idea why they took it out (frame rate?), sometimes it feels like they originally had great theatrical plans for Stadium and in the end ditched them all and dumbed it down to a fight that can be over in ten seconds as long as you've saved up your Devastator ammo throughout all of episode 3. If I'm not mistaken, I think TerminX once said Stadium was the oldest original map in the base game (I may be misremembering though), so it's no surprise that it underwent the most revisions in the end but it's pretty funny the way those revisions went, they didn't get rid of just the surrounding buildings but also of all the detail from the bleachers to just turn them into some empty flat zone, at least Duke 64 brought the slopes back (they actually had a shit ton to gameplay there). Also had seen some of those screenshots before but never noticed the original blimp with the Nuke icon, that's pretty cool, I can see why they changed it though (and ironically enough, now the Simpsons can't even use Duff beer imagery in their own show anymore, at least here).

[dnskill]

Darkus mentioned this before, but I wanted to elaborate on it a little bit more.
In the beta footage of DN3D that was of French origin, it shows the early version of Hollywood Holocaust with the green carpets. You can see this:

Obviously, this is an early version of the "Attack of the Bleach Blonde Biker Bimbos" poster, under a different title, "Debbie Does Duke".

It is also pretty obvious they were nodding to this porno film:

It also seems the artist was trying to somewhat emulate the poster as well, and this can still be seen in the final version of the poster despite the change in name.

[ck3D]

Amazing looking out!

Haha, the actress' names. Attack of the Bleached Blonde Biker Bambi. And you reckon Misty Winter was the beta for Nuclear?

"Paula Head" - goodness gracious. Vivid colors, oh I'm sure. Speaking of which, now I'm catching myself wondering if the red and black font on yellow background style of the E1L1 theater porch wouldn't have anything to do with this poster too, originally, although I'm surely looking too deeply into this.

[Aleks]

Wow, I'm glad this apparent sequel wasn't released yet in 1995/1996: Debbie Does Damnation, who knows what ideas the guys at 3DR would get otherwise... There's also Debbie Does Demon, Debbie Does Dallas... Again and finally, Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical. Also I've just noticed in the cast of Debbie Does Damnation is a character named Duke Flyswatter!

[TerminX]

vpiss2.voc was a temp one-liner recorded by whoever it was who voiced Duke before JSJ.

[dnskill]

 ck3D, on 27 May 2021 - 01:19 AM, said:

I finally decided to look more into this, and changed the lotags of the field to 3, so the Cycloid was able to get past the goal posts and near the bleachers, and I also was able to raise the bleachers and change the texture to match the strategy guide version. If that’s how Stadium was at one point, between the earthquake effects version and the final version, I think I can safely say this was changed because the Cycloid is more likely to kill himself before he ever kills Duke, because most of his rockets will just hit the bottom of the bleacher stand, hurting him in the process.



From my tinkering with E3L9:

Raising the bleachers but not changing the Lo-tags for the field makes little difference in how the map plays out, and this is exactly how the version in Total Meltdown plays for the most part.

Raising the bleachers and adjusting the Lo-tag so the Cycloid can reach beyond the field makes things too easy once the player reaches the bleachers, and changing the Lo-tag but keeping the bleachers flat seemed to mostly lead to this same outcome.

[ck3D]

Yeah, Cycloids have the bad tendency to hurt themselves with their own rockets, mini-Cycloids (and mini-Overlords, too) are especially notorious for being prone to that, I guess due to their rockets spawning in a place that doesn't exactly align with their reduced hitbox (that's especially visible in their default behavior without a .con hack where they only have one health point and will usually just commit seppuku in front of Duke), but the normal ones have that problem too to an extent. I've used them multiple times as fixated RPG turrets in some maps of mine before (including scenarii where they aren't meant to be directly reachable/hurt), and noticed every once in a while they will still hit themselves, usually if the player gets too close but lower than whatever floor or platform they stand on, then they will just keep shooting their own legs like maniacs.

Either way I think that's an interesting example of an anti-pattern here - in order to compensate for relatively poorly coded boss behavior, the level designers had to dumb the map down to adapt the design around the mechanics, when in reality that should have never needed to happen in the first place had the code been a bit more refined originally. But I guess in a commercial product it sort of makes sense to reward the player with an easy, simple fight after they've ventured through the whole game painfully stocking up on ammo and items. The blimp sort of ruins that principle though, although I can see why its existence would be regarded as convenient upon the average player dying and needing to pistol start.

I just never really got the whole idea of the poorly coded bosses, to be honest. Out of all of them only the Battlelord is really properly coded complete with its mini counterpart, but it's also one of the most annoying of them bastards with that cheap high-rate hitscan weapon and only getting to meet those in 'vanilla' user maps with no .con hack gets stale real quick. The Overlord is great, but without even more advanced hacks it loses its most underrated forte - its melee attack combined with its speed. Cycloid is a toy and the Queen outside of water feels broken and besides spawning Newbeasts that pose no threat underwater it's essentially another barely moving target that can only really kill you by using time against you. The way I see it, bosses in a game should be one of the priorities, where in Duke 3D it really feels like they were designed for proper use in their original context in the base game levels where they all worked quite-to-very well, except as soon as you take them some place else the duct-tape that really holds them together becomes so apparent.

Also personally, I remember I thought the sloped bleachers in Duke 64 played different/amazing and added a lot of (or, well at least, some) depth to the fight. Completely changed your approach to diagonal strafing from up there when dodging the rockets and also enabled you to get height advantage even without a jetpack. But perhaps the alternate weaponry in that version (which I loved, by the way) especially played a role there, with the game's ultimate gun having a different pacing (long charge BFG-9000 type of weapon vs. constant DPS explosive type of weapon). The Cycloid model in Duke 64 was also a lot taller than its Duke 3D sprite counterpart IIRC.

[Fox]

 ck3D, on 10 June 2021 - 05:54 AM, said:

The Cycloid model in Duke 64 was also a lot taller than its Duke 3D sprite counterpart IIRC.

Behind the model the enemy is also 50% larger (repeat/clipdist).

[High Treason]

Somewhere in the time of Map Version 5, Ken Silverman altered the wall[].extra to default to 0 instead of -1. Whilst this was later changed back for Duke Nukem 3D, likely on the part of 3D Realms, many walls remained in the game with this 'invalid' 0 value. This is to blame for the Tile 0 bug in Dark Side - you should read that first, as well as the proceeding posts, as Oasiz and Doom64Hunter made further discoveries as to what is going on with that.

Meanwhile, here is a bunch of boring prattling about walls in the game with an extra value of 0, far too long to post in the thread, as well as a link to download the script used to find them, or just read a pre-generated report of them. I have yet to run the script on LameDuke's levels, though it is known that they also feature this oddity, on account of that build of the game being from Version 5's time. In any case, this allows us to see where older and newer parts of affected levels might be and, in some cases, we have older shots or other findings to back this up. Only recommended if you're really, really bored or trying to cure insomnia.

[brullov]

I am not sure if it was posted before. Duke Nukem: Endangered Species promo art in high quality:

[Sanek]

Big list of personal Duke-related websites:

https://web.archive....othersites.html



All created very early into the game, but perhaps some interesting user-made content can be found there.

[FRVIND]

Sanek, on 24 October 2021 - 06:13 AM, said:

Big list of personal Duke-related websites:

https://web.archive....othersites.html



All created very early into the game, but perhaps some interesting user-made content can be found there.

All (or most) of the sub-links are dead. We are the only ones left... let's hold on tight

[Aleks]

Was intending to post this for a while. Few weeks ago, Lee Jackson wrote on his Facebook group that he's found an old e-mail from him to George Broussard which lists all the stuff he's done for Duke 3D. I've attached the e-mail here in a txt file, as provided by Lee. Now after further inquiry from me, here's some even more interesting information regarding the voices behind the trapped women and - more importantly - assault commander (the quote comes from Lee himself):

Quote

The Fat Commander is my natural voice - I can make it sound really guttural if I try. I think the Alien Talk is my guttural voice, but processed. Also, Colleen was a co-worker at Apogee/3D Realms who was in charge of shipping.

Not sure if this has been known before, but I for one find it pretty cool to know whose voice has been taunting me for the past 20+ years and telling me to "suck it down"

Attached File(s)

•  LEEMUSIC.TXT (1.51K)
  Number of downloads: 424

[MrFlibble]

Aleks, on 30 November 2021 - 12:31 AM, said:

Not sure if this has been known before, but I for one find it pretty cool to know whose voice has been taunting me for the past 20+ years and telling me to "suck it down"

Nice discovery! I certainly did not know that. Now imagine Lee saying the same line in his normal voice

Could be a part of a special sound mode, you know, like the original release of Command & Conquer included an alternate set of sound effects produced by someone at Westwood purely by imitating the sounds with their mouth.

[oasiz]

The Duke3D source has some extra leftovers under /extras, there is actually a leftover game.h (duke3d.h in final) which I speculate to be from between august-november.
https://github.com/v.../extras/RGAME.H Here is a direct link to one copy.

Header files themselves are quite useless but there are a few interesting things to note here that I haven't seen people really pick apart.

Firstly weapons:

#define KNEE_WEAPON        0
#define PISTOL_WEAPON      1
#define ELECTRO_WEAPON     2
#define RPG_WEAPON         3
#define CATAKILLER_WEAPON  4
#define SHRINKER_WEAPON    5
#define HANDBOMB_WEAPON    6
#define TRIPBOMB_WEAPON    7
#define HANDREMOTE_WEAPON  8

This is from a time when shotgun/ripper didn't exist and we had the electro weapon (one seen in LD and may demoreel)
While it's not officially mentioned in many places, Duke3D actually had some altfire capabilities for various weapons (as mentioned by TX).
You can actually see traces of this:

short ammo_count[MAX_WEAPONS][2];

In the final game you don't have a 2nd entry for each weapon's ammo counter.

When we start searching a bit more, you will realise that a lot of old screenshots have something such as 99-99 as the weapon count instead of 99/99.
But if you look even closer, you will find that some times these weapon counts can be something like 97-98 - this makes no sense for a max ammo counter to change between screenshots. Ammo was simply implied to max out at 99.
I think what you really see here is just primary/alternative ammo being displayed. Some times you also see this weird dot next to the ammo counter.

Also there is "gotweapon" but also "togweapon" -- toggle? Perhaps you had to pick them up too.
One thing to consider is that some shots have BLUE and RED variants for weapons, for example the flamer is seen with a blue and red light and the plasma/electro shoots with red in one of the screenshots.. Perhaps this was used as a motif for primary/alt?
This concept kinda supports the expander, where the crystal remains red. It could also be a default pal mockup from Build but it would indicate that base art had to initially be blue for this palswap stuff to work.
Oh and that weird dot around ammo counter in multiple shots is blue.

Few other interesting tidbits:
Player struct has alcohol_amount
Near the kill/secret counts you also have "squished"

There is a "harley_mode" in player struct -- TX mentioned some time ago that they experimented with a sideways bike ride thing (art ended up in E3L1's bar screen)
Also inspace() is mentioned as expected.


As Duke3D development was full of trial&error, the guys are known to do a lot of screenshot mockups so perhaps some of the speculation here is not fully accurate either (although it would indicate general direction).
Anyway, some trivia for today.

[dwtietz]

Lameduke map version numbers, in case this hasn't been logged anywhere yet:

L1.MAP 5
L2.MAP 5
L3.MAP 5
L4.MAP 5
L5.MAP 5
L6.MAP 5
L7.MAP 5
L8.MAP 5
L9.MAP 4

M1.MAP 5
M2.MAP 5
M3.MAP 5
M4.MAP 5
M5.MAP 5
M6.MAP 5
M7.MAP 5
M8.MAP 4

N1.MAP 5
N2.MAP 5
N3.MAP 5
N4.MAP 5
N5.MAP 5
N6.MAP 5
N7.MAP 5
N8.MAP 5

O1.MAP 5
O2.MAP 5
O3.MAP 5
O4.MAP 5

War1.MAP 5
War2.MAP 5

[ck3D]

I'm sure that's a bug (or feature?) introduced by Billy Boy's .con edits for this map but check out the mortar boomerang at 47:08, that's my first time ever seeing that:



edit - so apparently mortar behavior isn't handled by .con but that's just how the engine will dictate their knock-back (similarly to Pipebombs), in this case from another explosion nearby, according to Striker. Illusion still looks cool though.

[Jimmy]

I've seen a lot of bizarre behaviour from the mortar over the years, good eye there though.

[ck3D]

Don't know if that's known or even remotely useful to know, but recently I found out that adding lo-tag 3 to sectors you want a Cycloid to be able to reach actually de-activated (all?) effectors in them (at least that de-activated whole bunches of my SE31's, then as soon as I removed the lotags everything started working again - didn't test other effectors). That's only making me curious about what exactly they were trying to do with the Cycloid, old screenshots and stories of Stadium and its development stages have been shared or theorized on here before with earthquakes going on altering the terrain, etc. I always felt like there were many scrapped ideas or at least attempts at making that fight way more memorable than what we got that were lost on their way and so perhaps that's one more hint that the devs were struggling to direct specific behaviors or well I don't know.

edit - lol, the Stadium talk was actually on this very page. I need sleep.

[Marphy Black]

Not sure where to best post this, but this thread's fairly apt. Joe posted some unseen Duke Nukem Forever concept art on Twitter last year which I think got by most people: https://twitter.com/...852464769159175

It's concept art of Bombshell (and an unnamed bulldog!) for Duke Nukem Forever, I guess because he has sheets of original 3D Realms artwork just lying around for some reason. Anywho, of note is that this concept is by Chuck Jones and is dated 1996, making it one of the oldest pieces of media we have for DNF.

Not satisfied with Joe's angled handheld photography of a curled page, however, I've attempted to do my own perspective correction and cleanup of this artwork for easier and more pleasant viewing:


And just in case Imgur greatly compresses this PNG, I've also uploaded my cleaned up version to Google Drive for guaranteed preservation quality: https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing

[MrFlibble]

Heh, I think I like Joe's daughter's take on it better, as her version does away with the clumsy attempts to sexualise the character and gives her a more pronounced action-y posture. A sprite sheet based on this reimagined version would look at home alongside Duke's sprites IMO.

With all due respect to Chuck Jones, the original image looks almost like a caricature you'd find in the MAD Magazine. Maybe that was intentional though.

[ck3D]

MrFlibble, on 07 January 2022 - 12:25 PM, said:

With all due respect to Chuck Jones, the original image looks almost like a caricature you'd find in the MAD Magazine. Maybe that was intentional though.

I think it looks like the style you would see in the Duke 3D graffiti sprites for some reason.

[dnskill]

Lunick noted on Discord that The City Streets was slightly different on V0.99 and V1.0, as heard here. It was mentioned in the past on this thread that dethtoll's file size was different when comparing V0.99 to later versions, and the reason is that Duke Nukem 3D V0.99 uses an older version of dethtoll.mid compared to what appears in v1.0 shareware and beyond. It is 59 seconds shorter and while mostly the same song, it doesn't have some of the drum sounds. I never noticed this difference until recently.

[dnskill]

Lunick uploaded the old version of Death Toll mentioned in my previous post here.

[dnskill]

(Thanks to TerminX and Hendricks226)
In the demo reel shared on YT of the 1995-05-09 beta you can see this security monitor screen, and here's what it likely looked like in art form:


TerminX shared this one here below which appears to be an updated version of what is seen in that beta:



Today, I was looking at my user guide manual and noticed something I hadn't noticed before (see it here).

This image in the manual appears to be this same exact tile, only it doesn't say POLARIS.

With the help of Hendricks226 and TerminX, TX shared the version that can be seen in the manual:

Not sure what MAGAWARD means. High Treason mentioned on Duke4 Discord that perhaps it is a reference to this and this.

[Sanek]

Interesting. Makes your wondering if they intented to have separate viewscreens for each company that exists withing the game (Polaris/EDF/Tiberius etc).
Is this white on the borders come from file itself, or it's just the way it was cropped from source?

This monitor art can be easily redrawn from scratch though. Still, props to Voidpoint for sharing this! Wonder if we can see something more elaborate in the future.

[Ghostwar]

I feel like a rookie with this question, considering the colossal amount of time I have spent over the years map building with the original build editor, and more recently with Mapster32, but if there is a way to actually copy TROR sectors from one map to another, I sure would appreciate someone enlightening me.

[Doom64hunter]

Ghostwar, on 12 May 2022 - 11:19 AM, said:

I feel like a rookie with this question, considering the colossal amount of time I have spent over the years map building with the original build editor, and more recently with Mapster32, but if there is a way to actually copy TROR sectors from one map to another, I sure would appreciate someone enlightening me.

One way I found to do this is with additive sector select, using the [ RALT ] and [ ' ] key, moving the editor camera into each TROR layer in the process and selecting the mass of sectors each time.

Then load another map and the selected sectors should transfer over.

[ck3D]

Unless it was a one-off bug which sometimes tends to happen to me with quick newboard.maps I start on the fly as test maps, I just ran into a Mapster bug I've never seen before I thought I would point out because it may be interesting, I'm sure it's normal engine behavior too and eDuke32 devs are aware since an error message about invalid... coordinates? (the specificity of the message I already forgot) does display (note that I'm not using the latest version of Mapster either; that build is about a year old). But basically, I started a new map and just made a large triangular sector real quick that was all blue walls, because I was already so zoomed out - which I didn't think would matter for an ephemeral test map but I guess turned out to, since I assume it caused an overflow. That resulted in a fully invalid sector which couldn't be explored in 3D mode and would basically render nothing but base pitch black and infinite HOM. I didn't experiment at all so I have no idea if it's reproducible or a one-off (but it would make sense if it were consistent), I have no idea if the entirety of the map has to be 'invalid' to generate such results (in my case it was, now I wonder if isolated sectors in a level with valid space would also behave the same), I didn't even try to see if it killed the player. But I thought it was a bit particular and odd, and while I don't know shit about how magnets are wired there myself I seem to understand that HOM can be tied to funky rendering tricks and so perhaps this could be relevant info to someone.