[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: 460

[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.

[ck3D]

Want to see another weird one I've been getting? Pretty sure I've mentioned it before on here; the infinite letter sprite column. I've since narrowed the causes down to... weird stuff going on upon opening some old maps, which were made in older versions of Mapster, in more recent Mapsters (well this build here is about a year old), and either running corruptcheck tryfix or sometimes just letting Mapster run its base, default corruption checks. Apparently, it's finding stray or corrupted sprites around the map, moving several if not all of them to the same exact coordinate (if there's ROR, that's sometimes outside of playable space when floors don't align), sometimes giving them absurd tags, and while the sprites don't show in editor most of the time (if ever?), in game generates a giant ass column of them that disappears ad infinitum into the parallaxed sky. (edit - just double checked and no, it actually stops at top sky height)

 duke0261.png (274.48K)
Number of downloads: 325

From the mapper's perspective, it's very easy to address the issue since locating then deleting the sprite(s, because sometimes it seems to be just one) successfully forever deletes the column. So this is not an issue I'm having. I'm just really curious as to what exactly could cause a sprite to do this and is it even possible to manipulate? Looks like a maskwall but isn't, acts solid like a white wall but isn't, seems to be one-way whenever the sprite is, tile of the sprite glitches out in funky ways (similar to floor-aligned sprites from a distance) with how close or far the player gets. I don't know much about cstats, maybe it's related? I assumed random corruption the first time it happened to me, but since then I've gotten this maybe half a dozen times on different maps (but all with the same background of having been made on the same outdated Mapster originally, then ported over to newer).

[dnskill]

At least part of what I'm about to post was mentioned here

Shaq Fu, on 09 October 2016 - 08:55 PM, said:

More images of this place can be seen here: http://imgur.com/a/DdQqH

and I'm pretty sure this was discussed in the past elsewhere on this forum, but I felt it may be worth adding a bit more info to this because it seems not many people are actually aware of these small differences in v0.99:

First off, as Shaq Fu posted about in 2016, E1L2 in v0.99 includes a section of the level that appears to be a concept for a more involved starting area for this level. It seems at some point the plan was to have Duke go down the elevator, but it would lead him to a parking garage. From, there, he would find armor in a storage closet and a switch near the garage doors to raise the garage doors with. He'd also have to deal with a pig cop and assault trooper in here.

Spoiler

From there, it seems the plan was to have this connect with the rest of the level, so you'd exit the garage with the erotica store to your left (to the right of this image below), and the rest of the level likely would've played out exactly the same.

Spoiler

Curiously, there is another small room that appears it would've been the inside of a building that would likely have gone off from an earth quake or some other sort of trigger and leave a hole in the wall for Duke to enter here. My best guess is it is meant to be part of the building that leads to the yellow access card door, sort of like in Nuclear Winter. It seems it is possible this could've been used to show a bunch of gibs flying out from an explosion, as I doubt the troopers inside would survive.

Spoiler

Furthermore, there is a secret Easter Egg found in v0.99 that was removed before v1.0 and you can see how to trigger it here. The way this worked was by using the security cam feature but disguising it as a magazine.

Spoiler

There's another unused room that appears like it too was some sort of page in a magazine, but there's nothing to trigger it. It could be just another Allen Blum hidden message sort of thing, or maybe it was initially a part of this same thing here.

Spoiler

Another cut "Easter Egg" is in the bathroom payphone booth, which played the sound PIGWRN.VOC instead of the dial-tone. You can see this here. This sound was also used for the ending to E1L2 in this beta before being replaced with !PIG.VOC in v1.0. This makes me wonder if PIGWRN was only used as a placeholder for the ending message, and was intended to be heard only through the phone, but ultimately went unused. I'm pretty sure it's saying "Prepare to die, human!" as pigs squeal in the background.

Oh, and in the Abyss in v0.99 there is a hidden message I just noticed:

Spoiler

It can be found in a tunnel area that is absent from the final version of the game near where the fire pit is, right before you jump down in there if you go the the left there's a small hole you can get into that leads into this tunnel. Without the goggles, it is pitch black, but you can peak into where the room with the octabrains and bloody hand switches are for the shrinker puzzle you need to do in order for the lava area to explode for you to get to the rest of the level.

[oasiz]

Probably known to some but I discovered this today and doesn't seem that well documented..
Typically SE17 transport elevators are documented as requiring HITAG 0 & HITAG 1 pairs for lower/higher floors.
While writing documentation for m32 scripts I found it strange that it's explicitly 0/1 and not simply "greater than zero / not zero" as this is not seen much in the code.

It turns out that if I modify _SE.MAP to have tags 665 and 666 it still works fine, hinting that It's just +1 that it cares about for a higher floor.
However If I copypaste the higher floor and shift it even higher and give it a 667, surprise surprise, it still works!

This means that the multi-floor capability for transport elevators is still in the game but with one limitation: You can't determine the direction when inside the elevator.
You can however call the elevator just fine on the top floor and have it reach you. As you use it, it will go lower and lower until you're at the bottom.

Digging through the code it seems that the function in question and it does have "WarpDir" quite well supported.
Slightly below you have the ST code itself that has two separate blocks "Player inside sector" and "Player outside sector".
When inside, it simply calls 1 or -1 depending on the current floor, however if you are outside it will keep climbing as long as the Z differs.
What's more, the RGAME.H I posted above has a player struct member "select_dir" which is possibly what was used to store this value, it's possible that the earlier code was as simple as looking at this value and picking 1 or -1 to pass for warpDir.
The "Outside of elevator" code could've been simpler already if it was just two floors so I think it was just quickly modified to remove the need for this variable.

Long story shorter:
- Warp elevator hitag doesn't have to be 0/1, just a sequence.
- Multiple floors are still supported just like lameduke
- Only the "pick a floor" functionality is broken when inside the elevator but otherwise it's all still there.

Maybe with some workarounds this could be made to work better?

[oasiz]

This only changed one if statement to check for "SK_CROUCH" and removed one line of code after that.
The routine already does the checking of "Is anything really above/below" for you.

[Jblade]

that's really awesome, nice find!

[Shadow_Wulfe]

What is the syntax of the eduke32 "Give" command?

I can only seem to get it to spit out a line telling me it COULD give "requested item".

[Jblade]

Shadow_Wulfe, on 09 October 2022 - 06:37 PM, said:

What is the syntax of the eduke32 "Give" command?

I can only seem to get it to spit out a line telling me it COULD give "requested item".

it takes either a tilenumber or the full name of the actor.

[NNC]

I was toying with Mapster today, and noticed that one of the Babe Land carts (the blue one) gets glitchy as soon as you open the map (it's not like those old Mapster/Build SOS related glitches which became problematic when you make the first change in the level). It's sprite #303 which is the cause of the glitch, it's a rotated sector put on the edge of two sectors. It's functional in the original game, but isn't with a maphack. Weird stuff.

[oasiz]

Yeah, I think this was last brought up a few years back. IIRC It's just a mapping mistake and it's just the editor auto-correcting the sector number of the sprite.
Rarely an issue but it can cause interesting things with rotation sprites for example.

Try opening the map with script_expertmode 1 enabled and see if the disabled correction lets it remain "wrong"

[NNC]

oasiz, on 26 November 2022 - 01:00 PM, said:

Yeah, I think this was last brought up a few years back. IIRC It's just a mapping mistake and it's just the editor auto-correcting the sector number of the sprite.
Rarely an issue but it can cause interesting things with rotation sprites for example.

Try opening the map with script_expertmode 1 enabled and see if the disabled correction lets it remain "wrong"

Weird stuff. I checked some maps, and this autocorrection thing happens a few times. For example one pigcop respawn is modified from one sector to another in Hotel Hell too. How the engine do these things? How can it detect what's wrong and what isn't?

Also, what's this expertmode doing? What's the difference between it and normalmode?

[Aleks]

The Watchtower, on 27 November 2022 - 03:55 AM, said:

Weird stuff. I checked some maps, and this autocorrection thing happens a few times. For example one pigcop respawn is modified from one sector to another in Hotel Hell too. How the engine do these things? How can it detect what's wrong and what isn't?

Also, what's this expertmode doing? What's the difference between it and normalmode?

Original Build didn't check if the sprites have "correct" sectnums, but then I don't think it was possible to purposely edit this and could only happen through a glitch I suppose. Mapster automatically fixes sectnums in "non-expert mode" (so that the sprite have the sectnum corresponding to their geometrical coordinates/physical location) and doesn't in expert mode, which can be used for various tricks. Also, expert mode allows for joining non-adjacent sectors, which was also possible casually in original Build.

[NNC]

During my Blast Radius playtesting, ck and me were talking about palette respawns once again, and how it doesn't work bosses aside in the vanilla game, despite the several uses of pal21 respawn troops especially in the first 3 episodes.

Now I'm thinking again, basically all those red liztroop spawns in the game are "straight in your face" ones, where you can clearly see the same flashy animation that is also used by the red troop's teleport. For example in Hollywood, that weird respawn in the cinema chairs look like some kind of introduction for the red troop, similarly to the one at the backdoor. Then there is a second one from both routes in the main lobby before you can get the shotgun. I mean, the troop spawns in flashy style, and can use the same flash later on.

Similarly, the straight into your face respawn troops in Red Light District (in the bar shooting the girls), Death Row (in the church), Launch Facility (at the start), The Abyss (near at the end with the deep abyss), and several others in Incubator, Warp Factor do the same. The most common respawns are not straight into your face, and none one them are using palettes. I didn't check beyond mid-episode 2, I guess this whole concept had been lifted later on, but this is a trend that is not a coincidence.

[Reaper_Man]

FWIW looking in the source code, the lack of palette transfer from RESPAWN to the enemy it spawns is intentional. In the case of the Liztroop, the palette is always forced to 22 if it isn't already set. However for all enemies, it doesn't check for the palette of the spawning RESPAWN and apply it first, so the Liztroop sees a default 0 palette. This is not the case for bosses, which does check if it was spawned by a RESPAWN and if so, transfers its palette to the boss. Because this behavior was never changed between 1.3 and 1.5, we have to assume they wanted to enforce this behavior, and because EDuke tries to maintain compatibility, that's why this behavior persists. Thankfully you can work around this using Events

As for the Liztroop Captains, I would guess the opposite - RESPAWNs were already using the TRANSPORTERSTAR effect, and they added in the Captains after having the "in your face" spawns as a way to change up gameplay dynamically.