[Ghostwar]

Hard to believe that I don't know the answer to this question after twenty five years of map building, but can anyone confirm if Mapster32 has the ability to remove the OSD overlay in order to take screenshots within the editor?

[Danukem]

Ghostwar, on 06 November 2024 - 09:58 AM, said:

Hard to believe that I don't know the answer to this question after twenty five years of map building, but can anyone confirm if Mapster32 has the ability to remove the OSD overlay in order to take screenshots within the editor?

I don't know, but there's a lot of really obscure keyboard combos that do things listed on this page:

https://wiki.eduke32...yboard_Commands

apparently F2 toggles the clipboard preview which is a big part of what you want - if you search the page for "toggle" there are other things you can turn off too

[Ghostwar]

Danukem, on 06 November 2024 - 12:55 PM, said:

I don't know, but there's a lot of really obscure keyboard combos that do things listed on this page:

https://wiki.eduke32...yboard_Commands

apparently F2 toggles the clipboard preview which is a big part of what you want - if you search the page for "toggle" there are other things you can turn off too

Well what do you know.. it was a combination of three separate key combinations at that link that did the trick.
Appreciate the link and the help.

Keep an eye out for some ridiculous screenshots at "what are you working on"
Probably this weekend.

[MrFlibble]

There's some official Blood promo stuff (including gameplay clips) on this GamePro press CD, but I'm not sure how interesting it might be:
https://archive.game...60-6186aca40e44

[High Treason]

I think everyone knows already, but for anyone who doesn't;
After a very long hiatus, a new episode of DMT has been completed and covers how Billy Boy Windows work, as well as how to construct them in a level. Due to things shown in the video, it also goes over how mirrors work and touches on the surface of a couple of other things that may get their own video in the future... might well have to do door or viewscreen abuse next time, but don't know when it will be.




I'm sure there was a "Duke Videos" thread, but I can't find it so assume it died at some point. Guess this fits here anyway.

[FRVIND]

Well done
Thanks

[ck3D]

There has been several uploads of rips of French TV shows about Duke/Build these past few days I figured I would relay,

This one shows a few seconds of beta Hollywood Holocaust gameplay and thus may be the one some might find the most interesting (I find it funny how tripmines were presented as a revolutionary weapon when it later tuned out they flopped pretty hard in terms of practical popularity):



This one isn't so interesting per se but just that it exists, a 'retro' show/segment dedicated to Build in 2007 already and so nearly 20 years ago:

[High Treason]

There actually is an interesting thing in the second one, in that they chose to dub the original Blood theme over the footage instead of the crappy boring one in the retail version.
I still suspect the original theme and the older music were written by a different composer, possibly Michael Lewis, rather than being by Daniel Bernstein as in the final. This is only speculative, but the older music was at least made with a different sequencer (Votetra Plus) and is put together quite differently to the final's music.

[oasiz]

High Treason, on 22 May 2025 - 12:27 PM, said:

I think everyone knows already, but for anyone who doesn't;
After a very long hiatus, a new episode of DMT has been completed and covers how Billy Boy Windows work, as well as how to construct them in a level. Due to things shown in the video, it also goes over how mirrors work and touches on the surface of a couple of other things that may get their own video in the future... might well have to do door or viewscreen abuse next time, but don't know when it will be.




I'm sure there was a "Duke Videos" thread, but I can't find it so assume it died at some point. Guess this fits here anyway.

Seen a few of your videos, this, mirror and the skybox testing.
I was meaning to say earlier but these are really good explanations on the rendering quirks that can be exploited and in general how drawing works.

[Smikes]

In 2009, someone posted images to GiantBomb.com of rejected Duke 3D box art. This is old news - and I think everyone here has probably seen this - but the images have been removed from the original source. There's even a Reddit thread asking if anyone can find saved copies of the images anywhere. I had them backed-up, so I figured I'd share them here. Feel free to cross-post this to that Reddit thread.

Attached File(s)

•  Montage Bridgewater Barron Designs - Rejected Box Art.zip (1.16MB)
  Number of downloads: 106

[dnskill]

Laura Beyer, on 19 September 2025 - 05:16 AM, said:

What Happened To The Rejected Box Art For Duke Nukem 3D?

...It was rejected.

[MYHOUSE.MAP]

I was browsing an archive of 3DR's site and noticed a peculiar picture at https://web.archive....era/110896.html

 110896.jpg (37.14K)
Number of downloads: 86

It's an image meant for an image captioning contest that ran from November 8 to 21, 1996, but what's on the monitor is interesting: It's E1L1's camera room, but with tile 164 as the switch to show the movie instead of 132!

I did a quick check across 0.99, 1.0, 1.1, 1.1+, 1.3d shareware, 1.3 full, and 1.5, and none of them use tile 164!

0.99

 099.png (35.48K)
Number of downloads: 57


1.0-1.3D shareware

 10.png (35.11K)
Number of downloads: 36


1.3D full - 1.5

 duke3d_000.png (32.38K)
Number of downloads: 30

[Reaper_Man]

I am working on understanding the format of PALETTE.DAT and LOOKUP.DAT, and how one might more easily generate a new engine palette, including all of the palette swaps, transparency blend tables, and shade tables. I did not begin my day with this intention, and I am not quite sure how I wound up here.

The wiki tells us that:

Quote

https://wiki.eduke32.../wiki/Utilities

The PALETTE.DAT and LOOKUP.DAT files hold the palettes, palettes swaps, shade and translucency (blending) tables for the game. This is one of the most loathed and untouched editable features of Duke3D. While incredibly difficult, it can come to good effect. The Build tools bsuite, mkpalette, and transpal can help you in this regard.

Loathed is right. I think the most immediately confusing thing is that PALETTE.DAT contains the shade lookup table, and LOOKUP.DAT contains the palette swaps.

I also discovered that TABLES.DAT is completely unused, and contrary to some old info I found, it has nothing to do with transparency lookups, and never has.

From Ken Silverman's website:

https://advsys.net/ken/tables.txt

TABLES.DAT is probably of no use to you.  It contains mostly lookup tables
for mathematical functions such as SIN.  Remember that back in the dark ages,
floating point code used to be really slow!  Since you asked, here's some C
pseudo-code which explains how I created the TABLES.DAT file:
----------------------------------------------
short sintable[2048], radarang[640];
char textfont[128][8], smalltextfont[128][8], britable[16][64];

for(i=0;i<2048;i++)
	sintable[i] = (short)(16384*sin((double)i*3.14159265358979/1024));

for(i=0;i<640;i++)
	radarang[i] = (short)(atan(((double)i-639.5)/160)*64*1024/3.14159265358979);

The 8x8 text font is extracted from the BIOS of the VGA card
The 3x5 text font was designed by me (Ken Silverman)
 
for(i=0;i<16;i++)
{
	a = (double)8 / ((double)i+8);
	b = (double)63 / pow((double)63,a);
	for(j=0;j<64;j++)
		britable[i][j] = (char)(pow((double)j,a)*B);
}
 
TABLES.DAT file order:
	write(fil,sintable,2048*2);      /*sin (and cos) lookup table*/
	write(fil,radarang,640*2);       /*atn lookup table*/
	write(fil,textfont,128*8);       /*8x8 text font for ASCII chars 0-127*/
	write(fil,smalltextfont,128*8);  /*4x6 text font for ASCII chars 0-127*/
	write(fil,britable,1024);        /*gamma correction lookup table*/

In fact the only code reference to TABLES.DAT in the current EDuke32 engine is in build/src/engine.cpp, and it's all commented out because the method that calls it, engineLoadTables() , now generates the necessary tables at runtime.

However, at long last, we can see what these fonts look like.

 smalltextfont_sheet.png (2.34K)
Number of downloads: 20

 textfont_sheet.png (3.99K)
Number of downloads: 26

Also I generated some more easy to visually parse palette lookup tables, shade tables, and transparency blend tables. These are all straight from PALETTE.DAT and LOOKUP.DAT, just arranged in a way that is a bit more logical and larger than 1 pixel per color. You can really see here how badly the yellow in the palette sucks in the shade map here.

Attached File(s)

•  palette_dat_shades_full.png (10.86K)
  Number of downloads: 36
•  lookup_full.png (9.36K)
  Number of downloads: 22
•  palette_dat_translucency_full.png (102.28K)
  Number of downloads: 19

[Hendricks266]

Yes.

EDukeWiki: Palette data files

Note that there is no need to work with the .dat files because EDuke32 provides modern def syntax to define the tables through the basepalette, palookup, and blendtable tokens.

The fonts in TABLES.DAT were originally used by the editor. I want to re-add optional support for loading this file if present because some platforms like Raspberry Pi are not guaranteed to generate a sine table identical to the original one, which will subtly affect physics and break demo compatibility.