[djdori11]

After Duke Nukem 3D, more than 5 games has been released using the Build Engine, which of them is the most advanced one to your knowledge\opinion and why?
PowerSlave
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance
Blood
Shadow Warrior
Redneck Rampage Rides Again
WW2 GI
Extreme Paintbrawl
I didn't include NAM and Redneck Rampage (1) because it's obvious that their sequels are more advanced.

By advanced I mean more modern, has more staff in it.
Like in Blood the pick ups are real 3D and in Redneck Rampage Rides Again there are vehicles..

[Mad Max RW]

I always felt Blood was the best with the voxel tech and all around great design.

Shadow Warrior had vehicles, but they were somewhat half-assed and limited to flat ground. Correct if me I'm wrong, I haven't played in years.

[Loke]

If I'd guess I would say either Shadow Warrior or Blood.

[Jinroh]

I think Shadow Warrior's engine had the most technical junk you could do with the engine. I mean they had some crazy stuff in there. I love Blood and everything, but I think the sheer volume of different weird tricks the engine could do puts Shadow Warrior in the lead on that one.

IIRC I read that the ROR in Shadow Warrior was more, "Correct" than Blood's as it moved the above sector in to correct 3D space at run time. I could be wrong though. ^^

l]

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Oh, there's just no argument here. Extreme Paintbrawl hands down.

...

In all seriousness, as mentioned by the above poster, Shadow Warrior had the most "bells and whistles". Really a shame that the modding community isn't larger for it. I haven't played through Blood all the way through, so I can't pass judgment on that.

[djdori11]

Jinroh, on 06 January 2012 - 11:08 AM, said:

I think Shadow Warrior's engine had the most technical junk you could do with the engine. I mean they had some crazy stuff in there. I love Blood and everything, but I think the sheer volume of different weird tricks the engine could do puts Shadow Warrior in the lead on that one.

IIRC I read that the ROR in Shadow Warrior was more, "Correct" than Blood's as it moved the above sector in to correct 3D space at run time. I could be wrong though. ^^

So if this is true Shadow Warrior is probably the most advanced Build engine game.
But it's arguable cause like Redneck Rampage Rides Again has vehicles and 3D sprites and WWII GI has some 3D sprites and stuff like cannons and "realistic" healing system and such.

[Jinroh]

djdori11, on 06 January 2012 - 12:35 PM, said:

So if this is true Shadow Warrior is probably the most advanced Build engine game.
But it's arguable cause like Redneck Rampage Rides Again has vehicles and 3D sprites and WWII GI has some 3D sprites and stuff like cannons and "realistic" healing system and such.

Weren't the vehicles in RR: Rides Again just sprite overlays for the HUD though? I've not played all the way through yet since I bought it from GOG, but the Motorcycle springs to mind. Which was awesome btw. xD Or am I thinking of Suckin' Grits on Route 66? xD I can't remember it's been a few months since I last played.

[djdori11]

Jinroh, on 06 January 2012 - 12:52 PM, said:

Weren't the vehicles in RR: Rides Again just sprite overlays for the HUD though? I've not played all the way through yet since I bought it from GOG, but the Motorcycle springs to mind. Which was awesome btw. xD Or am I thinking of Suckin' Grits on Route 66? xD I can't remember it's been a few months since I last played.

Vehicles only added in Rides Again which is basicly Redneck Rampage 2. And there is a Motorcycle with machineguns and some kind of a boat with rockets. And I don't know if it's sprites or what ever but it's pretty good.

[Jinroh]

djdori11, on 06 January 2012 - 12:58 PM, said:

Vehicles only added in Rides Again which is basicly Redneck Rampage 2. And there is a Motorcycle with machineguns and some kind of a boat with rockets. And I don't know if it's sprites or what ever but it's pretty good.

Ok yeah that's what I was thinking of. ^^ Thanks for reminding me. Yeah they were like Sprite Overlays and changed movement physics. They were rad though, I liked the motorcycle a lot. ^^ Though IMO they're slightly less impressive than the Sector Vehicles from Shadow Warrior, even if the Redneck Rampage ones controlled a lot better. xD

[Loke]

Don't know but the vehicles in RR had some fucking atrocious controls, at least for me. Though I did sort of get hang of it after hours of slamming into walls at full speed.

[Jinroh]

Loke, on 06 January 2012 - 05:09 PM, said:

Don't know but the vehicles in RR had some fucking atrocious controls, at least for me. Though I did sort of get hang of it after hours of slamming into walls at full speed.

Yeah they weren't perfect, but I think the ones in SW were a bit worse as I had the same thing. Though yeah as cool as cruising through levels on the motorcycle was in RR yeah it didn't turn well at high speeds which is semi-]realistic, but not suppose to be that stiff.

[Micky C]

I don't know if this counts for anything, but I think Duke was probably the best at integrating build engine features into gameplay. From what I played of Shadow Warrior and Blood, all the new features were underused, or weren't used in a fun way. Of course I'm just basing this on how I didn't find shadow warrior all that fun. It had some nice ideas which sounded good in theory, but in practise turned out very boring. I kept thinking to myself "imagine how good it would have been if some of these things were in Duke 3D", where hopefully they would have been used to their full potential.

[Hendricks266]

Many of the above posts have good points.

Shadow Warrior hands down had the single best use of the BUILD engine from the start, but I would not say it was the most advanced. Blood is a tad more customizable than SW but is not quite as technologically impressive.

WWII GI had some innovations in sprite-based interaction and player abilities.

The actual winner of the "most advanced" award goes without question to EDuke32. "But Hendricks," you may say, "that's not a game, that's a source port of a game!" EDuke32 is the marriage of WWII GI's innovations with the best BUILD game, Duke Nukem 3D, further expanded with CON functionality and TROR to encompass just about everything the other games can do provided you can reimplement it in CON.

All that being said, as time goes by, EDuke32 will become more than just a Duke port: it will be the modern face of the BUILD engine.

[Martin]

Hendricks266, on 07 January 2012 - 04:02 PM, said:

All that being said, as time goes by, EDuke32 will become more than just a Duke port: it will be the modern face of the BUILD engine.

Do you think EDuke will ever drop the 'Duke' moniker in order to distance itself from an individual game and be known purely as an engine?

[The Commander]

Time for a vote on a new name maybe?

EBuild32
ESprite32
EPoly32
ETPH32

I don't think a name change would suit at all, it would feel out of place to me.

[Hendricks266]

Martin, on 08 January 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

Do you think EDuke will ever drop the 'Duke' moniker in order to distance itself from an individual game and be known purely as an engine?

There will always be an "EDuke32" mode or component where you can play Duke just as you do now. A name change could happen in theory but there will be no reason to worry about that for a long time since all of the devs are busy with our own lives.

[Jimmy]

I think at some point it'd be nice if there was a branch of EDuke32 that didn't include any of the Duke3D stuff, but I don't reckon there is anyone that would do anything with it.

The Mighty Bison, on 06 January 2012 - 11:29 AM, said:

Oh, there's just no argument here. Extreme Paintbrawl hands down.

In all seriousness, as mentioned by the above poster, Shadow Warrior had the most "bells and whistles". Really a shame that the modding community isn't larger for it. I haven't played through Blood all the way through, so I can't pass judgment on that.

LOL.
The thing that broke the Shadow Warrior modding community is the lack of customization. 3DR fucked up by not bringing in Replogle or SOMEONE to extend CON functionality to the game.

djdori11, on 06 January 2012 - 12:35 PM, said:

So if this is true Shadow Warrior is probably the most advanced Build engine game.
But it's arguable cause like Redneck Rampage Rides Again has vehicles and 3D sprites and WWII GI has some 3D sprites and stuff like cannons and "realistic" healing system and such.

3D sprites aren't really a big deal, Duke3D has them. Unless you mean voxels, in which only Shadow Warrior and Blood had those.

[Hendricks266]

Captain Awesome, on 08 January 2012 - 05:37 PM, said:

3DR fucked up by not bringing in Replogle or SOMEONE to extend CON functionality to the game.

I agree that it would have been better if there was actually some modification ability, but I don't want Todd anywhere near my SW. I have full confidence that Norwood and Maddin could have done something, at the very least allow level names to be changed without hacking the exe.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Wouldn't it be possible to modify the game more extensively now that the source code has been released, though?

[Jimmy]

Yeah, sure, but clunking through a basic coding system is a lot easier to tinker with than an actual coding language you have to compile and shit. I know I couldn't do it, but I can piddle well in CON.

Also, Replogle kicks ass.

[OpenMaw]

Hendricks266, on 08 January 2012 - 06:05 PM, said:

I agree that it would have been better if there was actually some modification ability, but I don't want Todd anywhere near my SW. I have full confidence that Norwood and Maddin could have done something, at the very least allow level names to be changed without hacking the exe.

Out of curiousity, what exactly is wrong with Todd?

[Hendricks266]

Commando Nukem, on 12 January 2012 - 06:00 PM, said:

Out of curiousity, what exactly is wrong with Todd?

I know I'm guilty of bashing Todd probably more than he deserves.

JonoF, TerminX, and Plagman can probably chime in since they have had much more experience working with the Duke codebase.

In general, his programming style is rather sloppy. SW is a much more polished game than Duke from a programming and gameplay perspective. Duke has a literal laundry list of rough edges and bugs in result.

While CON was a good idea, the way he chose to implement it and how he actually based game code in it rather than being purely mutator like Lua resulted in a sub-par experience. SW's enemies work together and interact with their environment, and Doom's enemies will infight, while more than one enemy in a line of sight from the player in Duke will result in the one in the back blindly blowing the shit out of all the others. Absolutely nothing based in the original game's CON will react intelligently to anything else in the original game's CON. All CON actors are player-centric one-man-teams, oblivious to many environmental conditions. We can't forget that he failed to add support for variables other than abusing the shit out of an inventory item.

The very least of this is his laughably bad spelling.

[Plagman]

You can say whatever you want, he still made Duke3D. I might never want to work with the guy, but he's still godlike in my book. ;-)

[TerminX]

I agree with Plagman. I've bashed his horrible code quite a bit over the years, but the fact of the matter is he managed to get the heap of shit working mostly correctly, in DOS, with little that could be classified as a decent debugging tool (since they simply didn't exist back then in anywhere near the capacity as they do now). It's really a pretty impressive feat... the sum of the Duke codebase is much greater than its individual parts.

[Jimmy]

I actually love the limitations of 1.5 coding. It made me think much more logically and in-depth about things. It required so much problem solving.

EDIT: LULWOT. I do not understand the downvote here.

[thatguy]

Captain Awesome, on 13 January 2012 - 01:40 PM, said:

EDIT: LULWOT. I do not understand the downvote here.

I just had a faint memory of the way people act over at gametrailers.com....I thought the downvote was pointless so I raised it. Also its a good post.

[Gambini]

Everybody seems to be forgetting one very important thing here about SW. Not only it didn´t have customization capabilities. It was also a kick in the balls (with safety boots) to map for. The st1 and st2 sprites were impossible to use. Recreating an effect in Duke may take a few minutes go open a map where this effect is used, take note of the tags, go back to your map and apply them - effect working. While doing the same in SW would take hours, and still the desired result would not be achieved as expected.