[PokeThePower]

Duel, on 26 April 2013 - 12:20 AM, said:

Dude if you ever want to transfer your skills and knowledge, look no further.

In all truth I've got a couple of Duke 3D mods "in progress". But I also have a huge desire to do things besides games when I get home from work so they are going slower than DNF. Was part of the reason for taking 9 months off the industry entirely. As well as non-stop addiction to philosophy and conspiracy theory. I've tried to wear out Yatta's ear but he's got way more patience with me than I have patience with myself or energy to give.

Tea Monster, on 26 April 2013 - 10:06 AM, said:

I'd just like to say thank you for sharing so much with us about working at 3DR at that time. It's nice to get an insight into what it was like at the time.

Cathy, on 26 April 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

Yeah, that inside knowledge is invaluable for those who followed DNF for so long. It seems the game at one point really was what we had imagined.

Thank you too! It's a helluva lot of fun to chat with others who are just as much fans as I am and aren't just trying to leech info for some ulterior motive.

That said for those who come along and discover these posts later: I emphasize it's *my* insight into what it was like and thus has to be taken with that level of skepticism. I'm even skeptical of my memory sometimes but try to avoid talking about things I'm a little hazy on or haven't exchanged perspectives with others from the same time to get some degree of confirmation that I'm not falling into total "Fanboy" (2001) or "¡Viva la Revolución!" (2006) bubbles.

Cathy, on 26 April 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

And I adore that analogies.

I absolutely love painting with words. Glad it makes people smile and laugh... while occasionally also setting things in a new light that gives an "aha!" moment.

[X-Vector]

Conspiracy theories are so 90's.

[PokeThePower]

X-Vector, on 27 April 2013 - 05:09 AM, said:

Conspiracy theories are so 90's.

That's just what they want you think.

Actually... good point... the word theory is no longer necessary. Conspiracy History.

[trustn0!]

I gotta say, its nice to listen to your experiences working on DNF but personally, im more interested in hearing about your time with Halo 4.
You mentioned that during the development of DNF, ideas and even mechanics were being made that even games to this day haven't even attempted.
So in an environment as controlling as one as a Microsoft flagship title would be under, what your thoughts be on it as opposed to the more lax conditions that DNF was with with.

[blackharted3]

@ Wieder your reply made me lol! That emoticon is epic.

[PokeThePower]

trustn0!, on 27 April 2013 - 10:02 AM, said:

I gotta say, its nice to listen to your experiences working on DNF but personally, im more interested in hearing about your time with Halo 4.
You mentioned that during the development of DNF, ideas and even mechanics were being made that even games to this day haven't even attempted.
So in an environment as controlling as one as a Microsoft flagship title would be under, what your thoughts be on it as opposed to the more lax conditions that DNF was with with.

I was working at Certain Affinity in Austin so we were subcontractors for 343. Thus the work environment and conditions day to day were more defined by CA than 343. Naturally I'm going to choose the independent game developer environment (not indie, independent... though I have nothing but love for indie developers in general). I didn't know I was going be working on Halo 4 when I signed up with them.

That said, the final decisions on what went into the game was of course heavily influenced/affected by the 343/MS culture and I'll just leave it at the same thing I said on my site: I was with Certain Affinity for about one year and focused on portions of Halo 4 multiplayer. Certain Affinity is good people and I’m very happy I made them my home for my first year back in Austin. Some of the best pure design work I’ve had the honor to participate in happened there…

That’s about all I have to say about that.

I'm back working with Certain Affinity again after my sabbatical and quite happy with the projects/properties I'm associated with. They have barely started to exert their full potential and have been building a really strong foundation.

[Jblade]

Quote

Running straight at you or stationary AI aren't inherently bad in and of themselves. It's a matter of whether that fits expectations. Some of the best and most effective AI in history were actually pretty dumb, but they were extremely satisfying to defeat. Even if they are scripted. It's really down to presentation and polish. You'd be surprised how much of a difference the exact same AI but new animations, effects, and sounds can make.

This is a really good point actually. The Replicas in FEAR, and the Half-life Grunts were seen as amazing since they shouted out what you were doing and basically narrated everything they did so you knew they were doing it. From a tactical point of view that makes no sense, but from a gameplay sort of view it made them seem far more real and human (Especailly when you managed to land a grenade at their feet and hear them shout out "SHIT!")

[Psyrgery]

Once again, thank you very much for everything wieder, it means a lot for me to hear such pieces of valuable information from one of the guys who actually worked on the project.

I see myself as a 10yo kid, looking forward to play that uber-amazing game, dreaming about how amazing would it end up...

[DavoX]

What happened to this project anyway? (the tools I mean! not DNF ! )

[xPreatorianx]

Well all I know is I would definitely boot the game back up and play it if you released this patch. I know a lot of people hate DNF but I actually enjoyed it. It sure as hell didn't live up to the hype but it was still an enjoyable experience in it's own right. So I guess you could consider it a guilty pleasure of mine!

[Gambini]

I´d love to replay the highway thing with first person perspective on the monster truck. I know that was possible in early versions. I´d also like to take a look at the maps without that fov-blurry shit.

[DavoX]

You can deactivate the motion blur now Oh and you can adjust the FOV too. Unless the monster truck part forces it... I didn't check.

Also this seems to be a working version of flawless widescreen that actually removes the blur.

http://gsngaming.com...er-sweetfx-v14/

[Draythianna]

Hey sorry about the dead links, some music anti-piracy company flagged it bad, and my mediafire account was closed. Also my pm's should have gone through email but were not. :-/

If anyone wants me to I can upload it somewhere else, dunno where atm.

[Nukeaholic]

Depending on the size of the file maybe try DRD file space? I would definitely recommend trying that but at the moment they're moving host. Also, I remember reading that this won't work with the DLC or the DLC won't work if this is patched, I was just wondering if that was fixed yet?

[Draythianna]

I could put it on 4shared, anyone have a preference?

[TheZombieKiller]

Could you tell us how you managed to decompile the source tree? There appear to be tools to compile the source files in the engine dlls, so if you can decompile them, and get the compilers working, then we might be able to mod parts of the game.

-TZK

[Person of Color]

PLEASE POST THIS.

[Draythianna]

Hi sorry for the dissappearing act, I do that time to time.... but I always come back.

Things have improved quite dramatically on the DNF front possibly for modding as well, as far as a patch goes I shall put something new up easier to use in the next few days provided that the world not make duke "nuke'em" not something to laugh about. I know more of what is going on then I'd rather, and just be glad you don't.... regardless next few days as long as electronics continue to function I'll have something up . I could have it done sooner but I need to verify a few things.

As far as the source goes, its not all of the source and its kinda of a mess what i did get. Basically what I did was decompile what it could from the references of a semi compatible version of Unreal Engine 3 with a few tricky commands. I had all of this backed up quite nicely I thought but I've had some minor hard drive corruption, I'm thinking of moving over to RAID, or in the least using MD5/SHA/CRC based backups from now on. I have the worst luck with file corruption . I'm a big file archivest, I like to back up rare stuff on the net for safe keeping too so i'm quite angry at my computers, but I'll include anything DNF related that I was able to recover. I have recently figured out that just because files are the same size and date doesn't mean they are not corrupt. It could be filled with zeros, and thus it was thanks a lot to chkdsk/scandisk!!!! replacing bad sectors. blah blah blah useless. They should change it to read. "Attempting to guess what file contents were and removing the ability to undo this" that ought to get peoples attention more. sorry about the ranting but I had somewhere between 100gb and 3TB of corrupt data I'm still wading through. It wouldn't be so bad but I sync my backup drives so until now corruption could also be synced


I do know why they removed the SOS:\> console, it wasn't visible in multiplayer, but it could still be used, whoops. I guess that was the fastest/cheapest fix they could come up with in spite of how obtrusive and discouraging of a fix it was. I was playing with it a bit, wouldn't take too long for a griefer to keep changing maps, or adding blocking objects at will, scripts, etc... possibly at the expense of server stability and definately at the expense of what was THEN their multiplayer base. I think they were short sided with the fix tho, hence this thread.

[MusicallyInspired]

It's not exactly an alien concept to be able to restrict console commands for clients in multiplayer games. FPS's have been doing that since their beginnings. There was no excuse to remove the console altogether. It was just laziness on their part.

[----]

MusicallyInspired, on 05 March 2014 - 09:27 PM, said:

It's not exactly an alien concept to be able to restrict console commands for clients in multiplayer games.

Dedicated servers (that are independant from your Steam account) and proper server/match browsers aren't either.

[Draythianna]

Anyhow I am still working on this, i've made an interesting discovery. The files from MegaPackage.dat can be overriden at runtime with changed files placed in the same directory, this means modding will work, the question is how to change these files then. The important files to change are all *.u files which are unreal compiled files. Unfortunately this time around all i've been able to decompile using Unreal 3 engine are the following files: Engine.u and Editor.u to quite a few *.uc files that could be edited but would have to be recompiled somehow. How i made this discovery (of the loading at runtime is the following)

I have basically two versions of duke nukem forever: Version one and the current one with all the dlc.

Normally the Megapackage.dat is not interchangeable between versions will create a crash at runtime.

After I extracted Megapackage.dat from the new version I placed the version one MegaPackage.dat in with all of the new files, as expected it crashed. Then I put the extracted new files in the same directory and the game recognized it and ran with the changes ignoring the old files in the version one MegaPackage.dat. So yes modding is possible and likely if enough interest is gathered.

I've also done some further experiments with trying to formulate an editor via files from Unreal Gold/torunament/tournament2004/unreal3 so far with not much good success. I can get it so the editor loads but it won't read the file formats so is useless. I spent a good while trying to get this working but I'm going to move onto some other aspect and release a console patch as soon as I remember how to create an innosetup installer with the options I want. I could release the console patch now but I want to avoid the problems of the first release, so a bit more time.

Anyrate if this seems like it is taking forever at least it is appropriate in spirit. Always bet on duke lol!

[TheZombieKiller]

Engine.u and the like are easy to decompile, I got them with decompiled with UT2004's UnrealED. The problems are the other files, as they seem to either be protected or they are a custom format.
I tried making an editor out of that stuff too, but it won't work. The level format is extremely different, hell, even the current version of the ACTUAL editor doesn't work anymore, the DLCs were made by patching files together.

[Draythianna]

TheZombieKiller, on 08 March 2014 - 05:55 PM, said:

Engine.u and the like are easy to decompile, I got them with decompiled with UT2004's UnrealED. The problems are the other files, as they seem to either be protected or they are a custom format.
I tried making an editor out of that stuff too, but it won't work. The level format is extremely different, hell, even the current version of the ACTUAL editor doesn't work anymore, the DLCs were made by patching files together.

That brings up another point about how much of a trainwreck this development process is. I would like to mod this game, heck I'd like for there to be a way for offline multiplayer (i don't care if it is gearboxed& steam sanctioned or not) problem is the game is so hard to unravel that most of the time people that could do it pass onto other things.

I know some russian, and eastern european hackers are working on some edits to the game, that looks interesting. I just hope some of these mods get off the ground before interest is totally lost.

I'm just happy that they allow local files to be overriden at runtime that is the first big step to modding a game. I was kinda thinking that especially after the console disappeared that they would block anything modifying the game files at runtime. Looks like they didn't think of that or as usual are lazy about it. Unfortunately we can't repack MegaPackage.dat, nor can we rebuild the *.uc to *.u format.

As far as the *.u format they are using, it may not be protected although they probably stripped some of the information, making it a binary unreal file, but knowing how "complicated" the build process was for the game it just may be hard to read by anything other then the original tools.

Ironically, the people that are now getting the farthest with tools regarding DNF are the pirates, so I've been watching what i can learn from them. They are mostly trying to get non-controlled multiplayer working but ATM unoffiical servers are broken and you're likely to get a VAC ban for messing with it at all.

[TheZombieKiller]

Drathian, on 08 March 2014 - 11:04 PM, said:

nor can we rebuild the *.uc to *.u format.

Well, Engine.u and all the other decompilable files appear to be regular .u files, and if these files are actually used by the game, then that means that the engine is capable of loading regular .u files.
This means that if we can manage to get the sources to the .u files, they can be recompiled with a regular compiler.

[Draythianna]

Well i decided not to release this patch, as it violates too much grey area mumbojumbo of licenses and stuff.

However, someone else decided to upload a setup patch file that contains pretty much all the current duke nukem forever related mods and debug information.

I wonder who that could have been, looks like it took a lot of work har har har.

For everyone's convience I'll update the first post with this patch done by an strange odd unknown person. Its about ~130mb of goodies

https://mega.co.nz/#...oyBcFl-nfoPfA2g

If there are any problems maybe they lurk here, I'll let you know if there is any new updates that i can find.

*Requires a full retail steam DNF installed to use. May or may not work without the dlc.

[TheZombieKiller]

I don't really think Gearbox would care anymore if you released it, then again, they've been pretty big assholes when it comes to DNF.
It's bad enough they thought the game was good in its current state, but then they went ahead and made things worse by removing the console.

[Draythianna]

TheZombieKiller, on 14 March 2014 - 02:43 PM, said:

I don't really think Gearbox would care anymore if you released it, then again, they've been pretty big assholes when it comes to DNF.
It's bad enough they thought the game was good in its current state, but then they went ahead and made things worse by removing the console.

Ya good thing someone else released it then eh?

[TheZombieKiller]

Pretty much

[blizzart]

I was too lazy to read through all posts, so am I able to use cheats in DNF now?

BTW: Great work!

[xMobilemux]

Hell I'm having fun with it Great Job