[Jimmy]

Corvin, on 09 April 2014 - 09:04 PM, said:

There was a small movement back in the day (circa1998) that fans wanted 3DR to stop work on DNF and work on Duke3D. 3DR or Joe S. didn't understand why.
3DR hardly listen to the fans so such an endeavor was never done.

It appears that 3DR was working on Duke3D after Atomic Edition to some degree, but there's no telling how far they got. As I've pointed out before, Dirk Jones created some voxels for Duke 3D.The image says Duke Nukem Forver, but as far as we know, DNF was never on the Build Engine and it began on the Quake engine, no reason to use voxels. I believe this is simply a mistake on Dirk's part about something he did 2~ decades ago. The copyright date of 1996 is also rather telling, that means they were working on this probably around the same time as the Plutonium Pak. Maybe these changes were meant for the PlutPak or Atomic Edition, and just abandoned. I firmly believe there was a small amount of movement at 3DR toward making Duke3D as technologically strong as Blood and Shadow Warrior.

RunningWild, on 10 April 2014 - 02:03 PM, said:

Has there been any further movement towards getting other Build Engine game support in eduke32? I read some other posts here, many from now years ago, but I'm curious if any of this progressed (and, yeah, I know Blood is straight out).

Some people have tried hacking Redneck Rampage into EDuke32 with rather mixed results. RR series and Shadow Warrior are both surely possible, but it would require a considerable amount of work for both. More than unpaid people are really in a position to put in. RR will need a lot of reverse engineering/recoding. SW would take some major reworkings of EDuke32, some which may be warranted even but it would just a shit pile of work and likely one of the biggest headaches of all time. If we could get some real money (legally of course) behind these projects, I don't think they'd have a problem getting off the ground. It's just a lot of work and our community has always been starved for programmers, from CON to beyond.

Also you likely know this, but NAM/Napalm is pretty much fully supported and WW2GI is mostly supported.

[Gambini]

I remember being amazed too by some of the environment of RR. But gameplay was quite bland and personally i found the sound (music and sounds) strident and annoying, the "yehaaa", the looping music, the looping crickets, the gun sounds taken from the same sound libraries of 1950 movies.. Then again I think Xaxtrix had great vision for environments. Take a look at their Kingpin: Life of Crime game. Another gem with arguable gameplay but plenty of believable and atmospheric scenarios. In those times most companies did abstract level design, yet they were all for realistm.

MrBlackCat, on 09 April 2014 - 06:55 PM, said:

I just wish companies would not abandon engines so fast and continue to make material for them for a bit longer. I am comfortable with this idea as I have collected up (and play) most every DooM and Duke Nukem add-on, shovelware etc that I can find.

(examples...)
Duke 3D Related...


DooM Related...

MrBlackCat

I just been looking at your library of photos. The hell! How much money you have invested there on your game/tech museum? and how many zeros has your electricity bill?

[MrBlackCat]

Gambini, on 10 April 2014 - 04:12 PM, said:

<snip>
I just been looking at your library of photos. The hell! How much money you have invested there on your game/tech museum? and how many zeros has your electricity bill?

Money I don't know. I do remember during the mid to late 90's I spent about 30K USD on my home LAN and PC's and games. Many of the games are original as I had excellent jobs and excellent priorities (games!) all through the 90's. Electric bill is nothing really... the room is somewhat automated. I leave, everything goes to sleep. Walk in and indirect floor lighting wakes up, then I can turn on any of the alternate lighting by remotes around the room. (Bright, UV, Dimmed Incandescent, Red etc) Even though I have many systems there are only a few TV's and monitors connected to them with switching systems. Everything is trimmed in Fluorescent so you can just run the UV's and still see in the room fine.

I am a gamer more so than a collector however... not much "new in box" in there. I get them to play, not to say I have one.

I have never played Redneck Rampage through... back when it came out. I do have them all on the list to play, but is going to be a while at the current rate. I have all the iterations waiting patiently on the shelf though. I remember trying to find every Build engine game when shadow warrior came out... realizing what a great engine it was. I got Witchaven 1 and 2 early on, but THAT didn't go so good. Then games like TekWar war very interesting and innovative in concept, but not so well executed. Still lots of fun. I still play Redneck Deer Huntin' sometimes as a comparison demo to Duke Nukem 3D... mostly just to demonstrate to casual gamers how diverse the engine was.

MrBlackCat

[Daedolon]

Xatrix was always insane with their level of detail. I still think both Redneck Rampage (/Rides Again) and Kingpin have probably the best modern (well up to the new millenium) style for factories and other industrial areas ever to be featured in any video game.

[Mark]

I was impressed with the textures that have the built-in lighting. No extra Polymer SEs needed.

[MetHy]

So I'm nearing the end of Rides Again. The 2nd swamp map with vehicule, the Elvis house map were really well designed, but nothing amazing. The boat map, I was disappointed with. It felt too small imo and it just doesn't compare with to Caribbean Life's boat level and Blood's boat level (or was that in Cryptic Passage? think so). At the end though the boat explodes and sinks kinda like in Red4 (I wonder if Merljin played this map before making Red4?), I supposed that could have been interesting except that apparently due to the explosions I got a major glitch and I couldn't even keep playing; after a while of freezing I could play but the game was slow, then back to normal speed but with tons of graphical gtliches. Another freeze when trying to save... So I had to use a cheat to reach the next map (and lost all my gear).

After that though, I reached another Motorbike map. Holy shit was that amazing! 2nd best map in the game so far after the Refinery, and it's very unique too. It takes place on a motorcross course and ends in an arena and it's just amazing. Being able to shoot while driving and having an efficient "brake" key really adds up to the Build motorbike exerperience, and I have to say the DNF mod's bike maps don't compare, either (I wonder if Gambini and Davox played this game, too).





Not long ago I said Powerslave was the most underrated Build game out there; well, Rides Again might be even more underrated. It really is a lot more solid than the original on every single aspect but I guess it suffered from the reputation of the original, as well as the success of other, true 3D, FPS coming out at the time.

[Jimmy]

I always found the issue with RR seems to be more like the team was spread thin considering the amount of levels and their ability. RR had three level designers and fourteen levels, and RA had two level designers and fourteen levels. It becomes apparent the people they hired had more of a knack for architecture than gameplay. They could have benefited from a strong level design leadership role. Suckin Grits had a whopping nine level designers and only twelve levels.

[Robman]

Wait.. Rides Again had a motocross course? Can you actually complete the jumps? That's reason enough right there for me to try it out sometime. I have the original RR cd but never ended up playing it very far through.

[Jimmy]

Yeah, it's pretty fun considering the limitations of the engine. It's worth giving a shot for curiosity's sake.

[RunningWild]

Jimmy, on 10 April 2014 - 02:31 PM, said:

Some people have tried hacking Redneck Rampage into EDuke32 with rather mixed results. RR series and Shadow Warrior are both surely possible, but it would require a considerable amount of work for both. More than unpaid people are really in a position to put in. RR will need a lot of reverse engineering/recoding. SW would take some major reworkings of EDuke32, some which may be warranted even but it would just a shit pile of work and likely one of the biggest headaches of all time. If we could get some real money (legally of course) behind these projects, I don't think they'd have a problem getting off the ground. It's just a lot of work and our community has always been starved for programmers, from CON to beyond.

This makes me wonder if this effort would be worth a Kickstarter. Though, even with money, finding people with the drive, time, and energy to invest would still be problematic as I see it.

There is the guy who is reverse-engineering Dark Forces (DarkXL) and Daggerfall, who says he plans to get to Blood (probably sometime in the year 2050).

MrBlackCat, on 09 April 2014 - 06:55 PM, said:

(examples...)
Duke 3D Related...


DooM Related...

MrBlackCat

This collection makes me drool. I have a lot of that Doom stuff, but your Duke collection kicks mine's ass.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Do you still have the Duke Xtreme T-Shirt that came with Duke: The Apocalypse? I loved that T-shirt when I was a kid, but I lost it.

[MrBlackCat]

RunningWild, on 19 April 2014 - 10:54 PM, said:

<snip>
This collection makes me drool. I have a lot of that Doom stuff, but your Duke collection kicks mine's ass.

Maybe... but I was very successful in the 90's and LOVED this stuff... luckily I had the space and desire to buy and take care of all of these games. Not everyone has the same options and opportunities I had. I am aware of how lucky I am am and I don't take my collection for granted... but still I am more a gamer than collector. I don't watch Television and I have no children, so a great deal of my time is available for playing and taking care of games.

Duke of Hazzard, on 20 April 2014 - 09:12 AM, said:

Do you still have the Duke Xtreme T-Shirt that came with Duke: The Apocalypse? I loved that T-shirt when I was a kid, but I lost it.

Many of them... I buy most of them from eBay, and keep the originals (usually X-Large) in the boxes. I wear a Medium generally. I also made some Duke shirts as you can see the "odd" ones in these images. I wear Duke Nukem, Quake or DooM shirts most of the time when I am not at work. (In the first image, the far right two shirts are examples of several I made some time around 2002.)


MrBlackCat

[MetHy]

Out of curiosity, does anyone know (or have estimate) of how many copies each Build engine game sold? (counting add-ons too )

[Kristian Joensen]

3.5 Million copies for Duke3D.

[termit]

Kristian Joensen, on 05 May 2014 - 02:12 AM, said:

3.5 Million copies for Duke3D.

Any source? I'm sure more than that.

[Lunick]

termit, on 05 May 2014 - 02:42 AM, said:

Any source? I'm sure more than that.

Wikipedia quotes 3.5 million from an article without a source as far as I can tell...

Edit: Scott Miller in this article quotes around 3.5 Million http://www.gamasutra...tion_scott_.php

[termit]

Lunick, on 05 May 2014 - 02:46 AM, said:

Wikipedia quotes 3.5 million from an article without a source as far as I can tell...

Edit: Scott Miller in this article quotes around 3.5 Million http://www.gamasutra...tion_scott_.php

2009, so now it's more than 3.5 for sure

[MetHy]

termit, on 05 May 2014 - 03:33 AM, said:

2009, so now it's more than 3.5 for sure

How much did YOU sell ?

Also what about the PS1, N64 and XBLA versions ? (Saturn version doesn't use Build so it's off-topic )

[MrFlibble]

Recently I played the 3Dfx version of Shadow Warrior shareware a bit, using DOSBox SVN Daum and nGlide. The game generally looks quite neat:


I'm generally not a fan of blurred textures and sprites, but the bilinear filtering in this actually works fine. It can be turned off anyway, by pressing Alt+P (Alt+B turns bilinear filtering back on):


One idiosyncrasy of this version is that sloped surfaces had to be made very bright, for some technical reasons that are alluded to vaguely in the readme file. Another issue I noticed that the tank barrel on level 4 is not displayed at all.

More shots:
http://imgur.com/Q5tN9Vv
http://imgur.com/JXS89il
http://imgur.com/VsCboPH
http://imgur.com/9EAaaVG
http://imgur.com/iHK9B7w

[Micky C]

I didn't know such a version of Shadow Warrior existed

What other differences/features are there? Texture filtering seems pretty amazing for the time.

[Player Lin]

Those screenshots give me the (looking) feel of Diablo 2 when I use its Glide renderer with Glide3-to-OpenGL-Wrapper...but more classic and pixelization.

[MrFlibble]

Mickey C, on 10 May 2014 - 05:14 AM, said:

I didn't know such a version of Shadow Warrior existed

You can easily upgrade the regular SW v1.2 (both shareware and registered) with 3Dfx patches - get 'em from the 3DR website. Be sure to use DOSBox SVN Daum when patching the game, because Apogee/3DR used to configure their RTPatches to check the date stamps of the updated files, and regular DOSBox and Gulikoza's build do not allow programmes that run inside DOSBox to modify file date stamps - hence the updated files will have the current date and time, and the patch programme will abort the updating process.

Mickey C, on 10 May 2014 - 05:14 AM, said:

What other differences/features are there? Texture filtering seems pretty amazing for the time.

As far as I can tell, there are no other (noticeable) differences. Officially supported resolutions are 512x384, 640x480 and 800x600. The 3Dfx version does not support voxels.

[Hendricks266]

MrFlibble, on 10 May 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

Be sure to use DOSBox SVN Daum when patching the game, because Apogee/3DR used to configure their RTPatches to check the date stamps of the updated files, and regular DOSBox and Gulikoza's build do not allow programmes that run inside DOSBox to modify file date stamps - hence the updated files will have the current date and time, and the patch programme will abort the updating process.

A "date" command is present in the mainline DOSBox SVN. Here is a recent build I made while working on the betas: http://hendricks266....64_gcc-4.8.0.7z

DOSBox SVN Daum and DOSBox-X offer some cool things but I've also found them to be unstable. Also, I can't build them with MinGW on Windows with all the libraries supported like I can with mainline. (Does anyone know if these two changed something with PC speaker emulation? It sounds terribly ear-grating with them.

If you don't want to do that, or you are running a real system and don't want to mess up the date, I put this together to include when I package betas for 3DR to distribution: http://hendricks266....ff/fakedate2.7z

[MrFlibble]

Hendricks266, on 10 May 2014 - 08:46 AM, said:

A "date" command is present in the mainline DOSBox SVN. Here is a recent build I made while working on the betas: http://hendricks266....64_gcc-4.8.0.7z

I think we're talking about different things here. It's not the fake system date that I meant, it's the feature that seems to be exclusive to DOSBox SVN Daum which correctly sets the date stamps on files that are, for example, extracted from an SFX archive, or patched with an RTPatch file.

I've discovered it when I was playing around with patches for Apogee/3D Realms games, and many patches would not work inside vanilla DOSBox, reporting a files don't match error. This is because RTPatch files can be set to verify the date stamps of the resulting files after the update process is complete. Maybe there's a command line parameter to override this, but I'm not sure.

A while ago I asked at VOGONS if the date stamp feature could be implemented in vanilla DOSBox as well, and the reply I got was:

Qbix said:

You are partly correct. Those builds don't preserve the original date, they allow the original date to be set by the archive utility.
As to why it is not in the default build. I wasn't able to come up with a version of the code that worked on all OSes that dosbox supports under all circumstances. [source]

There's a patch for this feature, available here, that can be used in custom DOSBox builds.

[Hendricks266]

I've had luck extracting Apogee's DOS installer files directly using 7-Zip. The dates are preserved that way. One note is that the files will come out with a bunch of odd attributes such as "Offline", so you can use this to clear them: http://hendricks266....ff/fixattrib.7z

Obviously this won't work for RTPatch itself but it may be useful.

[MrFlibble]

Yeah I know that 7zip and also WinRAR can extract the files (but not from all of the distributives).

As for RTPatch files, there's a tool that's available with the RTPatch evaluation package which allows to override the patch settings.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the date stamps of the shareware versions do not always coincide with the dates in the Apogee timeline, although it's hard to tell which source is more accurate now.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Could EDuke32 benefit from the source codes of the other Build games?

[Hendricks266]

Such as supporting them? Sure. It just takes time and effort. It's on my radar.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Hendricks266, on 10 May 2014 - 08:47 PM, said:

Such as supporting them? Sure. It just takes time and effort. It's on my radar.

I meant more in the lines of, for example, EDuke32 is originally a Duke port, but we also have the code of SW, which supports room over room and voxels, so I imagine, because the games are based on the same engine, that it would make it easier to add SW features to Duke.

I haven't followed EDuke32's development in a long time, though, so I don't know if EDuke32's solution for TROR was developed based on SW's code, for example.

Making EDuke32 an universal platform for Build games would be nice, but we still miss Blood...

[Hendricks266]

You can have just about any feature you want through CON. At least, anything that doesn't mess with the innards of the engine. I can't think of anything in SW that does that.

TROR is a different approach than the viewportal-based ROR found in SW, Blood, and RR.