[DNSkill]

Also I think the 2nd shot in that image is of the Abyss? It looks like a smaller version of the starting area.

Or it is the area you come out of leading to the Sub in Death Row.

[PikaCommando]

What's this supposed to be?



Is this level featured anywhere else?

[DNSkill]

First image is in the final game. That's the Alien ship you see in the level Abyss. You might've missed it, but it's there.

2nd image could be any city map.

[Salvation]

Tristan, on 16 July 2016 - 12:16 AM, said:

First image is in the final game. That's the Alien ship you see in the level Abyss. You might've missed it, but it's there.

2nd image could be any city map.

I think the 2nd image could be very early version of E1L2.

[PokeThePower]

MrFlibble, on 07 July 2016 - 03:17 AM, said:

BTW, I think you guys mentioned that the build of ROTT with female versions of certain guards was still available somewhere.

Honest assessment... at no time during my time at 3DR did I experience "sexism".

What I did experience was a consistent narrative that tilted toward gender dimorphism. And a natural narrative at that, not a forced one. A narrative that, in all my efforts to interact with the opposite gender has proven more true than false except when dealing with someone of the opposite gender who wants to be the opposite gender. Which only reinforces gender dimorphism.

3DR was never sexist or racist in terms of being anti-anything.

TerminX, on 08 July 2016 - 03:17 PM, said:

It's almost a shame that they didn't pick people who were less conscious of data security than Evan and I are.

I can't even begin to imagine the insight into my early 20's you have now.

TerminX, on 08 July 2016 - 03:55 PM, said:

Anything released has to be gone over very, very carefully. There are plenty of cases where assets are used temporarily without permission from the copyright holder, instances where personal information is written into game files as an easy way of accessing it while working, etc.

While at 3DR... 3DR was my house, home, and retreat. I've never repeated that but I also can't undo it. If a person wanted to dig into who I was at that time my actual home would be a waste of time. Also I had no respect (or thought really) for other people's copyrights because that was something to deal with "someday".

TerminX, on 08 July 2016 - 03:55 PM, said:

I think at one point I even saw somebody's SSN somewhere.

icecoldduke, on 08 July 2016 - 06:13 PM, said:

I wonder who thought that was a good idea :/.

For a while all you needed to do to get my SSN was download my programs I wrote for college from my own webpage. I've already let go any illusion of not being open to attack on that front.

TerminX, on 09 July 2016 - 10:16 AM, said:

I don't think the world has become more corrupt as time has passed;

Nothing new under the sun... just more sun shining light on what always has been but more sun = more desire to look away creating more opportunity for stuff that normally thrives only in shadows to thrive where nobody is comfortable looking anymore.

Altered Reality, on 10 July 2016 - 01:11 PM, said:

My interest in the 1999-2002 stuff would mainly be to test my prediction that it wouldn't live up to its own mystique...

No... but it would have exceeded the 2002ish mystique had we committed.

Altered Reality, on 11 July 2016 - 03:26 AM, said:

Wieder said that many things from the 2001 trailer were fake.

Fake-ish. With some focus and commitment everything fake could have been put in a box (back then).

Altered Reality, on 11 July 2016 - 03:26 AM, said:

And I disagree about the Quake 1 and 2 builds: first...

I'm willing to confirm what Fred has said. What you have seen in videos for the Quake version is more or less what existed as far as I was ever shown.

DukeNukem64, on 10 July 2016 - 11:05 PM, said:

The 2001 game was almost shipable.

Eh... no. But 6-12 months of focus on shipping what the 2001 game was as it was would have gotten it there, yeah.

[PokeThePower]

icecoldduke, on 11 July 2016 - 06:59 AM, said:

You are disagreeing with a developer who was on the project?

I'm 100% capable of being stupid, ignorant, and forgetful. Only through repetition and confirmation from other sources can anything I say be taken seriously.

icecoldduke, on 11 July 2016 - 06:59 AM, said:

IMO what prompted the change to Unreal was it was a shinny new piece of technology. Shinny keys won again.

The change to Unreal was good. Really it was. The game would have suffered trying to fit in the limits of the Quake engine. However... everything that followed was unnecessary and everyone who was involved in it knows that. I've yet to hear anyone suggest otherwise. The problem was saying no to "we could..." when the question "can we?" came up. We could do anything, and did a lot of everything.

I'm on a project right now which has a firm release date but ALSO struggles with people respecting the answer of "We shouldn't" to the questions of "Can we?" and the technically correct response being "We could".

[OpenMaw]

It's exponential, really.

That happens with mods too. Everything get's excited, and wants to do more, add more. You end up with a runaway train if you don't start stamping out ideas or putting them to the side. It's good to have a clear goal and keep the objectives in focus.

[Altered Reality]

Wieder, on 17 July 2016 - 01:27 PM, said:

The change to Unreal was good. Really it was. The game would have suffered trying to fit in the limits of the Quake engine. However... everything that followed was unnecessary and everyone who was involved in it knows that. I've yet to hear anyone suggest otherwise. The problem was saying no to "we could..." when the question "can we?" came up. We could do anything, and did a lot of everything.

I can attest about Unreal mapping being better than Quake 2 mapping.
In 1999/2000 I did some Quake 2 mapping, and I remember the frustration with the very long execution times of QVIS3 and QRAD3. Also, I didn't know the limits of the engine, and I hit them pretty fast. I was making a map that was partially based on Hollywood Holocaust and partially on the 1997 DNF screenshot, and after finishing the outside section I left it compiling for about 20 hours, then the computer crashed. I don't know if it was an inherent limitation of the engine, a bug of the editing tools I used or my machine was just not powerful enough, but that was sufficient to make me quit Quake2 mapping forever.

I wonder if something like that ever happened to 3DRealms developers...

[deuxsonic]

Alright it crashed, we're getting Unreal.

[High Treason]

I tried Quake 2 mapping once, never again.

When I started messing with Build I had problems, the editor would crash, my levels would not work and all manner of crappy things happened. I remember the frustration involved, but the whole time it felt like it was my fault, that I simply didn't know enough about the engine yet to make it work the way I wanted it to and it was fun when I did get things to work, it was an awesome feeling. Obviously I kept working with it and by now I've done things that were probably thought to be impossible - arched brides, 24 hour clocks and some tough puzzles - I can build the basic outline of what I want in a very short space of time without hardly looking at what I am doing.

Quake 2 mapping on the other hand (It wasn't Quake 2 really, but another game on the engine, same tools) took me a long time to figure out. When I first loaded Build I thought I had to draw the level in 3D, as if I were viewing from the XY plane like in the game... This obviously got me nowhere so I read the docs and within minutes I had a few ugly square rooms with Tile #0 (Gray bricks, because it was Blood) that vaguely resembled my intentions. Meanwhile, the docs for QE4 hurt my head intensely, it took me over a day to make a square room and I did not get much further as the tools were not stable and I couldn't get a sense of scale or work with textures properly, everything seemed so convoluted and overly complicated just to do the simplest thing. In the end, after a few days of cussing the editor out I did manage to get the level into the game, no idea how, because I remember it being harder than just hitting save and starting the game with command line parameters, but anyway, I got it into the game only to find my map had no collision and I fell into the skybox immediately before the game crashed.

I seem to think I threw my mouse and keyboard (or the ones I was borrowing, because I only had a 386SX back then) before going on a rampage around the house leaving the error message on the screen. It was one of those deep rages that makes your insides boil, you know, when it almost feels like you need to take a piss or something because you're that mad you've nearly relinquished control of everything... I dunno, maybe that's just me. Anyway, I never went back and as I didn't really like the game anyway it now lives in its box somewhere and hasn't come out since the late 1990s. I never did figure out how to get custom textures and stuff into the game. Went back to Build mapping and didn't look back.

Haven't really dabbled in Unreal, but I've been around people who have used the editor in front of me. It looks better than the Quake one but I've never really had the mindset for 3D modelling type stuff, I think you either have it or you don't and I think I'm better staying away from it. Ha, it's a wonder I ever made any of that CGI really. Whatever, Build engine for life.


Edit: I was pretty adept at using Crysis Sandbox 2 though, I had fun playing with that. I used to mess with the AI making the KPA jump off of cliffs and drive over each other.

[Richard Shead]

Commando Nukem, on 17 July 2016 - 02:14 PM, said:

It's exponential, really.

That happens with mods too. Everything get's excited, and wants to do more, add more. You end up with a runaway train if you don't start stamping out ideas or putting them to the side. It's good to have a clear goal and keep the objectives in focus.

I guess cutting really is shipping. If only George had been a 16-year-old emo kid who hated the world.

[PikaCommando]

Once you go WYSIWYG, you can never go back.

[deuxsonic]

Unreal started as James Schmalz's creation where in the earliest days he was actually creating the maps as spreadsheet data and then running it through a program he made that actually loaded it as a map. As the project grew in scope and took on more people, Tim Sweeney offered to create the tools to create the game, and for a long time UnrealEd 1.0, which shipped with the game, was Visual Basic code and pretty unstable. After a rewrite in C, it was somewhat better. Unreal Engine 1.5, which games like Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex used, came with UnrealEd 2.0 (or 1.0 in the case of Deus Ex) which changed to from the 3-column layout to the 2-column and was increasingly stable. There was a transition period and the tools for Deus Ex, for example, come with UnrealEd 1.0 even though the game is rumored to have been completed using UnrealEd 2.0. There is some unofficial way that UnrealEd 2.0 can be used to work on Deus Ex content but that was never something I played with. Unreal Engine 2.0 came with UnrealEd 3.0 which is the version I'm most familiar with. If you look through the old screenshots of DNF's development there's at least one that shows "DukeEd" clearly using the UnrealEd 1.0 layout, so I'm curious what version or versions of UnrealEd were being used to work on DNF. If they did a lot of development using UnrealEd 1.0 that may have been a frustrating experience in itself. Since we know that they transitioned to Unreal Engine 1.5 and then later integrated elements of 2.0, were UnrealEd 2.0 and 3.0 used during development?

[OpenMaw]

Looking through the scripts and such of DNF as released, it's pretty amazing the Frankenstein-monster even works at all. It's just surreal to think it's still "Unreal 1" echoed in there.

[Altered Reality]

deuxsonic, on 18 July 2016 - 05:09 PM, said:

Alright it crashed, we're getting Unreal.

It was more like "What?! It doesn't even support a tiny little L-shaped open area! Then I can't finish my map, because if I retry compiling it, it'll crash over and over again! And even if it doesn't, it's not worth it to wait for a whole day just to see if it looks good. I wonder if UnrealEd performs better..."
Mapping for Unreal was a liberation: levels compiled in seconds instead of hours and I could make much wider open areas.

High Treason, on 18 July 2016 - 05:27 PM, said:

Meanwhile, the docs for QE4 hurt my head intensely, it took me over a day to make a square room and I did not get much further as the tools were not stable and I couldn't get a sense of scale or work with textures properly, everything seemed so convoluted and overly complicated just to do the simplest thing. In the end, after a few days of cussing the editor out I did manage to get the level into the game, no idea how, because I remember it being harder than just hitting save and starting the game with command line parameters, but anyway, I got it into the game only to find my map had no collision and I fell into the skybox immediately before the game crashed.

I remember trying a level editor (don't remember which one) and thinking it was completely abstruse and impenetrable, then trying QuArK and finding it very user-friendly (incidentally, I had already had a very similar experience with Doom 2 mapping: I had tried DEU2 and thought it was unusable, then I tried WadAuthor and it was extremely easy). There was never any misunderstanding about how to compile the levels, because the editor itself guided me into installing and configuring QBSP3, QVIS3 and QRAD3. I had managed to get custom textures in there easily, it's just that whenever I tried to make a slightly large open area, the compilation time greatly exceeded my patience.

High Treason, on 18 July 2016 - 05:27 PM, said:

Haven't really dabbled in Unreal, but I've been around people who have used the editor in front of me. It looks better than the Quake one but I've never really had the mindset for 3D modelling type stuff, I think you either have it or you don't and I think I'm better staying away from it.

Compared to Quake2 mapping, UnrealEd is heaven. Everything is self-contained (no external programs). It's not completely WYSIWYG, but it almost is, and levels compile ridiculously fast, even on a risible machine like the one I was using in 2000 (Pentium @ 200 MHz w/MMX). It's just more efficient because there's no big delay between doing something and seeing results, so, if it looks wrong, you can just go back and fix it, and you can do it iteratively without wasting lots of time hoping that the corrections you made a day or so before actually work.

Commando Nukem, on 18 July 2016 - 09:28 PM, said:

Looking through the scripts and such of DNF as released, it's pretty amazing the Frankenstein-monster even works at all. It's just surreal to think it's still "Unreal 1" echoed in there.

Some things are pretty obvious. The RPG works like the Eightball (aim at an enemy long enough and a heat-seeking mode is activated); the Impregnader works like the GES BioRifle (both shoot gobs of green explosive goo); the freezethrower recharges itself like the Dispersion Pistol; the impregnators attack like the Spinners (they both throw gobs of poisonous goo at you); the railgun works like an ASMD rifle without alt-fire; the holoduke could already be done in Unreal (Jess Crable made a hologram generator for Unreal, then joined 3DRealms to work at DNF)

[PikaCommando]

Altered Reality, on 19 July 2016 - 02:21 AM, said:

Compared to Quake2 mapping, UnrealEd is heaven. Everything is self-contained (no external programs). It's not completely WYSIWYG, but it almost is, and levels compile ridiculously fast, even on a risible machine like the one I was using in 2000 (Pentium @ 200 MHz w/MMX). It's just more efficient because there's no big delay between doing something and seeing results, so, if it looks wrong, you can just go back and fix it, and you can do it iteratively without wasting lots of time hoping that the corrections you made a day or so before actually work.


Some things are pretty obvious. The RPG works like the Eightball (aim at an enemy long enough and a heat-seeking mode is activated); the Impregnader works like the GES BioRifle (both shoot gobs of green explosive goo); the freezethrower recharges itself like the Dispersion Pistol; the impregnators attack like the Spinners (they both throw gobs of poisonous goo at you); the railgun works like an ASMD rifle without alt-fire; the holoduke could already be done in Unreal (Jess Crable made a hologram generator for Unreal, then joined 3DRealms to work at DNF)

I find HL mapping pretty troublesome too. Hammer really loves to crash.

Also, wow. I never noticed that. Does this mean DNF is the biggest Unreal TC ever?

[Loke]

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 03:04 AM, said:

I find HL mapping pretty troublesome too. Hammer really loves to crash.

Try J.A.C.K (previously known as Jackhammer). Cool thing about it is that it not only supports Half-Life you can also map for Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Hexen II and Gunman Chronicles. Hammer 3.5 feels pretty outdated nowadays.

[Daedolon]

Is it out yet? I heard about something good for Hexen II, someone here was showing screenshots but said the tool is not available yet.

[Loke]

Download links here: http://jack.hlfx.ru/en/download.html

[Altered Reality]

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 03:04 AM, said:

Also, wow. I never noticed that. Does this mean DNF is the biggest Unreal TC ever?

Pretty much, except for the new renderer. It's also worth to mention Unreal4Ever, which adds many Duke Nukem-like weapons to Unreal (freezethrower, shrinker/expander, tripmines, pipebombs...). Case in point: the "Duke Nukem 98" proof of concept levels I had made in 2011.

[Altered Reality]

Loke, on 19 July 2016 - 03:44 AM, said:

Try J.A.C.K (previously known as Jackhammer). Cool thing about it is that it not only supports Half-Life you can also map for Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Hexen II and Gunman Chronicles. Hammer 3.5 feels pretty outdated nowadays.

How does it compare to GTKRadiant?

[oasiz]

Most of the city shots on D3D are just lifted off from L6.map you see in LD, I think pretty much all are.

Here are some quick mockups to help put these beta city snaps and wondering to rest, obviously missing some textures here and couldn't be bothered to stick in retail ones to fill in some gaps..
More comparisons on the same pics: HERE

Judging by that white stained wall, most of the city ones are snapped around the corner what ended up housing the "Duke nukem must die!" sign.
At least 5 revisions on that corner area exist based on that 1995 vid / LD and shots before it turned in to a more self contained map that was E1L2.

1995 vid has no sloped roofs but has walls added to separate L1 and L2, out of these it seems to be the earliest after LD since that huge monitor is still in the same height and with static noise.
Possibly the same build as D3D39.PCX since the pistol seems to slightly offset (rotation) and all visuals match. Mockup done in street3a

Between builds, some buildings got moved around and such, there is not much continuity between these mockups.
> street1a, Shot discussed earlier, this one tries to replicate that.
> street2a, different textures and retail palette. Looks very similar to the build as the original small snap earlier (street1a is based on) but the corner bit on the grey building is different.
> street1c shows parallax in the distance, probably the only "L6-like" map with a visibly missing E1L1 section, screenshot from some magazine.

> mp1 - Just a quick mockup of one screenshot, funny how you can see that placeholder "mirror mirror on the wall..." texture in the back.

Attached File(s)

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•  street2a.png (825.79K)
  Number of downloads: 154
•  mp1.png (731.63K)
  Number of downloads: 185
•  street3a.png (664.38K)
  Number of downloads: 135

[Richard Shead]

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 03:04 AM, said:

Does this mean DNF is the biggest Unreal TC ever?

Altered Reality, on 19 July 2016 - 07:21 AM, said:

Pretty much, except for the new renderer.

"If DNF was a TC, it would be done by now."
- Senior level designer Stephen Cole, circa 2000

[Altered Reality]

Duke Rocks, on 19 July 2016 - 10:40 AM, said:

"If DNF was a TC, it would be done by now."
- Senior level designer Stephen Cole, circa 2000

The problem with that statement (I thought it was George who said that, BTW) is the ambiguity to define "total conversion". What did Stephen Cole have in mind? How many levels? How big? How many changes to the game entities are necessary before something starts to be a total conversion, and how many before it stops being one? Does the presence of an autonomous executable automatically disqualify it? What about rendering options the original doesn't have? Bone-based animation instead of the original vertex-based animation? The addition of a physics system? Was "Klingon: Honor Guard" a total conversion? Was Deus Ex a total conversion? Was "Virtual Reality Notre-Dame" a total conversion?

See? A sentence like that raises too many questions to be significant per se.

[MusicallyInspired]

KHG certainly felt like a TC. The menus are more or less the same as well as the game functionality (right down to the freaky warping colour palette effect in the game title text). The only real addition was the custom cutscene videos and the fact that each level was a self-contained maze instead of a linear experience that didn't stop like Unreal.

I really liked KHG. I remember getting it as a kid for my birthday or Christmas or something. It wouldn't work on our computer, though, because of some problem reading the disc or possibly with our CD-ROM drive itself. It was only a double-speed drive and it recommended a quad-speed or higher. Watching the videos was definitely slow. But it just wouldn't start up was the main problem. I also remember the required 250MB disk space requirement being quite high lol. I recall remember imagining what the game would be like playing as a klingon and thought it was so cool. For that reason and my nostalgia I probably like it a little more than it deserves, but I still enjoy it today. Then suddenly it started working. I don't remember why or how. I do remember being quite happy. It was the first official Star Trek FPS game, even if it was a Klingon game that had nothing at all to do with the Federation (there's not one human character or Starfleet ship in the game).

[icecoldduke]

Wieder, on 17 July 2016 - 01:27 PM, said:

The change to Unreal was good. Really it was. The game would have suffered trying to fit in the limits of the Quake engine. However... everything that followed was unnecessary and everyone who was involved in it knows that. I've yet to hear anyone suggest otherwise. The problem was saying no to "we could..." when the question "can we?" came up. We could do anything, and did a lot of everything.

I'm on a project right now which has a firm release date but ALSO struggles with people respecting the answer of "We shouldn't" to the questions of "Can we?" and the technically correct response being "We could".

I'm not arguing which engine was better(Unreal would have won hands down); DNF could have shipped on idTech 2(a lot of games shipped on idTech 2), even if 3dr had to cut some of the fanciness out of the project. I'm always against switching engines mid project . The choice to buy idTech 2 in the first place was a bad decision, then switching to mid project was IMO a even worse decision. If George and Scott had to deal with the limits of the engine, the game might have been a success(makes it harder to feature pedal when the engine is hitting hard limits). It also seems like George and Scott were against the idea of planning .

EDIT:
It probably wasn't that bad of a switch since you guys didn't have much content done besides those one off scenes we have all seen in the trailers. But I still believe if George and Scott didn't have the money to switch to Unreal; and you guys have to ship with idTech 2, DNF would not be the mess it is today. Those hard limits would have saved DNF.

[Altered Reality]

icecoldduke, on 19 July 2016 - 02:53 PM, said:

If George and Scott had to deal with the limits of the engine, the game might have been a success(makes it harder to feature pedal when the engine is hitting hard limits). It also seems like George and Scott were against the idea of planning .

EDIT:
It probably wasn't that bad of a switch since you guys didn't have much content done besides those one off scenes we have all seen in the trailers. But I still believe if George and Scott didn't have the money to switch to Unreal; and you guys have to ship with idTech 2, DNF would not be the mess it is today. Those hard limits would have saved DNF.

I agree. And now that I think about it... maybe George did it because he thought too much like a gamer, as opposed to the owner of a company.
From the perspective of a gamer, switching from Quake 2 mapping to Unreal mapping makes sense: for the price of a game you get a much better engine, and you bypass all problems of slowness, crashes, inability to deal with wide areas and so on, while the alternative approach of getting a better computer in an attempt to counteract the engine's limitations would be much more expensive.
But for the head of a company, getting new computers to mitigate the problems is the cheapest solution. You are not just buying a game, you're buying the (much more expensive) authorization to use external technology to make a commercial product. You are not making maps, you are making a complete product you expect to sell. You're not just learning to use another tool for fun, you're investing your work time training and paying your staff to learn new techniques and redo what maybe they had already done with the old engine. The prospect is not just a delay in the release of your creation, it's a huge waste of time and money.
Ultimately, from the perspective of a company owner, the correct response to "the Quake 2 engine cannot render the areas around the Hoover Dam" is not "we switch to an engine that can". It's "we cut the areas around the Hoover Dam".

[deuxsonic]

They should have just finished the first Unreal-engine incarnation before they threw dynamic lighting into it and released that.

[Micky C]

icecoldduke, on 19 July 2016 - 02:53 PM, said:

I'm always against switching engines mid project .

I thought one of the main downfalls of DNF was they kept writing new renderers for the engine. You wouldn't be a fan of that now would you?

[Richard Shead]

Altered Reality, on 19 July 2016 - 11:19 AM, said:

The problem with that statement (I thought it was George who said that, BTW) is the ambiguity to define "total conversion". What did Stephen Cole have in mind? How many levels? How big? How many changes to the game entities are necessary before something starts to be a total conversion, and how many before it stops being one? Does the presence of an autonomous executable automatically disqualify it? What about rendering options the original doesn't have? Bone-based animation instead of the original vertex-based animation? The addition of a physics system? Was "Klingon: Honor Guard" a total conversion? Was Deus Ex a total conversion? Was "Virtual Reality Notre-Dame" a total conversion?

See? A sentence like that raises too many questions to be significant per se.

From the entirety of his quote, I can only infer that he was speaking of your average fan-made TC. I presume a DNF TC(in his mind) would basically be an untouched Unreal Engine with a Duke-related theme. Keep in mind that he was talking at a time when not very many - if any - projects labeled as "TCs" could rival full retail games when it came to added or enhanced features. I guess there's always been a bit of a grey area as to what constitutes a TC versus a standalone product.