[PikaCommando]

I wonder how painful was it for Wieder to make that Lake Mead map in DOOLE/DukeCraft/DuArK?

[deuxsonic]

Duke Rocks, on 19 July 2016 - 06:47 PM, said:

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.

What I use to separate them is whether the base game is required to run the TC. If it's standalone, then it is it's own game. You could call it a standalone TC but I think they're the same thing. Making changes to the engine is not a requirement to have a new game. Look at the games that were made for free using the Unreal Engine 3 UDK.

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

I wonder how painful was it for Wieder to make that Lake Mead map in DOOLE/DukeCraft/DuArK?

UnrealEd 1.0 as far as I can tell. Maybe he'll share what that was like.

[icecoldduke]

deuxsonic, on 19 July 2016 - 07:41 PM, said:

Making changes to the engine is not a requirement to have a new game.

+10000.

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

I wonder how painful was it for Wieder to make that Lake Mead map in DOOLE/DukeCraft/DuArK?

Didn't Quake 2 use Radiant? Or did radiant come out for idTech 3 and get back ported to Q2?

[deuxsonic]

Id used a tool named QuakeEd 4 to make the maps for Quake 2. Robert Duffy then used the source from this to create QERadiant, a side project which became popular, which id then changed and brought in as their official editor for Quake 3, Q3Radiant. GTKRadiant took this and used GTK+ to make it platform independent and it became game independent as well (supporting a huge number of games.) DoomEd, which is part of DOOM 3, is closely related to Q3Radiant, and then DarkRadiant was forked from GTKRadiant specifically for id Tech 4, The Dark Mod in particular. At the time, this was basically Timothee Besset's job at id was to maintain the editor. Since he's not with id now and id isn't really id anymore, I don't know who maintains it now.

[Altered Reality]

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

I wonder how painful was it for Wieder to make that Lake Mead map in DOOLE/DukeCraft/DuArK?

He always said he only worked on the Unreal engine incarnation of DNF.

[deuxsonic]

Even after they started replacing the engine I would be surprised if UnrealEd changed considerably as, at least in my opinion, is one of the best map editors (it certainly was back then even if it had a much steeper learning curve than Build considering what could be done with it), particularly being that it's also always been the official one and when it was bundled with Unreal and installed with the game which took it even further than just having it as an extra on the disc like the tools for the main Build engine games. I can't think of a time when there was ever a demand for a 3rd party replacement.

[PokeThePower]

icecoldduke, on 11 July 2016 - 08:40 AM, said:

Hindsight is always 20/20 but based on the limited information thats out right now, George and Scott seemed to be focused on graphical showcase pieces, and one off scripted sequences rather then gameplay.

Scott was barely involved. Not in a bad way. One might be inclined to say he should have brought a hammer down... but it wasn't that simple of a company arrangement and no amount of "well I woulda" will be anything more than posturing.

Altered Reality, on 11 July 2016 - 10:02 AM, said:

It would've looked like this: sin.png
(screenshot from a SiN playthrough)

Using some of the tricks I used on Waterworks and Oilrig... I could have gotten the dam closer to the DNF vision than the Sin one. But yeah... never could have gotten it to what Unreal made viable.

PikaCommando, on 11 July 2016 - 04:00 PM, said:

I think this Lake Mead would have worked the same way with the Q2 Highway level; it's just a small box with scrolling skyboxes like the train DM level in SiN. Since Fred said that the Unreal DNF Highway level has free-roaming, I assume this would be the same with the Unreal Lake Mead level, hence the crashing through the docks scene in the trailer (which Wieder said was Playable).

Nope... Lake Mead was always a super fancy "train" level. What I had coded up was an ability for prefab scenarios to attach to the "tracks" in sequence. Basically the boat was scripted to fall out of the ship, land in the water, and then was attached/reattached to a sequence of nodes that had different behavior available. One node would just follow the deformation of the water (really cool when the mothership came hovering over the boat along with a 200 foot tidal wave circle surrounding it due to the "gravity field" or whatever). The water deformation also happened based on explosions... so if a mine went off next to you or an alien ship crashed next to you, it would dip the water and the boat would dip along with it.

Other nodes were 100% spline path scripted... such as crashing through the docks (and another much more advanced sequence involving a bridge going in and out of pillars).

The terrain spawning on the left and right was able to be randomly generated (random static meshes.... not outright terrain) and then switch to specific terrain when a certain node sequence was coming up. It allowed for it to have some "decent" variation where the coastline would come close or disappear into the distance reducing the feeling of moving down a perpetual canyon.

You can see some kind of rough aspects of this in the 2003 video...

Altered Reality, on 18 July 2016 - 05:03 PM, said:

I can attest about Unreal mapping being better than Quake 2 mapping.

It depends on what sort of environment you want to build. SinEd was lovely, and Sin came with a fantastic set of features. CoD tools are highly similar (even to this day) and I would still choose to work in CoD over Unreal personally.

I spent a long time making bets with the Unreal promoters at 3DR to propose ANY geo suggestion and I guaranteed I could build it faster in SinEd than they could in Unreal. We never actually got to a real competition, but I did eventually get a decent clip tool and edge drag implemented... and wound up writing a ton of UnrealEd utility functions as well as actors for gameplay to make so by the end DukeEd was hard to walk away from.

Altered Reality, on 18 July 2016 - 05:03 PM, said:

In 1999/2000 I did some Quake 2 mapping, and I remember the frustration with the very long execution times of QVIS3 and QRAD3.

Compile times are indeed the bitch. However no Unreal game of any substance will ever run at 60fps.

Text based data + a legitimate scripting language for gameplay is better for the likes of me thus my inherent annoyance with Unreal. However I understand the popularity of WYSIWYG from a commercial and consumer standpoint.

PikaCommando, on 18 July 2016 - 08:09 PM, said:

Once you go WYSIWYG, you can never go back.

I've had to go back and forth a lot in my career... and I'm not a fan of my toolset trying to protect me or predict me. I'll take CoD 4 over current Unreal any day. I really don't like Unreal, and feel Unity straddles the line kind of awkwardly, but I can appreciate the magnificent power Unreal hands to people in the first 5 minutes of touching it.

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.

It makes me sad you don't get to see the historical scripts. That's where the real juice is. They started to take themselves seriously after the exodus.

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

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.

Yeah... the reality of what was done in Q2 made the switch to Unreal something that even in hindsight... I can't disagree with. However it set a pattern that carried more consequences than necessary. And of course, without the money of Duke 3D, Max Payne, etc... an entertaining game would have been made in idtech.

Altered Reality, on 19 July 2016 - 05:18 PM, said:

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".

The switch to Unreal was smart. I'll never be able to prove it... can only reinforce it. As a company owner with a budget, the switch was smart. The failure to lock things down after that was not. I'm very confident we would have sold many more units in Unreal and provided Duke 3D fans something that they actually wanted as opposed to "it's Duke... but it still can't shake that Quake TC feel". But we'd have had to lock down that 2001 direction and put it in a box. We didn't, so poo poo on me.

[PokeThePower]

PikaCommando, on 19 July 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

I wonder how painful was it for Wieder to make that Lake Mead map in DOOLE/DukeCraft/DuArK?

I made a train map in Sin, but it was stupidly simple. What I had going in Unreal would have been completely impossible in idtech. You've never really seen the full Lake Mead. Or Slick Willy.

icecoldduke, on 19 July 2016 - 08:46 PM, said:

Didn't Quake 2 use Radiant? Or did radiant come out for idTech 3 and get back ported to Q2?

I love Radiant. However as one of the people I work with right now has said in the past... "The more Radiant makes sense... the less the rest of the world makes sense."

[Richard Shead]

Wieder, on 22 July 2016 - 05:53 PM, said:

You've never really seen the full Lake Mead. Or Slick Willy.

[PikaCommando]

Say, which alien's mothership is that? In the 1998 DNF it was Chinooks piloted by the Army Ants (I don't think aliens were involved in 1998 Duke?) but the only aliens we know of in 2001 DNF are the Octabrains, Greys, and the giant roaches (which seems to be gone by 2003 and replaced by the cast of DN3D in 2006).

[KareBear]

Thanks to Paul Richards concept art we know the giant roaches were called Snatchers,they seemed that have been replaced in function by the Pregnators in the final game.There was also and alien called a Bellowsaur which you can see in one of the 2003 screenshots released with DNF.

[PokeThePower]

Duke Rocks, on 22 July 2016 - 09:40 PM, said:

What saddens me most is Fred, etc... probably never got a decent snapshot of Slick Willy when it was playable with "fake" VO start to finish.

Lake Mead is the only mission, as far as I know, that reached completion enough that we started soliciting playtest feedback from non-DNF 3DR people.

PikaCommando, on 23 July 2016 - 01:17 AM, said:

Say, which alien's mothership is that? In the 1998 DNF it was Chinooks piloted by the Army Ants (I don't think aliens were involved in 1998 Duke?) but the only aliens we know of in 2001 DNF are the Octabrains, Greys, and the giant roaches (which seems to be gone by 2003 and replaced by the cast of DN3D in 2006).

I'm referring to the ship you can see at the end of the 2003 video. The alien drone ships you see flying in toward Duke's boat were all spawning from that giant ship in the background. It really was pretty huge and when it started to approach you and engaged the "show off water deformation tech" mode... there was no mistaking its existence. A bowl about a half mile in diameter and 200 feet tall at the edges was formed under it to stage the final battle.

There were always aliens involved in 3DR Duke... but which ones were active at any one time is hard to pin down in hindsight without actually loading the data.

At one point in Slick Willy there was a Pig Cop who had "gone good" left over from the LA Invasion and was helping Duke out.

You are right though, in the 2001 era of development there was a lot more human betrayal or just infection and less overt aliens fully formed invading our safe space. The logical feature of being able to see who has a "roach" and who doesn't was played with multiple times. Some of that is because we just hadn't gotten around to visually designing and implementing the other aliens, some of it was because the human infection angle was stronger at the time.

You can partially blame/credit me for shifting the creature design back to the Duke 3D characters once we had gotten to absurd delay scenarios. I implemented several ambient creatures (such as the tentacle spitters), and we played around with a lot of kind of out there for Duke characters such as the pseudo Silent Hill/The Ring girl with the tentacle arm... but at one point the effort shifted to a focus on updating the enemies we and the players already knew. New players would still find them interesting, and old players would enjoy seeing them fully 3D realized and updated with some new behaviors the aliens brought with them for their followup invasion.

That was the thinking at least.

KareBear, on 23 July 2016 - 06:04 AM, said:

Thanks to Paul Richards concept art we know the giant roaches were called Snatchers,they seemed that have been replaced in function by the Pregnators in the final game.There was also and alien called a Bellowsaur which you can see in one of the 2003 screenshots released with DNF.

Bellowsaur was doomed from the start, but did have a modest life in the development.

At one point there was a gun proposed that involved you picking up a pregnator and... exciting it.

[HulkNukem]

All this makes me want a new Quake 2 engine/Unreal 1 engine type FPS game.

[MusicallyInspired]

Well, we got that Quake episode by Machine Games.

I'd really like to see an Unreal 1 expansion actually. I don't know why I love that game so much. Just really resonated I guess.

[Moggimus]

MusicallyInspired, on 23 July 2016 - 08:26 AM, said:

Well, we got that Quake episode by Machine Games.

I'd really like to see an Unreal 1 expansion actually. I don't know why I love that game so much. Just really resonated I guess.

Oh I forgot all about that Quake episode. I downloaded it but didn't get around to it yet.

I'd love to see new Quake 1/2 & Unreal 1 games. Another Unreal 1 expansion would be great too... Unreal is one of my favorites. I just replayed it last month; been meaning to play Return to Na Pali again as well. Other than the stupid narrative in it I remember the maps being pretty good.

[PikaCommando]

Who would be the final boss? We know it's the Octaking in the 2006 version based on the leaked plot outline and it's probably Dr. Proton in the 1998 version, but who's the candidate for the 2001/2003 version?

Also, looking at the 2006 footage, it really is a weird fusion of (visually upgraded) 2003 and final (the Vegas section looks like the same levels shown in 2003 but the Dam section looks almost the same as it is now). Why didn't they keep the night sky? Personally, I think the dynamic lighting made the game look at its most beautiful (and most atmospheric) in 2005 than it was in 2002. I don't know how, but both the beautiful lighting and atmosphere are completely gone in final.

[deuxsonic]

How did the good pigcop work? They just make pig noises. Did duke have some kind of translator built into his James Bond gadget sunglasses?

MusicallyInspired, on 23 July 2016 - 08:26 AM, said:

Well, we got that Quake episode by Machine Games.

I'd really like to see an Unreal 1 expansion actually. I don't know why I love that game so much. Just really resonated I guess.

moggimus, on 23 July 2016 - 08:38 AM, said:

Oh I forgot all about that Quake episode. I downloaded it but didn't get around to it yet.

I'd love to see new Quake 1/2 & Unreal 1 games. Another Unreal 1 expansion would be great too... Unreal is one of my favorites. I just replayed it last month; been meaning to play Return to Na Pali again as well. Other than the stupid narrative in it I remember the maps being pretty good.

Return To Na Pali was good, being mostly maps that were cut from the main game. Unreal had a lengthy single player game, being I think 38 maps and most of them were not small maps, but they did a ton more that didn't make it into the game, some of which showed up in RTNP and the game's betas. Did you guys play Operation: Na Pali? It had annoying voiceover work but it's fun as another Unreal single player experience.

[PikaCommando]

Didn't the Pigcop at the end of E1L2 speak English?

[HulkNukem]

IIRC, they changed it to daytime during the strip for two reasons.
1. They wanted to get away from the strip at night because that's what all media always goes for when it comes to Vegas and they wanted to be unique and different in that regard (Not acceptable answer)
2. The engine couldn't handle all the lights at night (More acceptable answer)

Putting it during the day is just another bad choice when it came to the final DNF product; there is a reason all media shows the strip at night.

[deuxsonic]

PikaCommando, on 23 July 2016 - 09:53 AM, said:

Didn't the Pigcop at the end of E1L2 speak English?

I've never been sure because you can go into the trap and instantly kill both pigcops that come from behind the moving wall and the speech keeps playing as though it's someone else saying it.

[HulkNukem]

This is going off really old memory, don't you hear the same voice in Death Row when you go into that circular room with the computer in the middle with a hologram of one of the bosses heads? I swear there's a sound clip in there with the same voice.

[deuxsonic]

HulkNukem, on 23 July 2016 - 10:17 AM, said:

This is going off really old memory, don't you hear the same voice in Death Row when you go into that circular room with the computer in the middle with a hologram of one of the bosses heads? I swear there's a sound clip in there with the same voice.

Yeah it's the room with the Battlelord "hologram" in the center. It could have been the Battlelord both times.

[Moggimus]

HulkNukem, on 23 July 2016 - 10:17 AM, said:

This is going off really old memory, don't you hear the same voice in Death Row when you go into that circular room with the computer in the middle with a hologram of one of the bosses heads? I swear there's a sound clip in there with the same voice.

deuxsonic, on 23 July 2016 - 10:20 AM, said:

Yeah it's the room with the Battlelord "hologram" in the center. It could have been the Battlelord both times.

Yeah, the voice in the clips from both E1L2/L3 sound like the same person to me. In Death Row it makes sense that the Battlelord would be the one speaking. I wonder if those VO were done by Joe Siegler or someone else on the dev team, because it doesn't sound like JSJ at all to me.

[Jblade]

Quote

Why didn't they keep the night sky?

This is what I'd like to know as well, even if it was after you left Weider I'm curious what your thoughts on the reason for the switch to day was.

Either way this stuff is incredibly fascinating, thank you a million times for sharing it with us!

Quote

How did the good pigcop work? They just make pig noises. Did duke have some kind of translator built into his James Bond gadget sunglasses?

They can talk, they talk to Duke at the end of Red Light district. They'd probably rather just not though.

[neznam]

Oh well. Now that Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior are out of the spotlight, why not take this opportunity to shine a light on ROTT and the Blake Stone series, 2 games not often spoken about? I'm sure those old "Wolfenstein 3D Part II: Rise of the Triad" specs from the 3D Realms website a while back must'v materialised into something before the whole concept was canned in favour of a story independent from Wolf 3D. I mean, even though the name may have been different from that of the final product, the IP is still the same, so it shouldn't really be a problem for 3D Realms to release early ROTT builds. An early build of Aliens of Gold or Planet Strike sounds like it might be cool too (if Apogee was actually saving that kind of stuff from that long ago, that is).

I'd pay to play a new Blake Stone game. I don't understand why the new 3D Realms has to fixate their efforts over IP's in a completely hopeless legal situation when they could be developing new titles for the semi-recognisable IP's they still own. Hey, maybe if they took ROTT in a direction where it wasn't just an overgrown inside joke between a long dissolved dev team from the early 90's, they could actually do something good with it. My advice to Fred would be to salvage and rejuvenate the cherished and classic IP's you still own rather than dwell pointlessly on the ones you don't.

3D Realms' Duke days are over. Same goes for Shadow Warrior. Realistically, the IP's just aren't coming back. Time to let go. Any "boycott" of Gearbox by some dreamers on Duke4.net won't work because simply put, no one cares. I seriously doubt that there are even enough people in any major US city with an interest in a boycott to fill a school cafeteria. You could make the most of whatever Gearbox'l release under the Duke IP and salvage some sort of joy in knowing that the character isn't gone for good (and may very well develop into something better post-DNF), or you could continue plotting the great forum revolution to take Duke back from Gearbox and keep wallowing in pessimism and cynicism.

[deuxsonic]

I guarantee you one day that stuff leaks. There is more than one copy of it and something with that level of interest isn't going to stay buried.

[Kathy]

It might just get lost, like most of the stuff does.

[deuxsonic]

...and then found by someone else. I guess if you went out of your way to try and destroy every copy of it.

[Altered Reality]

neznam, on 23 July 2016 - 01:19 PM, said:

I'd pay to play a new Blake Stone game. I don't understand why the new 3D Realms has to fixate their efforts over IP's in a completely hopeless legal situation when they could be developing new titles for the semi-recognisable IP's they still own.

Same. I think that IP deserves to be more than what it is now, and it's a shame that 3DRealms never used it again since the 1990s.

HulkNukem, on 23 July 2016 - 08:22 AM, said:

All this makes me want a new Quake 2 engine/Unreal 1 engine type FPS game.

Something like this?

[HulkNukem]

Not a knockoff though, a new original IP using one of the older engines, limitations and all.
Something like the Bombshell prequel except for early polygonal models and low res textures!