[Mark]

Would you at least be a little happy if they make it with an 8bit palette, software rendering but runs natively in Windows? ( like eduke32 )

[TerminX]

There's a big difference between retro and outright 1:1 reproduction of 90's techniques. This project is retro. I can't really say too much about it, but it does use a brand new 8-bit palette, which all assets will use. I'm really excited about it.

[oasiz]

This is awesome news, can't wait to crush this game with speed running it !



Sorry but I have to heavily disagree with making it for DOS
Making it for DOS would require you to deal with retarded limitations, making it sure that it runs on various hardware configurations that less than .1% of your average gamer owns.
After all this you'd still have to actually make it playable for the rest, safe to assume that dosbox would be used.
As you are already not running it "true to original", what's the point ?
With dosbox, you have an extra layer on top that requires a ton of extra performance, if lower FPS in something you really want to simulate then you should do it externally and not use 100% host CPU to accomplish that and get varying results per system.

For coding you'd deal with all sorts of performance limitations, memory segmentation, etc.. Why not possibly utilize +10yr worth of "under the hood" bug fixes that don't change the game play experience at all, aside from some very tiny tweaks that are really only d3d specific in eduke's case. Again, these can just be performance/showstopper fixes.

TROR? When other games used ROR already with a different implementation. I don't get this point.
You're really just artificially limiting yourself by forcing yourself to achieve the same result with worse tools.

I'd say that in this case the end result counts the most. Stuff like megaman 9/10 work brilliantly in my opinion, It's still very true to the originals while cutting restrictions just enough to give more artistic freedom. They clearly knew what they wanted to achieve.

And you refer to pseudo, sure.
Coding for a real platform can be a huge task, you need at least one~ year of coding experience on the platform alone to learn most of it's quirks. Systems are limited, early games on those tended to be simple just because they usually did what the hardware was designed for. NES PPU is very buggy and error prone to program for. With commodore systems you'd be swapping floppies or enjoying long load times, Not to mention that DOS had it's fair share of issues to account for. Replicating some these are features that might have been part of the overall experience but let's be honest, back then such sprite flicker/quirk/load time/etc.. would have been considered undesirable.

It's all about how much effort you want to put in to it to make it as true as possible, you don't have to do a 1:1 clone to get the essence of it right.

One of the very few "true" games I can think of is Fantasy Zone II remake for arcade, even that doubled RAM compared to the last revision of system 16, possibly to make it less painful to code for as well.

Again, sorry for the rant.

Looking really forward to more info on this!

[Mr. Tibbs]

Sounds like a really cool project. Any estimate for when we'll get some solid details?

Who cares if it's not a 100% faithful? Despite using more colors than any 8-bit platformer, Shovel Knight successfully evoked why people loved that era. More importantly, it was an awesome game.

[Hank]

Not sure what retro really means.
Some of the older games were very good games. And some of the older games really sucked.
I'll wait what will be published; just because one uses original (older) game principles and techno, does not guarantee a good game.

[DavoX]

Looking forward to this

[brullov]

DavoX, on 26 July 2015 - 02:15 PM, said:

Looking forward to this

Me too. I think that guys who are making this game are really cool.

[MusicallyInspired]

Sounds awesome and unique! I hope they'll have some sweet retro-influenced music as well.

[Radar]

This sounds awesome.

[Marphy Black]

But can we trust whoever these mystery retro developers may be? They could be any old yokels!

[MetHy]

Altered Reality, on 26 July 2015 - 11:20 AM, said:

Yeah, key word being PSEUDO. I'm all about historical accuracy, and creating an imaginary version of the past with the only goal of making the real past look better than it really was brings my piss to a boil. It's no different than what Stalin did when he modified historical photographs in order to make people remember past events differently than they happened.

It's not about "making the past look better than it was", it's about taking the best out of past and present in order to make a better game.

For instance we all know that DN3D was dubbed down in terms of detailing just before release in order to make it play better on lower specs systems.

We also all remember what it was to run a usermap with a lot of sprites seen at the same time or with a huge visibility. It ran terrible. And in my case, it ran terrible even if I ran the game in 320*200 with details set to low.

Another example could be mirrors and how laggy they'd make the game, or Shadow Warrior's RoR system, which as a result meant devs had to limit their use of it.

The original DN3D limited itself to making maps that were FAR from reaching the wall limit in order for them to play well on all systems.

The advantage of not worrying about DOS compatibility is you can do anything you want without having to worry about optimization or specs. This is a godsend for a PC dev.
Should they really limit the game by a HUGE margin only so that a couple of people may run it in fucking DOSbox (which in itself is ALSO making the past look better; because you run Blood in 800*600 lagless in Dosbox on your computer nowadays doesn't mean you could have done the same on your computer at the time...) and for the sake of "historical accuracy" ?

There is no historical accuracy worth caring about, because historically speaking, 3DR and Monolith could have done a LOT more with their ROR systems, they didn't because otherwise only a handful of people with high end computer (for the time) could have hoped to even launch the first map. But they could have. They didn't so more people could play their games.

I remember Wieder talking about 3DR experiencing with TROR over TROR over TROR, with Build, after the release of Atomic Edition. I remember Wieder saying something like "there was as much TROR as your computer could handle". You can't say this next game isn't accurate because it doesn't run in DOS specs from the early 90's. 3DR's next Build game wouldn't have, either. And this is the next 3DR Build game.

Let's also not forget that the minimum specs for Build games kept getting more demanding between 95 and 98, so where is the "historical" limit? Limiting yourself to Exhumed minimum specs wouldn't be accurate because those aren't the same as Shadow Warrior's. Limiting yourself to Shadow Warrior's minimum specs wouldn't be accurate either because 3DR's next Build game featuring "as much TROR as your computer could stomach", had it ever been made, would have required much higher specs, too. And this was past 97, it probably wouldn't even have had a DOS executable since everyone was onto windows95/98 at this point.


If done right this is the chance to remind everyone Build FPS are the best and to show what Build can truely stomach. Noone would want to sacrifice that for "historical accuracy" that doesn't even hold.
This is chance to have 3DR's next Build game, the one which, in my opinion, we should have had in the late 90's, the one they should have kept betting on instead of changing engine.

[Micky C]

I've never played Redneck Rampage, but there are some very nice textures and some nice architecture which makes for some great looking scenes. If something like that can be pulled off in Build (but with good gameplay), that'd be fantastic.

[MetHy]

Yeah, the Redneck Rampage series, have high-res textures and some really cool stuff.

Rides Again In Arkansas has tons of amazing stuff. Some highly detailed environment, some levels mix sector and sprite structures to give a true 3D feel, shading is a mix between Build's shading system and shading directly applied on textures, it has driveable vehicules, etc
Now, it has no TROR, but Xatrix sure knew how to make the best of the engine and find tricks to go past the limits of Build at the time.

Oh and Rides Again In Arkansas does have good gameplay. So do Route 66 imo, Sunstorm's did a good job at trying to hide the flaws of the original game. You should give them a try, some things may amaze you.

http://i101.photobuc...zpsx7xnjpax.png

http://i101.photobuc...zpsgkpgmeac.png

http://i101.photobuc...zpsuvzt6xvz.png

http://i101.photobuc...zpsxcxwhxet.png

http://i101.photobuc...zps7tkknkfb.png

Now, if this Bombshell does things like that, I can already hear some people claim it's not "accurate" with what Build was capable of at the time...

[DavoX]

Those redneck rampage screenshots look amazing! I've always loved it's style and the way they used the textures to achieve a feel in the map!

[Loke]

Redneck Rampage is a pretty underrated shooter imo. Absolutely gorgeous game for its time too. All those hi-res textures really made it stand out in terms of visuals compared to other Build games.

[MetHy]

http://www.gog.com/g...page_collection

The first Redneck Rampage is hit or miss depending on the map. Go past that and some of the bullshit the first one has, and you'll find Route 66 and Rides Again which are much better.
I wouldn't call the first RR underrated, not everything about it is brilliant, but Rides Again is probably the most underrated Build game with Exhumed.

The only thing that sucks about RR's visuals are those ugly out of place photo realistic sprites.

But let's get back on topic. Let us dream a little and ask ourselves what would you want to see in this game?

I want to see :
- the same multiplayer orientation as DN3D and Shadow Warrior have. The fact that every map can be played in co-op AND deathmatch influences the way maps are designed even for single player, and is part of the kind of level design you'd expect from those games.
- Voxels. Tons of voxels. Not for weapons, enemies or character, but at least for the rest.
- TROR. see-through water. More amazing effects than Shadow Warrior and Blood combined.
- level editor
- musics should be made available in their normal format as well as in midi, and the player could swap any time between the two

[Steve 64]

It's been along time since I played Redneck Rampage, I love to play that again, I never played it online before would like to though.

[Altered Reality]

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

Making it for DOS would require you to deal with retarded limitations, making it sure that it runs on various hardware configurations that less than .1% of your average gamer owns.

Or you could limit yourself to supporting VESA graphics and standard sound cards of the time, like it was actually done back then.
I agree that some of the very early limitations of MS-DOS are retarded, and the "640 KB of RAM should be enough for everyone" joke keeps getting funnier and funnier... but DOS/4GW was made to solve that very problem, which then would not be an issue.

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

After all this you'd still have to actually make it playable for the rest, safe to assume that dosbox would be used.
As you are already not running it "true to original", what's the point ?

The point is that, if you want, you can dig that old 486/66 out of your garage and run it on that, like you would have done 20 years ago. Or you can choose to run on a modern system, where it will run more smoothly than a fake-retro version would.

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

With dosbox, you have an extra layer on top that requires a ton of extra performance, if lower FPS in something you really want to simulate then you should do it externally and not use 100% host CPU to accomplish that and get varying results per system.

You make it sound like DosBox is some kind of monster program that brings even an i7 to its knees. Fortunately, this is not the case. And I'm not advocating to simulate slowdowns on modern hardware, because slowdowns have always been an inevitable side effect of running a game on insufficient hardware. Purposely simulating them on a machine that can run a DOS program ridiculously fast, even under emulation, would be stupid. You should get slowdowns if you try to run the Bombshell prequel on a 386, and not if you run it on a modern system with DosBox emulating a dynamic core with the maximum number of cycles per millisecond.

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

Why not possibly utilize +10yr worth of "under the hood" bug fixes that don't change the game play experience at all

But wouldn't those fix change the experience, if they allow things that were not possible back then?

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

You're really just artificially limiting yourself by forcing yourself to achieve the same result with worse tools.

Again: would the result really be the same?

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

I'd say that in this case the end result counts the most. Stuff like megaman 9/10 work brilliantly in my opinion, It's still very true to the originals while cutting restrictions just enough to give more artistic freedom. They clearly knew what they wanted to achieve.

Yes, they knew what they wanted to achieve: easy money, by leveraging on feelings of nostalgia (which, by itself, embellishes memories) by selling imitations of NES games that actually look too good to be NES games. The result is to perpetuate false information about what was or wasn't possible back then.

oasiz, on 26 July 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

NES PPU is very buggy and error prone to program for. With commodore systems you'd be swapping floppies or enjoying long load times, Not to mention that DOS had it's fair share of issues to account for. Replicating some these are features that might have been part of the overall experience but let's be honest, back then such sprite flicker/quirk/load time/etc.. would have been considered undesirable.

Of course those effects would have been undesirable, but a faithful documentation of the past must necessarily include what was bad about it, otherwise, it's not documenting the past at all. It'd be like presenting a Flintstones theme park ride as a documentary about the Paleolithic.

And now it's my turn for a rant, directed to the person who accused me of incoherence because I talked about "worshipping a past that never was" while managing a DNF museum site. Actually, this person called it a "historical DNF fan site", which is wrong. As its title says, that site is museum, and it's meant to document as precisely as possible what actually happened in the past of DNF, which is why I refused to add my "Duke 1998 proofs of concept" to it.
For further information about the purpose of that site, I recommend that person to read my interventions in this thread in the 3DRealms forum.

[Radar]

Altered Reality, on 27 July 2015 - 08:55 AM, said:

words

I get how you're nostalgic. Maybe others here have the same experience, perhaps even you: I used to run a DOS compatible OS into 2008 until I finally decided to learn how to use a source port. I played DOS Duke for years. There's nothing cool about it, just retro-tinkering and nostalgia. I look forward to the future, and I love the concept of a new build game being sold with modern features like TROR and extended limits and modern OS compatibility.

By the way, I really like your historical DNF fan site.

[Mark]

A few years ago I started work on an HRP for Redneck. I looked at so many of the stock textures and said "hey those are great as-is. No need to change." So I concentrated on some of the uglier, blockier ones and turning pickups into models. I'll get back to it someday. My favorites are the old faded or painted woods and the old worn brick and morter stuff. Along with the walls that have "built-in" light glow on them.

[Striker]

Altered Reality, on 27 July 2015 - 08:55 AM, said:

Inane, illogical, nostalgia-rose-tinted, bullshit.

Oh sorry, for a moment there, I thought I was reading posts from HighTreason.

Being a documentation of the past isn't even the point of something like this. In a case like this, there is no past to document. The point is to make something fun and retro, on an engine that 3DR was well known for using, running on a modern system. Why the hell would anyone in their right mind, make something like this in DOS in this day and age? One, not many people still have their old DOS hardware... I'm luckily one of the people who still do, but, I rarely use it because I can play most of the same games without the nightmares of DOS memory management and other BS. I only use it to play Blood nowadays because DOSBox is a pile of trash when it comes to playing it smoothly. (I'm talking 60fps smooth.)

Second, DOSBox is slow as molasses on anything lower than a 2ghz system, so a lot of laptops and netbooks are out of the question. Ports like XDuke, JFDuke3D, and EDuke32 still run blazingly fast on such systems. Hell, I can still run some builds of EDuke32 perfectly on my Pentium 2-based Windows 98 machine at 800x600 with no slowdown. Even on my 4ghz Quad-Core I still can't run Blood or SW at 1024x768 like I can when I run natively.

Third, if they're going to use something like JFDuke3D, that still remains within most reasonable limits of build engine games of the time. But even then, 3DR was constantly improving the Build Engine during that era... chances are, this will turn out like what the build engine could have been if 3DR stuck with it into the 00's.

Look, as much as I like gaming's past as well, there's times where things weren't so good. It's a big reason why I'm working on bringing my favorite games (Terminal Velocity, Fury3, and Hellbender) into the future to avoid a lot of the crappy things about that time period.

The following isn't aimed at anyone in particular:

The DarkVoid thing... While it couldn't have run on the NES, it could easily have been done on the Famicom (Which, as a Japanese company, Capcom was aiming for), which supported expansion chips for sound, memory, and graphics, allowing the system to nearly reach 16-bit quality. The NES only supported basic memory mapper chips for carts.

Feast your ears on this awesome shit just to hear what the Famicom was capable of with said enhancement chips:

[Tea Monster]

Who nowadays (apart from 1/4 of the people on the forum) actually run DOS? I used to love DOS, but once I never again had to futz around with memory settings and soundblaster lines, then I never looked back. Altered Reality obviously never had to arse around with IRQ settings to get his soundcard to work with his modem.

I look back fondly on Windows 3.11, but I am so thankfull that I don't have to use it any more. The future is that way =======>

[Altered Reality]

Sgt. Rarity, on 27 July 2015 - 09:31 AM, said:

I get how you're nostalgic.

No, you don't. I want historical accuracy to destroy nostalgia.

[DavoX]

Altered Reality, on 27 July 2015 - 11:16 AM, said:

No, you don't. I want historical accuracy to destroy nostalgia.

That's funny coming from a guy with your nickname

[Radar]

Altered Reality, on 27 July 2015 - 11:16 AM, said:

No, you don't. I want historical accuracy to destroy nostalgia.

Your historical DNF fan site is nice.

[Altered Reality]

StrikerMan780, on 27 July 2015 - 10:30 AM, said:

Why the hell would anyone in their right mind, make something like this in DOS in this day and age?

But then again, why would anyone in their right mind use Build to make a commercial game that looks retro, if the end result is still not accurate to the time period? If they don't want to be accurate, the Unreal Engine 4 is -------> that way.

StrikerMan780, on 27 July 2015 - 10:30 AM, said:

Second, DOSBox is slow as molasses on anything lower than a 2ghz system, so a lot of laptops and netbooks are out of the question.

Wow, is DosBox 0.74 that much slower than DosBox 0.72? I have tried the latter to run the shareware version of Duke3D on a risible machine (a 1.83 GHz laptop with Windows XP I had bought 10 years ago) and the only slowdowns I get happen during certain colored screen flashes, like Duke getting hurt or picking up an item.

StrikerMan780, on 27 July 2015 - 10:30 AM, said:

Look, as much as I like gaming's past as well, there's times where things weren't so good.

Precisely. I completely agree with this, which is why I consider it so important to have a historical memory of the bad things of the past as well: so that nobody will believe his skewed, rose-tinted version of the past to coincide with factual history.
I'm all about embracing the future of gaming: in fact, I play most of my PC games in HD and 3D with a head-mounted display. That's why I want people to have a realistic view of the past: so that they won't diss the potential of the present and the promises of the future in the name of something they believe to be the past, but actually never existed in that shape or form.

Tea Monster, on 27 July 2015 - 10:44 AM, said:

Who nowadays (apart from 1/4 of the people on the forum) actually run DOS? I used to love DOS, but once I never again had to futz around with memory settings and soundblaster lines, then I never looked back. Altered Reality obviously never had to arse around with IRQ settings to get his soundcard to work with his modem.

Fortunately, I didn't, because all modem-related stuff I did in the 1990s, I did with Windows 95. I was used to set IRQ and DMA parameters in MS-DOS games, but I don't miss those times, just like a historian does not miss the time period he studies.

Tea Monster, on 27 July 2015 - 10:44 AM, said:

I look back fondly on Windows 3.11

I don't. I look at it with the same mindset as an archaeologist who looks at an antique papyrus: to examine it, but without any kind of nostalgic feeling for the time it belongs to. In the same way, just like an archaeologist would despise a trader who sells blatantly fake papyruses while trying to convince people that they are 100% faithful to the original, I despise fake retro games that are only sold to make easy money off nostalgics.

[TerminX]

It runs on EDuke32. Just because somebody wants to paint a piece in the style of the masters of the renaissance doesn't mean they need to produce historically accurate paints and an antique canvas to do so.

[Striker]

TerminX gets the point I was trying to make.

[Mark]

And there you have it folks. No more comments needed until the first teaser comes out. Everyone back to their corner until the bell rings for the next round.

[MetHy]

I hope every level is playable from a pistol start.