[Radar]

While I obviously don't have developer insight, my prediction is that preserving IF compatibility within mainline EDuke32 is a priority of the team moving forward.

[Zaxx]

Man, I have to say that one thing (apart from the overabundance of those spider enemies, some of those "gotcha" moments are truly bad) that has to come off as a bit of a negative for me is the way how the secrets are designed.

It's just too much platforming for my taste and since it's Build platforming I usually just press the nope button when I see that I'd have to do something elaborate. Like here:

I see the armor shards so I know that I can get there but I have absolutely no idea how to do it. I'm sure there's some nice easter egg or something there but it really is too much effort to do something you don't enjoy (platforming) so you could have a chuckle before moving on to you know, shooting stuff.

And that kind of leads me to my other issue with the secrets: a lot of times they are just not worth it. The stuff that is easy to find gives you enough resources and lots of times you're just like "oh, it's just a bunch of radars" so the more tedious, platformy exploration usually goes unrewarded. And that even goes for stuff like rewarding the player with more gameplay: I only very rarely find secret areas that have enemies in them. For example in Romero's level design it was always very important for the secrets to have cool shit or to offer some kind of alternative way to the level progression but in IF it's just optional extra parts of the maps without much interesting stuff going on in them.

It's like there's a cool FPS that also has a bad Mario game in it that nobody from the target demo really wanted. It's weird because the cyberpunk theme would have handed itself well to stuff like teleporters instead of platforming, mega health pickups or some crazy powerups that are only found in secret areas etc.

And what's up with that radar anyway, it's like "yeah, we'll put a radar here instead of something cool like our version of the HoloDuke that actually works in single player and would fit the cyberpunk theme 10000000000000 times better". It's not really useful sadly even though it could have been used as a replacement for the night vision goggles since the game has some slight issues with enemy visibility.

Aaand that's my little rant on secrets (and on the general lack of variety in pickups I guess). It really is something minor, it just annoys me.

[Radar]

I love the secrets because they are often quite large. Being able to explore that much extra level design is the reward for me.

[Zaxx]

The preview campaign absolutely felt like that for me too, I just feel that in the full game there are more misses than hits regarding this.

[Sledgehammer]

Yeah, I actually love those secrets, especially for the reason Radar mentioned. Just have to think out of the box sometimes I guess or at least not treat the game as Duke or typical another Build Engine FPS or hell, even like modern FPS game. Though I had the same issue when the game was in EA state, thinking "no, they wouldn't do that, would they?", especially considering this is Build Engine game, for example, Painkiller did some secrets kind of like this too, mainly you had to abuse physics to reach some of them. The secret Zaxx mentioned was pretty easy to find, by the way, try to look up in some areas to find an obvious clue. I found the secret solely out of curiosity myself, because I noticed that it was possible to reach particular places, actually didn't really expect to get somewhere since because I underestimated level designers.

I find secrets in particular (like other things) pretty clever and fresh, even if you played old FPS games there are new things in IF that could surprise you.

That said, this is not really a bad design, at least because the game does not punish the player in any way if he can't find every single secret. You still can finish maps just fine without them, even on the highest difficulty (I missed some of the secrets myself).

[oasiz]

Yes, eduke32 builds will work but there are game play issues like the escalator friction being incorrect, any explosion spawning hardcoded duke scrap (which will eventually result in too many sprites) and such.

Generally the experience is identical otherwise.
Use the STANDALONE flag when building.

[Sledgehammer]

oasiz, on 16 August 2019 - 06:53 AM, said:

Yes, eduke32 builds will work but there are game play issues like the escalator friction being incorrect, any explosion spawning hardcoded duke scrap (which will eventually result in too many sprites) and such.

As I expected pretty much, yes. But you going to provide full compatibility for IF, right?

[Zaxx]

Sledgehammer, on 16 August 2019 - 06:49 AM, said:

The secret Zaxx mentioned was pretty easy to find, by the way, try to look up in some areas to find an obvious clue.

I spent around 20 minutes on it and I couldn't figure out what the hell you're supposed to do there. There's green arrow pointing at a garbage chute so I figured maybe there is some other secret you have to find and from there you can drop down and that will launch you but ultimately I just wanted to shoot enemies in an FPS so I moved forward. I saw that there are some platforms up there too but those looked like something you'd do after getting to the other side.

I admit some of it feels fresh, it's just that for example when I saw in Civvie's video that there's supposed to be some elaborate piano puzzle I instantly thought to myself "yeah, who wants to play a piano in an FPS?" and of course he noclipped it because he wanted to get to the secret level, that's what he cared about. There's no point in including stuff like that because most people won't bother to figure them out and just downright cheat, look at the map in an editor and stuff like that.

Edit: Credit where credit is due: at least DNF figured out a way to make interactivity part of the gameplay.

[NightFright]

Well if you look at the EDuke32 synthesis builds right now, it's raining new versions lately.

[oasiz]

Sledgehammer, on 16 August 2019 - 07:02 AM, said:

As I expected pretty much, yes. But you going to provide full compatibility for IF, right?

fury.exe IS eduke32.exe, only few #ifdef standalone sections make the true difference
It will always be compatible unless some update break it.

All of the changes are done in CON when possible, only stuff like the things I mentioned + menu are done through source level

[Sledgehammer]

Zaxx, on 16 August 2019 - 07:06 AM, said:

"yeah, who wants to play a piano in an FPS?"

The people who want to play the game to death, finding everything, and most importantly the people who want to have some fun. IF is not this "finish once and drop forever" type of games that are quite popular these days, which is why it doesn't bother me too much if I miss some secrets too (I plan to come back to it a lot). Happened to me with Duke too that I replayed to death, along with a couple of some other games.

By the way, my first thought related to piano was "wait, did he just say you have to be quick as well?". That can be a pain in the ass doing it without fingers, depends from how quick you should be.

oasiz, on 16 August 2019 - 07:17 AM, said:

fury.exe IS eduke32.exe, only few #ifdef standalone sections make the true difference
It will always be compatible unless some update break it.

All of the changes are done in CON when possible, only stuff like the things I mentioned + menu are done through source level

As in, non-modified eduke32.exe specifically for IF? Either way, I see. And I was curious about others things just well of course. Figured if menu was screwed a bit that wouldn't be the only problem. Still, I hope we'll get fully stable IF dedicated EDuke32 build (or just 32-bit support outside of digital stores, because personally I could be careless about Windows/anti-virus warnings about the modified .exe for IF), unless it's way too challenging (in a sense that it's not worth it) to integrate full support for IF in regular EDuke32 builds.

[Radar]

IMO EDuke32's goal, however many years into the future this may be, should be to be able to launch all Build engine games from a single launcher, just like how GZDoom can run every Doom engine game.

[Zaxx]

Damn, I looked at my level stats for the first map and that goddamn platformy weirdness is the only secret I'm missing. Then it can't be accessed from another secret... fuck, what is the obvious thing I'm missing here?

[Sledgehammer]

Wanna know?

[malvado]

Just got the game, well done, it's really good. Honestly wasn't impressed with the very first early access release but it feels really sweet now. Thanks a lot, gonna binge through it this weekend.

[axl]

Radar, on 16 August 2019 - 07:44 AM, said:

IMO EDuke32's goal, however many years into the future this may be, should be to be able to launch all Build engine games from a single launcher, just like how GZDoom can run every Doom engine game.

That would be like a dream come true !

[oasiz]

Sledgehammer, on 16 August 2019 - 07:38 AM, said:

As in, non-modified eduke32.exe specifically for IF? Either way, I see. And I was curious about others things just well of course. Figured if menu was screwed a bit that wouldn't be the only problem. Still, I hope we'll get fully stable IF dedicated EDuke32 build (or just 32-bit support outside of digital stores, because personally I could be careless about Windows/anti-virus warnings about the modified .exe for IF), unless it's way too challenging (in a sense that it's not worth it) to integrate full support for IF in regular EDuke32 builds.

Regular builds wont have support for a while since there are manual overrides done on source level for things that we can't do in a modular fashion from CON.
We used eduke32 binaries a lot when testing stuff internally as well between revisions.

It's up to the guys if they want to build a standalone binary alongside regular duke binary (would make sense in a way since other "from scratch" projects could benefit from this)

[Zaxx]

Sledgehammer, on 16 August 2019 - 07:50 AM, said:

Wanna know?

Well I already gave up on the idea to find everything by myself so sure, a hint would be cool. Is there a visual cue somewhere? Do I have to shoot something? If you tell me that I'll have to jump it I'll go mad.

Edit: Shit, I think I found something related... you really have to jump all this? Good lord...

Edit 2: Well, that took a bit of save scumming,omg. At least that one was worth it but why so much platforming? I'll go cry in a corner now, the jumping physics are GARBAGE in Build for shit like this.

[oasiz]

Radar, on 16 August 2019 - 07:44 AM, said:

IMO EDuke32's goal, however many years into the future this may be, should be to be able to launch all Build engine games from a single launcher, just like how GZDoom can run every Doom engine game.

It's just not really doable as easily.
Everybody took the basis of build and made it their own. There is just way too much overlap and to do this properly you'd have to do a lot of reworking to get things abstracted to a point where each game can call a common safe method to handle a certain task rather than using it's own hacks
Doom engine was still a bit simpler and people built on top of DOOM but with build only very few built on top of duke3d itself.

That's why it's called the "build engine" and not "duke nukem engine" in proper text.

Where Doom games are a dialect, build games might all still share the same alphabet but the language is completely different.

[Radar]

MIND = BLOWN

[Sledgehammer]

oasiz, on 16 August 2019 - 08:05 AM, said:

It's up to the guys if they want to build a standalone binary alongside regular duke binary (would make sense in a way since other "from scratch" projects could benefit from this)

Well, I'd like to get at least 32-bit support for a moment, so I could play the game on my laptop with 32-bit system when I'd be away.

[oasiz]

Sledgehammer, on 16 August 2019 - 08:23 AM, said:

Well, I'd like to get at least 32-bit support for a moment, so I could play the game on laptop when I'd be away.

Biggest reasoning (albeit a bit of an excuse) is that if your can't do 64bit then you're likely too low spec to really play this.
Any system since 2006 should safely fit this category so that's why we really haven't put priority to this issue as much.

[oasiz]

Radar, on 16 August 2019 - 08:19 AM, said:

MIND = BLOWN

Just start mapping for different games like powerslave / tekwar / shadow warrior / duke and you will quickly see that every game has their own way of handling tagging. SW literally hijacks a lot of stuff meant for internal values to be used as those additional tags
.. Oh and these tags are not just limited to some map arrays, a lot of game code literally modifies the map data on the fly to store stuff like velocities for sprites IN the damn map format, kinda cool but so damn brittle.
Build itself is kind of like a really nice framework to allow tons of customization, and customize the devs did.

[Sledgehammer]

oasiz, on 16 August 2019 - 08:25 AM, said:

Biggest reasoning (albeit a bit of an excuse) is that if your can't do 64bit then you're likely too low spec to really play this.
Any system since 2006 should safely fit this category so that's why we really haven't put priority to this issue as much.

I don't want to upgrade my system because I have only 2GB of RAM, so it's a bit pointless to do, although I may install Linux on it anyway. Unless I decide to grab another RAM stick (the main reason why I don't want to bother), I'm not going to upgrade my system to 64-bit Windows and that won't happen any time soon. If it was something else, including hardware limitation you mentioned, I simply would not say anything in that regards.

Zaxx, on 16 August 2019 - 08:09 AM, said:

At least that one was worth it but why so much platforming?

Come on, it's absolutely fine and was absolutely worth it, yep.

[PokeThePower]

Zaxx, on 16 August 2019 - 06:20 AM, said:

And that kind of leads me to my other issue with the secrets: a lot of times they are just not worth it.

I do think this is an area for expansion. I have zero problem with the secrets as they are from an LD standpoint, even the platformer level ones. I love that sometimes they leave me thinking "This MUST be bugged, there's just no way to get over there, but surely they wouldn't ship it that way, but maybe, but no, but damnit..." only to eventually find it. However the goods once there are pretty much an afterthought, it's just personal satisfaction. IF could reach across the old school (it's fun for the sake of it) folks to more modern expectations by doing some version of sticker book or Modern Warfare Intel collections.

I think the secrets design is a defining part of the game's uniqueness... so playing it up more in ways that draw folks like the RPS reviewer to feel rewarded for hunting them down could add a lot of value. Getting all the secrets in one zone unlocks the ice variant of the SMG like MW intel cheats, or just lets you see a stylized icon in a sticker book that recalls the "hook" of each secret (broom+vent), perhaps with some indication of "epic" secrets vs normal, blah blah blah.

[Zaxx]

Quote

Come on, it's absolutely fine and was absolutely worth it, yep.

It's good to have the third person camera for stuff like this I admit but man, I can't even describe properly how much I dislike platforming in an FPS game... except for Doom 2016 because there mantling helps you out a lot.

[oasiz]

We had some ideas for this too, different kind of secrets. won't really go in to details in case these are to be re-used later on but I do agree that there is a point when it comes to collectibles.
I guess in a sense the secret itself is currently more of the collectible itself but is not really presented as a "material posession thingy"

Let's see where things head but currently it's obvious that a lot of the secret hunting is to give a secret itself, powerups were one way to reward it more

In the end, time and resources kind of made us forget some ideas and some ended up being retrofitted to something else entirely.
We kind of ended up having a huge amount of secrets to the point where it became a joke and just never stopped. Making them is just quite plain fun.

[Phredreeke]

oasiz, on 16 August 2019 - 08:25 AM, said:

Biggest reasoning (albeit a bit of an excuse) is that if your can't do 64bit then you're likely too low spec to really play this.
Any system since 2006 should safely fit this category so that's why we really haven't put priority to this issue as much.

Agree. I've tested it on my GPD Win (Atom x7-Z8750 based handheld) and while sections of the games are playable, it really struggles at other parts of the game. While it uses a low power SoC, it's not far off from Intel's fastest 32-bit CPUs in performance

[Aristotle Gumball]

I find the platforming really enjoyable actually, so it's a pretty subjective thing. Always enjoyed the jumping way more in a game like Blood than Quake where it always feels like you're sliding all over the place.

[Zaxx]

I'm a sucker for lore so doing stuff like getting a piece of intel for finding some secrets would be very welcome in my book. I'm the kind of guy who thinks that the "readme" part of IF is too short, I wanna know why there is permanent martial law.