[Doom64hunter]

I don't understand what's taking them so long to fix the sounds.

I mean, it took me about 8 hours total to record the sounds from mapster32's soundtest, crop and save them as ogg, adjust the timing and volume on them and compile that into a zip.
That is a cheap and simple solution that you could even assign some intern to do, all while retaining the .ogg system they have in place now.

[----]

Doom64hunter, on 23 October 2016 - 05:27 AM, said:

I don't understand what's taking them so long to fix the sounds.

Perhaps the pistol and other weapons are participating in the voice actor strike?

[Wolf]

Removed - more testing required.

[MetHy]

Doom64hunter, on 23 October 2016 - 05:27 AM, said:

I don't understand what's taking them so long to fix the sounds.

I mean, it took me about 8 hours total to record the sounds from mapster32's soundtest, crop and save them as ogg, adjust the timing and volume on them and compile that into a zip.
That is a cheap and simple solution that you could even assign some intern to do, all while retaining the .ogg system they have in place now.

Well there is probably a lot more to it for pros. Let's say that the initial contract between Nerve and Gearbox is over, this means someone need to specify what has to be done, evaluate the time and manpower it will take, schedule it since the guys are Nerve are probably not sitting around waiting for Gearbox to ask more stuff and have other projects to take care of, negotiate the contract, etc Meaning that the mere idea a single fix like this probably has to go through several people both on Gearbox's and Nerve's side.
Then they probably need to figure out by themselves what Hendricks said, figure out the best way to overcome this, then testing etc
And in the end, who knows if they can even update the game themselves without going through some people at Steam taking care of updates.

[Sledgehammer]

MetHy, on 23 October 2016 - 07:38 AM, said:

who knows if they can even update the game themselves without going through some people at Steam taking care of updates.

I'm pretty sure they can, I played plenty of games which were updated at least day one after release. It's the same with release dates, you can release your game whenever you want on Steam. You need to do that on PSN and Xbox store though and it does take a lot of time to submit your patch there.

Maybe they want to bring original sounds in better quality if they even exist? That would be pretty good if they brought them. Or likely they're just preparing big patch to fix other issues. Wishful thinking, but maybe they listened to TX or other people.

[NightFright]

Just don't expect them to read what we are writing here. They may fix the sounds and bring back duke.rts, but beyond that, I am kinda sceptical...

[Sledgehammer]

Technically they read what we write here because TX is likely reporting bugs. But yeah, I don't expect too much either, especially since the game pretty much bombed.

[TerminX]

NightFright, on 23 October 2016 - 11:08 AM, said:

Just don't expect them to read what we are writing here. They may fix the sounds and bring back duke.rts, but beyond that, I am kinda sceptical...

I have about half a dozen contacts at Gearbox currently and tend to send them the most serious issues that will need to be addressed.

[Wolf]

TerminX, on 23 October 2016 - 11:29 AM, said:

I have about half a dozen contacts at Gearbox currently [...]

Here's all the stuff I've found so far. Edited the "ambience off" issue.

Spoiler

DN3DWT
--------------

New Lighting System:

• Lights may stop abruptly instead of crossing sector lines, depending on light radius and/or sector line distance. EDIT: Further testing in unique maps proves previous hypothesis wrong. The factors surrounding this aren't immediately apparent. The lights seem to not like crossing certain sector lines for unknown reasons. Deleting/re-creating the sectors doesn't help. (FWIW, all of these seem to be in doorway-like areas.)
  
• The player's muzzle flash light is spawned at his feet instead of where the camera is, and thus will not brighten the floor unless the player is jumping, jetpacking, or otherwise not touching the immediate ground.

Core:

• Maximum expander ammo entry in "gamestartup" command in USER.CON isn't read by the game. The player's maximum expander ammo capacity will always be 50, no matter what it is defined as.

Sound System:

• Ambient sounds will sometimes play again despite already being played, thus overlapping and getting loud and obnoxious.
  
• Perhaps related to the above, but sometimes ambient sounds will continue to play despite moving away from the point of origin (the MUSICANDSFX sprite)
  
• Turning "Ambience" off in the menu only disables MUSICANDSFX sounds, but sounds marked with the ambient flag in USER.CON called from other actors still play. Was this default DN3D behavior?

Quality of Life requests:

• FOV slider, please!
  
• All game sounds are played back in mono. (Music still supports stereo, at least.) Would like stereo sound support.
  
• Would like something along the lines of "cvarVisibilityLink: 16by9Aspect" variables for their screen def code, to detect which aspect ratio the player is running the game at (to make better fitting hud mods)
  
• Some sort of CON parsing output at all other than just crashing the game with "Error in GAME.con" (though, it makes .dmp files in the folder when it crashes...)

[Jblade]

There's also the getting hit makes the sky flash red, that's kinda annoying (think that applies to all palfroms actually)

[HMNuke93]

Sledgehammer, on 23 October 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:

Technically they read what we write here because TX is likely reporting bugs. But yeah, I don't expect too much either, especially since the game pretty much bombed.

Do you have the sales data?

[Striker]

Doom64hunter, on 23 October 2016 - 05:27 AM, said:

I don't understand what's taking them so long to fix the sounds.

I mean, it took me about 8 hours total to record the sounds from mapster32's soundtest, crop and save them as ogg, adjust the timing and volume on them and compile that into a zip.
That is a cheap and simple solution that you could even assign some intern to do, all while retaining the .ogg system they have in place now.

Why even do that when you can just export them from the GRP file, convert them to WAV, and run them through something like r8brain or Wavosaur to upsample them with no filtering and export to high-bitrate OGG? The end result would be sounds that aren't muffled, sounding more like they did in Vanilla Duke3D set to 44100hz.

[Hendricks266]

Striker, on 23 October 2016 - 12:42 PM, said:

Why even do that when you can just export them from the GRP file, convert them to WAV, and run them through something like r8brain or Wavosaur to upsample them with no filtering and export to high-bitrate OGG? The end result would be sounds that aren't muffled, sounding more like they did in Vanilla Duke3D set to 44100hz.

Unless these programs resample exactly the same way as the Apogee Sound System, this will give an incorrect result.

HMNuke93, on 15 October 2016 - 04:14 AM, said:

SLOWLY working on at least a sprite replacement for the final boss. I call him "The Immolator". If someone has a better name, let me know it

The sprite is cool but how does it fit with an alien invasion? It doesn't match either Duke's art style or its theme.

[HMNuke93]

Hendricks266, on 23 October 2016 - 01:32 PM, said:

Unless these programs resample exactly the same way as the Apogee Sound System, this will give an incorrect result.


The sprite is cool but how does it fit with an alien invasion? It doesn't match either Duke's art style or its theme.

It's just a big humanoid alien with a flamethrower implanted on his arm. Didn't put much effort on detailing the armor since i wanted to reproduce that "90's monster" feel. I think it fits the art style quite good.

[Doom64hunter]

Striker, on 23 October 2016 - 12:42 PM, said:

Why even do that when you can just export them from the GRP file, convert them to WAV, and run them through something like r8brain or Wavosaur to upsample them with no filtering and export to high-bitrate OGG? The end result would be sounds that aren't muffled, sounding more like they did in Vanilla Duke3D set to 44100hz.

I just tested those two tools, and r8brain doesn't really improve the quality at all so that one is out of the question.
Wavosaur however seems to upsample them almost identically to the Apogee Sound System, and might even sound a slight bit better. So I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future.

You just have to make sure to disable interpolation and anti-aliasing or you'll end up with the same result as in World Tour.

[Danukem]

HMNuke93, on 23 October 2016 - 02:33 PM, said:

It's just a big humanoid alien with a flamethrower implanted on his arm. Didn't put much effort on detailing the armor since i wanted to reproduce that "90's monster" feel. I think it fits the art style quite good.

I think the body looks reptilian which does fit with the theme (lizard troopers and enforcers), and the weapon fits too. The only element which seems a bit off is the head. Maybe it would be better if the head looked like a super-enforcer lizard guy.

[stumppy84]

Trooper Dan, on 23 October 2016 - 03:17 PM, said:

I think the body looks reptilian which does fit with the theme (lizard troopers and enforcers), and the weapon fits too. The only element which seems a bit off is the head. Maybe it would be better if the head looked like a super-enforcer lizard guy.

I agree, what about taking the octobrain face and giving it the cycloid eye?

[CryptKiller]

HMNuke93, on 23 October 2016 - 12:02 PM, said:

Do you have the sales data?

http://steamspy.com/app/434050

Nearly 8,000 copies on Steam. Dunno how much sold on consoles, but somehow I don't think it's even a minor hit there.
And average playtime is between 2,5 and 3 hours, everyone bought it only for the new levels, goddamn.

[Danukem]

CryptKiller, on 23 October 2016 - 03:50 PM, said:

http://steamspy.com/app/434050

Nearly 8,000 copies on Steam. Dunno how much sold on consoles, but somehow I don't think it's even a minor hit there.
And average playtime is between 2,5 and 3 hours, everyone bought it only for the new levels, goddamn.

That's terrible. They would surely need at least 100,000 copies sold overall to make it profitable. Wouldn't they?

[Micky C]

CryptKiller, on 23 October 2016 - 03:50 PM, said:

http://steamspy.com/app/434050
And average playtime is between 2,5 and 3 hours, everyone bought it only for the new levels, goddamn.

What did Gearbox expect? Everyone who was even remotely interested/curious in trying out Duke 3D would have gotten Megaton (possibly in one of the many super cheap bundles).

I've said this many times, but the only real reason to buy WT is for the new levels, and considering there's 1000's of free maps out there, at a deeper level the only reason to buy WT is the curiosity of what the original devs can pull off. Is curiosity worth $20? Not in my opinion.


I wouldn't be surprised if news of the final boss alone put a lot of people off.

[AdrenalinDragon]

Micky C, on 23 October 2016 - 04:08 PM, said:

What did Gearbox expect? Everyone who was even remotely interested/curious in trying out Duke 3D would have gotten Megaton (possibly in one of the many super cheap bundles).

I've said this many times, but the only real reason to buy WT is for the new levels, and considering there's 1000's of free maps out there, at a deeper level the only reason to buy WT is the curiosity of what the original devs can pull off. Is curiosity worth $20? Not in my opinion.


I wouldn't be surprised if news of the final boss alone put a lot of people off.

Sigh... I really wish Gearbox just kept Megaton up on there. I really want another copy of Megaton now, and now it looks like I'm too late to purchase a Steam key for it.

[CryptKiller]

I agree 100%, they made a weird decision to take down Megaton Edition off Steam and waited for nearly a year to put up their own version. The whole situation is stupid beyond reason - people who are even slightly interested in Duke already got their copy and don't see the point of getting another version (even more if they got burned on Megaton's weird issues like buggy vsync and spotty multiplayer), there's not much new players to warrant such a release (and, no matter how you cut it - it's a re-release of 20 year old game for 20 dollars or euros, a bit too much). 3DR and Devolver Digital saturated the market for Duke Nukem 3D, and GBX now probably looks at sales of World Tour going "eh, wasn't worth it".

[HiPolyBash]

Everyone knew before this released that it'd sell poorly. Out of everything they could have possibly done this was the stupidest thing. New episode would have been cool in a collection along with all the other Duke game and bonus stuff. Remake something or port the console titles both would sell more. A new game would sell more if done right.

[Striker]

Doom64hunter, on 23 October 2016 - 03:03 PM, said:

I just tested those two tools, and r8brain doesn't really improve the quality at all so that one is out of the question.
Wavosaur however seems to upsample them almost identically to the Apogee Sound System, and might even sound a slight bit better. So I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future.

You just have to make sure to disable interpolation and anti-aliasing or you'll end up with the same result as in World Tour.

I could have sword r8brain had an option to turn off any filtering when upsampling, but maybe my memory didn't serve me well. But yes, Wavosaur when resampling without any interpolation or anti-aliasing works exactly how the Apogee Sound System does it.

[----]

HMNuke93, on 23 October 2016 - 02:33 PM, said:

It's just a big humanoid alien with a flamethrower implanted on his arm. Didn't put much effort on detailing the armor since i wanted to reproduce that "90's monster" feel. I think it fits the art style quite good.

While the art quality itself is great, some things bother me:

At first glance I thought you fight a red bearded viking, because of the lower heads color and the human looking face. And it doesn't look reptilian to me at all. More like a big human (from the face), which doesn't look as it belongs to the rest of the alien forces.

[Striker]

The face doesn't look human to me, more orcish.

[Jblade]

It looks really good, I don't see any point in nitpicking when it's a million times better than what the people who got paid for it did in World Tour itself (ie a recolour with a few minor changes)

[----]

Jblade, on 23 October 2016 - 10:50 PM, said:

It looks really good, I don't see any point in nitpicking when it's a million times better than what the people who got paid for it did in World Tour itself (ie a recolour with a few minor changes)

Lucy Pinder looks really good too ... but she still doesn't fit as final boss for a Duke game.

[Sledgehammer]

The huge issue with this re-release is not that it's another Duke Nukem 3D game, it's how they delivered it. Do you think everyone would avoid HTTKC+WT release, for example? If they at least hired competent developers who care plus Lee Jackson and old level designers and reused more assents from unreleased material (or better hired Chuck Jones), people would buy it even for 30 bucks if no more. I hate mobile gaming and I was ready to buy HTTKC.

They also could release alpha and beta material with this, I mean this is fucking Duke Nukem anniversary, why not to make something really worthwhile and big? Imagine if they really hired Chuck Jones, wouldn't you buy it then? Less people would think of such re-release as "the same old shit with new levels for 20 bucks". I have no doubt that good release would outsell Megaton Edition.

[NightFright]

World Tour statusbar vs Fox' statusbar (extended by 20px to fit WT statusbar length, with minor pixel edits). I think it's easy to see which of both is the better choice...