[Hendricks266]

 Svanis, on 06 June 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

It honestly saddens me to see people arguing over such small things. I never took credit for anything, I'm just a gamer excited to dig things out of these old beta builds without any background in programming/coding. I really don't want to be a thorn in anyone's side by posting a few replies to this topic. The weapon 6 thing is just the railgun using the sound of the katana. It's just mucking around with files messing the game up and it doesn't really work.

Thanks for trying this out. I briefly tried to set up a frankenbuild for the protected exe but was not successful.

I think ice had the right idea of compiling one of the source code backups from close to the date. The earliest we have iirc is October 95, which is closer than anything else.

[LeoTCK]

Yes, if you don't have September then at least try that! One month difference should work. Unless there was a big milestone meanwhile which might be oops.

[PikaCommando]

Good idea, I think an October or a November build should have more stuff or at least a milestone of some sort since November 15 1995 the last time the old Shadow Warrior website was updated before we see the 1996 one.

Also, could an October 1996 build be different from the November 1996 build we have? The last time the Shadow Warrior page was updated in 1996 was October 21 1996, but it looks like the story underwent drastic changes within one month (from magic villain to scientist villain, although that might not mean much for an old school FPS) because George Broussard was denying everything written on the October page in a November interview.

 Svanis, on 06 June 2017 - 01:09 PM, said:

Could anyone help me on how to open up the files to look at textures, etc?

I used a program called bastART. First, load up PALETTE.DAT for the build you want to dig and then you can check out each TILESXXX.ART for that build for the stuff you want. You can go to View>Browser for an easier way to look for stuff in an .ART file and you can (batch) export a frame as a .bmp through Edit>Export as .BMP/Batch Export.

[LeoTCK]

It could be. Shadow Warrior underwent drastical changes thorought the developement like Unreal did, even though in SW's case it was less times than Unreal which basically had like four markedly different game plans at some point.

In fact there exists an obscure mesh editor from the times Unreal was still developed on MS Dos, something most Unreal fans aren't even interested about. The mesh editor uses the same engine as the game did at the time, but surprise, there still appear to be functions/strings related to the normal game. Due to my inexperience in the matter I wasn't able to crack the editor exe to become the game exe again even though it seems to be possible and even though it would lack the external files it would ask for. Still a pseudo game should be possible from it.

WIth SW it went from a Strife-like game in 1994 (that's what it evokes in me from what I've seen of it), to a ROTT-like(theres even a springboard in one of the maps like the jump pads in rott) ninja game with darker map themes, to a duke-like ninja game without duke's excesses, to becoming duke3d in asia in practice. Still many maps from after 1995 were often redug and repurposed and when it comes to textures not much was changing. With Unreal it began as a one-must-fall like sci fi game except that this was first person shooter, then evolved somehow magically into a dungeon and dragons inspired game that was to be focused on multi user experience and where sci fi elements kept kreeping in, to essentially a gritty-quake-like looking game with gameplay having nothing to do with Quake despite the similar looks and having cool stuff like close-up melee attack modes of some weapons and being able to use all weapons as melee if you ran out of ammo, then it became a game similar to quake or quake2 slowly in gameplay and suddenly all the maps were scrapped and there was just too much new content at some point, until it got fleshed out to the 1998 game. But 1995-1998 is similar to 1994-1997 in case of SW, so both games were about equally long in developement. There are some tests that were done in late 1994 when schmalz was beginning to work on the engine but that barely counts as start of developement I guess. Still, started out as MS Dos game and not Win NT 3.1 game when the code business got taken over fully by Tim.

Btw I was able to climb ladders in one of the early game versions after all, I believe by simply holding the run button or some sht like that.

EDIT: Well engine/game is basically the same thing in the MS Dos era. It's just Tim had the bright idea to really make the distinction later especially when it became fully a windows game and hardly anyone knew later that it would have started on MS Dos. While people knew that Schmalz started it, it was never clear in interviews that it was on MS Dos as it was really supposed to be a HYPE'd Windows NT game. (as windows '95 didn't even exist yet, the developement was solely on NT)

[Svanis]

 PikaCommando, on 06 June 2017 - 08:46 PM, said:

I used a program called bastART. First, load up PALETTE.DAT for the build you want to dig and then you can check out each TILESXXX.ART for that build for the stuff you want. You can go to View>Browser for an easier way to look for stuff in an .ART file and you can (batch) export a frame as a .bmp through Edit>Export as .BMP/Batch Export.

Thanks!

[icecoldduke]

Does anyone know why old game devs named there headers and sources files using capital letters?

[TerminX]

 icecoldduke, on 07 June 2017 - 07:54 PM, said:

Does anyone know why old game devs named there headers and sources files using capital letters?

You don't know much about DOS, do you?

[icecoldduke]

 TerminX, on 07 June 2017 - 07:57 PM, said:

You don't know much about DOS, do you?

Care to enlighten the class? .

[TerminX]

 icecoldduke, on 07 June 2017 - 07:58 PM, said:

Care to enlighten the class? .

Click the link!

[icecoldduke]

 TerminX, on 07 June 2017 - 07:59 PM, said:

Click the link!

Ah I didn't see that was a link .

[MusicallyInspired]

I guess you don't use Firefox then? We were having this conversation in another thread about links on this forum. They're underlined for me because I'm using Firefox.

[LeoTCK]

While here they "shine" with bright color.

[Danukem]

 MusicallyInspired, on 07 June 2017 - 08:38 PM, said:

I guess you don't use Firefox then? We were having this conversation in another thread about links on this forum. They're underlined for me because I'm using Firefox.

I use Firefox, too, but for me they are colored with no underline, despite the fact that I have "underline links" checked in my browser options.

[Kawa]

 Trooper Dan, on 10 June 2017 - 07:13 AM, said:

despite the fact that I have "underline links" checked in my browser options.

In the end, site CSS trumps browser CSS... and then user CSS (Stylish?) trumps that. If the site CSS says not to decorate links with an underline, they won't be underlined regardless of browser settings. Which is basically exactly the same deal as their color. Browser says blue (and that too is a setting), page says gold, so the links are gold.

[MusicallyInspired]

It's weird because not ALL links were underlined for me. Just the ones in posts.

Actually, now that the CSS code has been changed to show links in gold, I no longer have the underline. Huh.

[Kawa]

 MusicallyInspired, on 10 June 2017 - 05:46 PM, said:

It's weird because not ALL links were underlined for me. Just the ones in posts.

Each element can have its own text decoration setting, and a block of settings can apply to particular elements that are part of other particular elements. If a:link has the underline set, and div.post a:link has it unset (selectors pulled out of my ass), every link but those in posts is underlined.

Mind you: unset, not unspecified. Were it unspecified, links in posts would inherit the decoration setting for links in general.

That's what puts the Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets.

...And then, individual elements can have their own inline style, so you could have no link be underlined but this particular single one. Or it could act exactly like a not-link, even down to not having a hand pointer, but still be clickable, because its style attribute makes it so. What a goddamn snowflake.

[NY00123]

Finally I've started looking into these a bit more, if just by the way of a "play-through" of sw960627 (with cheats). Well, OK, I took some walks in the very first map a month earlier, but now it's more "serious".

As mentioned here earlier, the Duke Nukem 3D jetpack can still be activated, if god mode is toggled on. This applies in SW registered v1.2 as well as sw960627.
However, in sw960627, you need to press on 'F' instead of 'J'. (Note that I removed SW.CFG and recreated the keyboard bindings with SETUP.EXE/SETMAIN.EXE.)

The third map of the first episode in sw960627 ($TANK.MAP) seems to have these few flies, somewhere (outside). Compared to the ones in v1.2, they don't seem to do much noise and are also less aggressive (considering their motion in v1.2, which is fast and, either semi-random or approaching the player). The flies also look larger to me in sw960627.

Unless I've missed something, it looks like $TANK.MAP cannot be properly completed, so cheating is the only way. (Hey, it's still not a final build.)

[Svanis]

What happened to TCRF? It hasn't been updated since that initial "push".

[NY00123]

There's surely enough to see, such that locating anything (including differences between revisions of EXEs found so far, or even just the data files) can surely take a while; That is, *months*, if not more.

A few more points about the files from sw960627:
- A full auto-map can be toggled with Alt-A.
- There are a few maps which were apparently done for some experimental works, and/or building some structure separately. !FOF1.MAP, !TANKTST.MAP and TORNADO2.MAP look like examples of such maps. There are good chances that the map editor would crash when you didn't unexpect it (especially during 1995-6), so some more complex structures were possibly constructed separately of larger maps, at first.
- Different revisions of the same map can be found. !!66_15.MAP, !!66_20.MAP, !!90_30A.MAP and the various !!P**.MAP files are clear examples, but when in comes to file naming, there are also these map files: DOZER.001, DOZER.002, DOZER.003..., DOZER.029, DOZER.MAP, DOZER2.MAP, $DOZER.MAP. I haven't checked all of them, but I do believe they represent different stages of the same map.
- Note that certain maps (or revisions of such) may appear to have the wrong tile graphics (see e.g., the above family of map revisions, beginning from !!66_15.MAP). Good chances are tiles got shuffled around more than once, leading to such appearances (although I assume the dev. team must had tried to avoid the thing, for exactly this reason).
- For a few of these maps' revisions, If you try to load any of them SW.EXE (rather than a map editor), you'll probably find yourself out of the game with an error message. There are also chances you'll get an error after moving the player to a nearby location.

Given what I've found out regarding the map files: Counting all different revisions of the maps (including possibly duplicated and/or corrupted maps), I think that sw960627 has a total of - well, not just 83, but 102 map files!

[Dzierzan]

I have a question. I was browsing through all beta tiles art files. I noticed riot gun has changed many times. Riot gun first appeared in sw960611 build and I have a question. Does it have 3 or 4 barrels?

[icecoldduke]

 Dzierzan, on 10 July 2017 - 11:38 AM, said:

I have a question. I was browsing through all beta tiles art files. I noticed riot gun has changed many times. Riot gun first appeared in sw960611 build and I have a question. Does it have 3 or 4 barrels?

Could you post screens?

[Dzierzan]

Since Insert Media doesn't work here cause I am not allowed to use it here, I'll leave links to imgur:

sw960611:
http://imgur.com/a/rDslC

sw960627:
http://imgur.com/a/YAvmm

sw960812:
http://imgur.com/a/fiKgi

[icecoldduke]

 Dzierzan, on 10 July 2017 - 12:46 PM, said:

Since Insert Media doesn't work here cause I am not allowed to use it here, I'll leave links to imgur:

sw960611:
http://imgur.com/a/rDslC

sw960627:
http://imgur.com/a/YAvmm

sw960812:
http://imgur.com/a/fiKgi

sw960611 shotgun might double as a mini gun.

[Hendricks266]

[icecoldduke]

 Hendricks266, on 12 July 2017 - 10:19 PM, said:

What is that?

[Ninjakitty]

 icecoldduke, on 13 July 2017 - 05:06 AM, said:

What is that?

A weird, almost cartoonish, dragon

[Hendricks266]

The background to this, with less palette damage.

[Hendricks266]

I compiled a build of SW from the earliest source code I could find on Jim Norwood and Frank Maddin's hard drives, and it seems to work decently well with the 950908 beta. Thanks to several people for the suggestion.



Due to legitimate factors out of my control, it won't be released publicly on Steam for about two weeks, but it's out of my hands now. Please be patient, and it will happen right on schedule.

I'm still not done with the SW betas. I need to shift my focus elsewhere though.

[icecoldduke]

 Hendricks266, on 14 July 2017 - 01:02 AM, said:

I compiled a build of SW from the earliest source code I could find on Jim Norwood and Frank Maddin's hard drives, and it seems to work decently well with the 950908 beta. Thanks to several people for the suggestion.



Due to legitimate factors out of my control, it won't be released publicly on Steam for about two weeks, but it's out of my hands now. Please be patient, and it will happen right on schedule.

I'm still not done with the SW betas. I need to shift my focus elsewhere though.

Can you tell us anything special about this build?

[oasiz]

According to all clues, dates and available assets, this should be the most advanced build of the game before the traditional / spell / etc.. style got scrapped and started moving towards more to what we know.
The later builds already have a bunch of the earlier concepts / maps / etc.. scrapped in favor of the style we know better.

Basically this could be the best and most mature way to experience old-style SW.
Some ideas got thrown around in discord and this could very well be one of the first builds where the development shifted to in-house. I expect this to be pretty cool !