/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7370982
With a computer.

>>7370982
Ken Silverman's Build Engine. Dude was like 19 at the time. Genius.

Are you referring to the tech or the content?

The tech is explained here: >>7371118
And it wasn't that impressive for 1996 desu.

The content is explained by there being absolutely no oversight over the adult content in PC games.

Duke 3D is for me the perfect FPS. Everything running on that engine is mostly great, but Duke is king. Even the console ports are some of the best FPS games on their consoles. I love Rare, but when it comes to FPS games, id rather play Duke 64 over Goldeneye or Perfect Dark.

>>7371123
>it wasn't that impressive for 1996 desu.
the fuck? name one thing equally or more impressive that didn't use IDtech.

>>7371131

I was thinking of IDtech actually.

Super Mario 64?
Tomb Raider?

>>7371131
>tell me what is 1+1 and don't give me that 2 bullshit

>>7371138
ehh maybe... I had a shiny new Pentium 133 with a gravis ultrasound and some altec lansing speaker shit with a subwoofer. This game blew most other PC games out of the fucking water. always bet on duke
>>7371139
6 / 3

>>7371131
Descent
Terminator: Future Shock
Powerslave for Sega Saturn

>>7370982
>Gimmicks
>backtracking
>tedious combat

Duke is overrated

>>7371652
Found zoomie

>>7371758
the design of dukem nukem resembles these modern games that you hate so much

>>7371652
>Gimmicks
Are good and add to the game when they stay just that: gimmicks and not the focus.
>backtracking
Levels aren't that large and Duke himself is fast. On top of that, there is that one item called Steroids that you likely never used.
Also complete linearity is way worse.
>tedious combat
The only tedium in Duke combat is having to blow up or gib with doors corpses on Damn I'm Good, so that they would stop respawning. Playing on Come Get Some is completely fine, if you don't want to deal with it.

>>7371761
>Wide open levels
>Non linear
>Hundreds of enemies vertically and being able to backtrack
Yeah no

The Build Engine was just very impressive for 1996. Ken Silvermen was a coding wiz.
Aside from that though the high amount of interactivity for the time, how a lot of the maps looked like real places and that Duke Nukem was just a fun protag and you had a recipe for success. I bet there was plenty of vitriol among Duke 3D and Quake players back in the day what with them releasing so close together.

>>7371123
I was referring to the level design as well. I've played lots of user levels from this engine/game, but the the developers for this title seemed to have masterfully grasped it with practically zero frame of reference.

>>7371131
System Shock, Terra Nova.

>>7371138
>>7371597
>>7372226
Absolutely not. Console games are console games. And the PC games you mentioned are a lot more archaic in terms of technology and level design. The only true contemporary that Duke 3D has, that is on the same level, is Quake 1, and Duke 3D (much like several games mentioned here) is slightly older. Duke 3D is a landmark title of forward-thinking design, and is certainly among the greatest and most important games titles ever released. The technology and mastery of design that Duke has is what sets it a generation ahead of DOOM (the previous most ambitious and most masterfully executed game before 1996).

>>7371131
Dark Forces came out one year before and even had crude 3D models.

>>7371807
>wide open levels
key cards hunting

>Non Linear
No

>Hundred of enemies vertically and being able to backtrack

With a combat that is not designed for this type of encounter

>>7371652
By this metric then Doom is even worse.

>>7372471
Hard to argue with someone that doesn't really address your points.

>>7372485
What I mean is that the game has limited exploration, the levels end up becoming linear due to the specific requirements to advance in the levels and the combat does not support this type of enemy

>>7370982
Accomplish what? Developing a shit game?

>>7370982
It was written by white men.

>>7372497
Of course the game has limited exploration, as it's a set of levels and not an open world. You can sequence break a lot if you know what are you doing though and there are a lot of optional rooms and secrets.

>>7372687
>white men
>programmed by a jew

>>7370982
The tech fits perfectly within the year. What do you mean? We had Descent, Doom, System Shock 2 Quake not long after, N64 with more advanced shit going on, and affordable hardware acceleration for home computers around the corner. It's just Doom/'superscaler' shit on crack with a few more tricks.

>>7373405
*System Shock 1,

>>7372395
>Absolutely not
Duke3D doesn't even support looking up and down withouth y-shearing unlike System Shock.

>>7370982
i mean it looks about 1996 in terms of tech, same year Quake and Mario 64 are released

If your game wasn't 3D after MechWarrior 2 came out, it was already dated for its time.

>>7372395
Mechwarrior 2 is on the same level.

>>7372457
Pro-tip: no one cares about 3D models. This isn't the reason why Duke 3D was a good game. You are only focusing on these minor details to obfuscate the fact that Duke 3D still leagues more accomplished in terms of actual design, instead of superficial ones. If this was Quake (which combines innovation and gameplay, similar to Doom and Duke 3D), you might actually be able to make a case, but you cannot. Dark Forces is a B-list Doomclone with C-list design.

>>7373426
See above.

>>7373405
There is no game on N64 that is more advanced than Duke 3D. The system can't even run fully Duke 3D without being downgraded because of memory limitations.

>>7373450
Duke is older and more revolutionary in terms of what was accomplished.

>>7373537
It's pretty funny that you rank this flat nothingness on the same level as something that changed video games forever. I guess you think Star Fox is ahead of Doom too right? I don't.

>>7373681
>nothing on N64 as complex
Apples and oranges. The Duke engine isn't even 3D, it's an x86/SVGA optimized 2.5D engine. You could just as easily say that nothing on a mid 90s PC was doing shit nearly as complicated as Wave Race's water. Build, or even Quake on release, couldn't even render a single surface like the N64 could. Also, X to doubt on a complete Duke3D port being impossible if a decent developer leveraged the hardware.

>>7373681
Descent was older than Duke AND more revolutionary, both in terms of graphics and level design.
Dark Forces actually had plot, cutscenes and mission objectives, giving you a purpose in every level.
Duke only added interactivity. That's it. Also, you're hilariously wrong about Duke 64. From technical standpoint it was improved, even if they for some reason couldn't add music and simplified (to a better effect) cutscenes. Duke Nukem Zero Hour (also made based on Build Engine) is honestly more impressive.
As for Quake, the only two things it brought on are multiplayer and mods. That's it.

>>7373681
>more revolutionary
but it really isn't. It's just Doom with literal Jewish tricks to simulate stacked rooms and more interactable objects. It sounds like you just have some weird axe to grind with the N64. I was a PC fan then too, but N64 looking games weren't even possible on PC til the late 90s. It may have been technically less complicated on the CPU than some PC games at the time, but N64 games were just doing shit most PCs literally couldn't. Glide was slow to roll out for anyone who wasn't a diehard, and didn't gain ubiquity til 98 or 99.

>>7373681
>Pro-tip: no one cares about 3D models
So you weren't even alive when these games came out.

Final Doom was the best 1996 fps game.

>>7373916
Doom wasn't even the best FPS in the year it came out. Shadowcaster and Ultima Underworld 2 were better.

>>7374009
lmao

Duke 3D is an overglorified Ken's Labyrinth TC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JH2kezTnRg

>>7371127
>>7370982
I grew up on DOOM and didnt get into duke until my 20s. Its fun and all but just too much controls and inventory items to keep track of half the time i dont even use them

>>7374040
Most first person shooter games of the 90s were influenced by wizardry


If we look back at wizardry it’s one of the most important games

>>7373902
I don't give a shit about N64, but I think the people here downplaying the mastery of Duke 3D is just hilarious. The conversation is akin to saying that J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is not a masterpiece because other composers of the era also wrote for harpsichord, and therefor isn't impressive.

>>7374059
There's no proof that FPS was influenced by Wizardry. This is just baseless conjecture.

>>7374140
You still didn't list what made Duke so revolutionary.

>>7374140
I like it a lot but the space episode blows and only some of Shrapnel City is okay. Definitely feels shareware-y and frontloaded.

>>7375605
Personally, I love Lunar Apocalypse a lot, especially the second half of it.
It got the best music too.

>>7372457
>>7371131
>powerslave
>dark forces
don't both these games use the duke engine?

>>7371761
>duke: shocks you with interactivity "you can fucking do THAT"
>modern game: wow these static scenes look so detailed as long as there's no motion. luckily interaction is disabled so we don't spoil it

>>7375853
Powerslave did, but an older version and only on PC.

>>7371761
you must have only ever played Forever

>>7372497
that shit also had completely optional diverging hidden levels you could find instead of just clearing them the "intended" way. when is the last time any FPS has even done something like that?

>>7375905
Ion Fury?

Technologically, it's pretty typical of a 3D PC game from 1996.

That in itself is an accomplishment, but compared to its contemporaries in that sphere, its main accomplishment is its presentation.

>>7370982
Come again?

>>7371123
>>7371652
>>7372538
cope harder zoomshit

>>7373537
>shitty accelerated / textured versions
filtered

>>7370982
most of home computers was shit *pic related And BEARLY can play Quake.

>>7375853
LucasArts developed their own engine for Dark Forces.
They gave it the rather imaginitive name "Jedi"

>>7375859
>shocks you with interactivity "you can fucking do THAT"
When I played duke3d for the first time and turned on a light switch I blown away in a sense and knew what this game was going to be all about. This was about a month ago too. I never understood the appeal of modern games with pretty graphics even though you can't interact with any of it.

>>7377059
Had the same "aha" moment in '96 when I realized that you can stick your fingers into electrical outlets in DN3D(and get appropriately shocked).
The engine manages the "real places in a primitive engine" thing just right.

>>7372119
No usermappers managed to scratch the genius of Allen Blum. Dude returned to the game after 20 years, and he built two maps (Golden Gate and Giza) that were better than the entire community output.

>>7377116
You can even see your reflection in mirrors, something that is inconceivable from modern day billion-dollar AAA trash

>>7378151
you can shoot the shrink ray into the mirror and it will bounce off letting you shrink yourself

>>7377176
Yea, his sense of 3D is unmatched, especially in Lunar apocalypse.

>>7373681
>Duke is older and more revolutionary in terms of what was accomplished
duke3d is a fuckin doom clone with toilet gags

>>7377116
>Had the same "aha" moment in '96 when I realized that you can stick your fingers into electrical outlets in DN3D(and get appropriately shocked).
>The engine manages the "real places in a primitive engine" thing just right.


It really is quite easy to make interactive objects in Duke Nukem 3D's Build editor. Once you learn how to use the hi and lo tagging system. You can do some Rube Goldberg-like shit in the engine, lights are done by controlling the radiosity levels of a sector, geometry can shift on events, sectors can be moved around (like tram cars). The engine itself can do interesting things with "impossible geometry". Like intersecting geometry, using portals to crate pools of water, etc. It is one of my favorite game engines to make maps for.

Literally by torturing closeted trannies. Based George found a bunch of tranny programmers at a college and threatened to out them to their parents in Texas if they didn't code the best game engine ever.

Slave labor works.

>>7380535
????

>>7380542
We will make the new truth that shows the world what evil actually is.

Duke 3D is based tranny torture. That's why it's good.

>>7380547
Are you the same guy that keeps posting on /v/ about how we should destroy the hobby so that trannies can't play them?

I understand where you're coming from, but get help, man.

Duke (and all the Build games, actually) always felt kind of... spotty? Like a shopping cart where some of the wheels are kind of fucked up but it's not immediately obvious how or why, and it's not really THAT big of a deal, but it irks me

>>7380580
That's what happens when you make a game with slave labor, man.

BASED ION FURY

>>7380535
>>7380547
>>7380584
Tranny hate isn't retro.

>>7372457
If 3D models are some kind of benchmark, then System Shock already had those in 1994. And probably wasn't the first one.

>>7374040
Ken's Labyrith has a Wolf3D-style engine, very primitive compared to Duke3D.

>>7380590
>the is-this-retro schizos are fighting the tranny schizos
Based.

>>7380590
transphobia is never out of fashion.

The zoomer cope in this thread is unreal

Get your T levels checked or something, you whine line women

>>7381008
Psychotically linking everything to a tranny conspiracy instead of just being passively irritated is a 2010s phenomenon. It's not retro.

>>7370982
Godtier level design

>>7381176
You can spot the troon a mile away. He will always try to divert the blame, away from his wicked lifestyle choices.

Is it a contrarian opinion to say Derelict is the best Duke map ever?

>>7381813
It's certainly one of the oldest, looking at the development history of DN3D.

>>7375841
Lunar Apocalypse has always been my favorite episode and I never understood the hate, Lunar Reactor is the best level in the game.

>>7377176
Although Golden Gate gives it a run for its money, that level is the most fun FPS level Ive played since the 90s no joke.

To this day DN3D is still my favorite game of all time and Randy Pitchford is my most hated human of all time.

>>7370982
Quakes better

>>7382268
For modding and multiplayer, yes.
And Quake 2 is even better than Quake.

>>7382280
man of culture

>>7373681
The problem with discussing innovation & influence in games is that people fail to see the forest for the trees. They point to an obscure game that happened to have a feature first but in a very limited way and think it's more innovative than a big game that implemented it fully.
Some other games/engines of the time may have shared features or had more advanced tech than Duke, but none of them were as much of a complete package.

>>7371131
>No! You can't just mention Quake 1's engine! You can't just bring up the fact that it's a true 3D engine capable of making levels far more complex than those of Duke and everything in Duke can be reproduced almost 1:1 in Quake!! Stop!

>>7382268
This is a DN3D thread

>>7382527
I don't remember, does Quake support non-euclidean geometry?

>>7382601
Take a guess

>>7382620
No?

>>7380535
George YourMomero

>>7382527
>>No! You can't just mention Quake 1's engine!
You can mention it all you want.
> And it wasn't that impressive for 1996 desu.
If there was only ONE game that was more impressive than Duke 3d in 1996, how is duke 3d "not that impressive?". Shit was incredible for 1996. You weren't alive. You weren't there. Shut the fuck up. Zoomers in shambles.

>>7382720
Also duke 3d ran wayyyy better than Quake at the time. Way more people had a smooth experience playing Duke than Quake running like 15FPS on a 486. At the time, Duke was the better game.

>>7382720
Despite it being fully 3D I thought it looked like a brown shit, even in 1996

>>7382729
yeah right. the hell were you playing back then instead? i was into Red Alert, Warcraft II, Mechwarrior II, and Terminal Velocity

>>7382620
I don't remember linked portals usage in Quake, hence I asked it.
>>7382720
>year 1996
>STILL having less than six degrees of freedom in 3D world
Outdated on arrival.

>>7382750
> less than six degrees of freedom
what did you never find the jetpack? retard

>>7382746
Radix, Tyrian, Jazz Jackrabbit, X-Com

>>7370982
They built the engine and it was three years after DOOM came out.

>>7382753
You can't fly upside down with a jetpack, retard. It got five degrees at best.

>>7382746
>Red Alert
wasn't out until November '96
>Warcraft II
>Mechwarrior II
>Terminal Velocity
among other things yes

>>7382786
>fly upside down
You can't with a real world jetpack, at least not the ones which the one in DN3D is loosely based on.

Well you could, but probably just once.

>>7382830
Why did you even bring it up in the first place?

>>7382863
I didn't. I'm a different anon.

>>7382890
Okay then.

>>7371118
>Ken Silverman's Build Engine. Dude was like 19 at the time. Genius.
Yeah well Sandy Petersen of Doom and Quake fame completely shit on Ken's Labyrinth, Ken's first FPS (it was originally called Walken)

>>7382987
Pathetic

>>7382994
Ken's Labyrinth is shit

>>7370982
That's not even the most graphically impressive game of the year, dude.

>>7382987
Ken Silverman was an autistic sperg who was impossible to talk to and refused to fix problems for licensees, namely Q Studios/Monolith when they were developing Blood according to the developer rant in the Alpha.
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Blood/Alpha_Demo#George.txt

Also George Broussard told them to defraud the IRS.

>>7382997
No you mong. The review is shit.

>>7383020
>George:

>I just got off the phone with Nick, who told me he had passed my previous message about Ken to you. I hope that you understand that I was really just venting at Nick, and I didn't intend that my message be passed on to you, Ken, or his father. There is still, however, a very significant problem we (Q Studios) have in dealing with Ken.

>Every update Ken makes to his engine turns out to be a major tribulation for us. He regularly makes changes that break our code without any advance warning. He consistently ignores our requests for fixes or suggestions for design strategy. Nick is constantly on me to "Call him. Just get on the phone and talk to him," but to be honest, talking to Ken on the phone is pretty much near the bottom of the list of things I'd like to do with my life.

>The problem is, he's just so completely unresponsive. I'll ask him a question, and nine out of ten times I'll either get silence or "I don't know" as a response. I know he's highly intelligent, but so are a lot of people I know, and I can TALK to THEM. Okay, so perhaps his personality is a bit different, but he still needs to work WITH us, not AGAINST us.

>>7383020
Cry harder, literal nobody.

>>7383039
>We've had a resource and memory manager in Blood since last year, and it's been working well and is very solid code at this point in time. To get it working back in December though, I had to completely replace parts of the engine, no thanks to Ken. A well designed system would have been built on the ground up from a good memory manager, or at the very least with hooks laid in so it could be developed later. To get our virtual memory system to work with Ken's engine, I had to spend weeks reverse engineering Ken's code, documenting variables, prototyping functions -- all things that Ken himself should have done or provided.

>Now in June, he hacks in his "group file" system, and says we have to use it. In one sense he's right -- he's hard coded the thing into his engine, and it's broken Blood unless I can figure out which parts of the engine I need to replace. By the time we're done with Blood, we probably won't have any of Ken's engine left... Perhaps you'll want to reconsider the royalties that you are paying him.

>A few months ago, Ken made a change to the engine that allowed each tile to have its own origin -- a reference point by which it could be positioned. This change was a good one, but there were some problems with the implementation. When the bit was turned on to enable sprites to be centered on their origin, animations bounced, and sprites appeared at the wrong position.

>It turns out the solution was one of procedure -- by setting the origin at the base for sprites that are supposed to be on the floor, everything appears correctly. Unfortunately, setting the origin for several thousand tiles using Ken's EDITART tool was just a bit too cumbersome for us, so I spent a few days developing a tool that would allow simple tweaking of the tile origins, among other things. This tool is integrated with our new sequence editor, which will be used to create and edit all the actor animations (walking, attack, death, etc.)

>>7383068
>Everything with this system was going fine until we discovered that Ken has some engine flaws in dealing with sprites that use origin based centering. The clipmove() function doesn't work, and neither does hitscan(). These two functions are pretty much essential to doing anything with the engine. I could rewrite them, of course, but that would be a few days to weeks out of our schedule, depending on how many more bugs and design problems crawl out of the woodwork.

>We had waited a few months before switching to the new origin based centering, so I was quite surprised to find such fundamental problems with it. We called up Ken and told him about it, and he said he didn't think anyone was using it, but he really didn't know. We asked him to fix it.

>Tonight I called up Ken because of the group file problems, and because we still don't have a fix for the clipmove() or hitscan() problems. Ken he wasn't going to fix it and we should go back to using the old centering mode. This is totally and completely unacceptable. We've already invested time and effort (need I say money?) into using something, and we're not about to waste more regressing.

>Ken understands algorithms, and he understands graphics. What he doesn't get is how to design SYSTEMS. Everything he does to the engine is a piecemeal enhancement to something that should have been designed right from the beginning. The memory system is a poignant example of this. It is a hack, like most of his code, and not very robust. From what I've disassembled of the group file code (trying to figure out a way to eliminate or replace it), it too demonstrates plentiful opportunities for crashing the system -- pointers being freed without validation, files being closed without verifying the handle, etc.

>>7383083
>Our resource and memory manager are quite superior to Ken's (no bragging), so to abandon our body of code would be a step in the wrong direction. When I mentioned to him that our resource manager used an LRU list to handle purging of resources, he said that he didn't understand how they worked and he didn't want to undertake something that complicated. It isn't that complex; it's just outside the realm of Ken's experience.

>I usually end my phone conversations with Ken with something like the following: "Ken, is there anything I can do, anything I can provide to you, that would help you make these fixes or changes?" The answer is invariably "No." After we hang up, I usually bang my head on the desk for about ten minutes. I've tried to explain to Nick that this is why I don't like to call Ken, but I think he already knows.

>Tonight I tried to explain to Ken what a library file is. I told him how linkers work, and how they resolve symbol name when producing an executable. I tried to impress on him the benefits of "code granularity" -- breaking a system up into as many small discrete modules as possible so that the linker can efficiently pack only used code into the executable. I informed him about "dead code", and why there was so much of his in Blood. I don't think I made any impression at all.

>George, I want you to understand one thing. When I ask Ken to make a fix or enhancement, it is most surely something we absolutely need for Blood. I wouldn't force myself to make the phone otherwise. However, everything that I ask for would benefit not only Blood, but EVERY OTHER build project. I've spent enough time as a Project Manager for commercial programming tools that I know what makes a good API, and I know what makes a system extensible. The things I've been asking for are "hooks" so we can implement our own features, not have him do them for us.

>>7383083
typical cowboy teenage coder =^)

>>7383107
>I sometimes wonder, though, if I'm going against the flow. Perhaps Ken added his cache system in response to other teams request for a memory manager? Maybe the group file code was asked for by the Duke Nukem team? These fears usually turn out to be unfounded, since other teams report similar problems as a result of Ken's "updates."

>I realize that most of the problems I've been describing with Ken are highly historical in nature, and there's no way to change the past. What can and must be done though is to make Ken more responsive to our needs. He needs to work WITH us, not against us. I don't know why he is so combative, but I can guess -- ego. He probably feels about his code the way a lot of programmers do: it's okay to criticize your own code, but for anyone else to do so is blasphemy. I used to be that way until I realized that a lot of the suggestions people were making to me were actually right.

>>7383119
>Termination contract - Release agreement

>Send them a letter saying why we want out - make it clear that we will no longer continue our business relationship under any circumstances. Try to separate Scott and George from Apogee. Avoid personal attacks.

>Intro- recieved draft agreement. Doesn't follow intent of agreement. We left higher paying jobs. Apogees priorities changed. We lost creative control, potentional income. We can't work under a situation like this.

>Points:

>* stole development teams

>* quote emails

>* "mission of Apogee West is to ...."

>* "all games produced by AWD recieve xx%"

>* recruited Richard away from us

>* withdrawn Sonic Holography agreement

>* Promises about ports to consoles

>* "Nick met with people from several console platforms - Atari, Goldstar,
Sony"

>* AWD was supposed to receive 70% of console

>* Apogees failures to produce a Blood contract despite frequent promises

>* Georges recommendation to defraud IRS


>Demands:

>* 35% on sales of ruins

>* Severence

>* compensation for amounts that would have been made through ports

>Conclusion:

>We want to be fair, we want a clean exit

>We should to be free to get back on track with the project, but this may not be possible due to the damage you have already caused. We feel that you owe us at least this.

>Avoid any mention of personality conflicts, i.e. Greg Malone.

>>7382987
>Sandy Petersen
You mean the worst ID level designer at the time?
Checks out.

>>7383116
When you're licensing your engine out for tens of thousands of dollars and it's already as hideous and lacking in documentation as Build code is, you should be fixing things.
>Upon opening VS, the Build engine source felt unwelcoming with difficult filenames (a.c, cache1d.c). Opening those files reveals something hostile to the eyes and the mind. An example among many others from Engine.c (line 693):

if ((globalorientation&0x10) > 0) globalx1 = -globalx1, globaly1 = -globaly1, globalxpanning = -globalxpanning;
if ((globalorientation&0x20) > 0) globalx2 = -globalx2, globaly2 = -globaly2, globalypanning = -globalypanning;
globalx1 <<= globalxshift; globaly1 <<= globalxshift;
globalx2 <<= globalyshift; globaly2 <<= globalyshift;
globalxpanning <<= globalxshift; globalypanning <<= globalyshift;
globalxpanning += (((long)sec->ceilingxpanning)<<24);
globalypanning += (((long)sec->ceilingypanning)<<24);
globaly1 = (-globalx1-globaly1)*halfxdimen;
globalx2 = (globalx2-globaly2)*halfxdimen;

>>7383158
The dude created Call of Cthulu and Downtown and The Chasm are peak level design

>>7383167
my guess is apogee licensed it, ken probably wanted nothing to do with it

>>7383167
Also i recall there being a ton of Duke mods, so it couldn't have been that difficult to work with. Reading ID source code is wonderful, and the exception to the rule. Most code i've read is more along the lines of terrible, hasty and convoluted.

>>7383170
>Call of Cthulu
Meh.
>Downtown and The Chasm are peak level design
What the fuck is wrong with you?

>>7383184
They wanted to do a lot of things with Blood and they were veteran programmers, Build is and always has been completely hacked together. I assume that didn't mesh well with them and Ken being a spergy teenager didn't help communication.

>>7383192
Right. I think what is unwritten here is that many "veteran programmer" frameworks are full of bulk and convolution. Things that look "hasty and inflexible" also tend to be faster. It's typical of inexperienced coders to make "something that works" as opposed to "a fowrard thinking framework that can support unknown unknown X in the future". Also, tight deadlines kill good code.

>>7382728
Duke 3D was easier to run for sure but it still sits somewhere between "slide show" and "almost playable" on a fast 486

Both need a Pentium compatible to be a good time IMO.

>>7383172
That's probably it, considering how different every game (that isn't based on Duke codebase) internally.
>>7383184
That's because Duke had CON scripting, that with time got expanded by eDuke and eDuke32.
>Reading ID source code is wonderful, and the exception to the rule.
Starting with Quake, sure.

>>7382720
>If there was only ONE game that was more impressive than Duke 3d in 1996,
Bing Bing Wahoo man says hello.

>>7383192
IIRC, Blood got a better and cleaner codebase than Duke or Shadow Warrior.

>>7383232
It still looked like the example above, that is from here:
https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/

>>7383240
I'm talking about the code they wrote for the game around the engine, including their ROR implementation and other stuff.

>>7383252
Ah I see

>>7382987
He was a talented programmer, not game designer. Imagine Carmack creating a game on his own without the help of the rest of Id.
>>7383184
The way Build works, theres an engine side and a game side. Ken supplied the engine and the game designers (3D Realms) created the game side. Duke mods use a proprietary scripting language (CON) for the game side that has nothing to do with Ken's code.

>>7383521
>nothing to do with Ken's code
Right. More or less, the engine wasn't built to be modified. When the Blood people started poking around, they got their panties in a bunch. Makes sense.

>>7383532
Well they asked for features that were there but didn't fucking work to be fixed or simple hooks so they could do things themselves. It is not unreasonable for someone paying out the ass for your engine to expect it to work as designed or for you to provide at least a modicum of assistance, especially when said engine has zero documentation as compared to someone like Carmack's licensed out engines

>>7383575
They were being crybaby faggots, Ken was not obligated to do jackshit for them

>>7382256
1. Dark Side
2. Derelict
3. Golden Carnage
4. Lunar Reactor
5. Freeway
6. LA Rumble
7. The Abyss
8. Mirage Barrage
9. Death Row
10. Fusion Station

Honorables: Hollywood Holocaust/Duke Burger

>>7383158
>You mean the worst ID level designer at the time?
Sandy named all the monsters, came up with all their damage, health and speed values, named all the levels and decided their orders in both games. He is also the reason we got the Icon of Sin at the end of Doom II, as they weren't going to put any new end boss monster at all. He convinced them they had to do SOMETHING, so the Icon of Sin was born. He also is the only reason we got the story we did in Quake, Shub-Niggurath and the Lovecraftian theme was all the Sandman.

Sandy is based as fuck. Seethe.

>>7370982
it was made by actual computer nerds, not hipster faggots learning to use unity or 90 IQ DeVry drop outs.

>>7382256
people hate the second episode because of the drones, they never figured out how to set X or Z to the holoduke or something. cause yeah as much as I love the more contemporary near-dystopian feel of the rest of the game I love the pure sci-fi aesthetic a lot.

>>7384490
true, half his levels in doom 2 were garbage, but he did the brunt of the work for mapping and was important in getting the game finished in the first place.

Duke level design is just much better than Doom's, too bad the franchise was ran by assholes all the time (Broussard, Pitchford).

>>7372395
>Still using 2D sprites
>Forward thinking
lmao

I just recently replayed Duke Nuke 3D Atomic edition and loved it. The only episode I didn't have a blast in was Shrapnel City. It was good, just not amazing like the other 3 episodes. I am going to work on the expansion packs now

>>7370982
This game would have been more impressive a year earlier. fucking Quake came out in 96

>>7383969
What a stupid faggot you are. Ken provided an engine with no support? That's insane.

"I ain't afraid of no quake"
Based Duke dabbing on the muh real 3d fags.

>>7372497
>the levels end up becoming linear due to the specific requirements to advance
Non-linear level design =/= Non-linear progression

>>7385672
Quake came out 5 months after Duke Nukem 3D

>>7385672
I would rather play Duke Nukem 3D, than Quake personally. Both are great games, but Duke has way more "personality" and its just over all a much more fun game to me

>>7385887
>5 months for one of the most important technological leaps in the history of PC gaming
wow

>>7385672
>This game would have been more impressive a year earlier
Yeah, that's a redundant observation. All games ever made would be more impressive if they hypothetically released a year earlier.

>fucking Quake came out in 96
Duke 3D is still older and still did a lot of new design that nobody else was doing. If you think this thread is based around the idea that Duke 3D had impossible graphics then you are wrong. We're talking about design here.

>>7385929
Quake was the release that marked the beginning of id's transition from a game developer to a tech developer.
But as far as tech demos go, it's pretty damn good.

>>7370982
HE HAD BALLS OF STEEL
That's how.

>>7385970
I think that is a fair assessment to make. Quake is still a great game, but it's not as fun as Duke Nukem 3D by any means. Though, again.. that's my own personal opinion. I never fully beat Quake until like 5 year ago, and there were a lot of frustrating moments. Still enjoyed my experience with it. The only time I ever got that in Duke, was with the button puzzles later in the game. Duke Nukem 3D really holds up in its level design and quirky humor / satire

>>7385630
I think my problem with Shrapnel City is that half the maps feel half-baked, and overall lacks the immersive atmosphere that E1 and E2 had.
Even E4 manages to have a few immersive levels, despite being the goofiest episode overall.

>>7386008
I agree, something just felt off about the 3rd Duke Nukem 3D episode. I know it was going for a realistic city, but some of the levels just felt flat and boring

>>7386023
Most of them were intended to be deathmatch maps and repurposed for single-player.
I would love if there was a fan remake of episode 3's weakest maps. Like imagine if Farenheight actually had a reasonably large & interactive fire station.

Discuss this shit in the fps general.

>>7373887
>Duke Nukem Zero Hour (also made based on Build Engine)
Got curious because this sounds like complete bullshit and the internet says "No".
Here's a quote I found:
>We actually used it [Build] to make maps for Duke Nukem: Zero Hour too, although with custom functionality added by our coders
So it seems some of the Build engine tools and file formats were used but the actual engine actually shares more with the one used by the console versions of Mortal Kombat 4

>>7387192

>>7387254
why

>>7373681
>There is no game on N64 that is more advanced than Duke 3D. The system can't even run fully Duke 3D without being downgraded because of memory limitations.
Holy shit you don't know ANYTHING about how these videogames run. Duke Nukem 64 (3D) runs piss easy on the N64 and doesn't downgrade a thing, it was one of the only N64 games I could emulate fullspeed on my 866mhz PC because it used up so little of the N64's power. Even Quake 64 ran smoothly but it's harder than Duke Nukem 64 to run because the 3d makes it a lot more advanced, and Quake 2 then after. I love Duke Nukem 64 but Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 (the two launch games in 1996) run circles around it technologically. Games like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Turok etc. those were a challenge to the N64, not the 2.5D game Duke Nukem.

>>7386008
>>7386023
Shrapnel City was an afterthought. Originally the plan was just LA Meltdown and Lunar Apocalypse in two parts (space station and moonbase). Shrapnel City maps by Levelord were made in a very short time, and even from the maps many areas were cut for some reasons. The biggest problem though is the episode didn't offer any additions (ie. new weapons, monsters) and didn't feel like a single player experience, it doesn't go from A to B. It wasn't bad, gameplay and flow was good, and had a distinct visual theme, but no match to the other episodes.

The best levels were LA Rumble and Freeway, because they felt like properly finished city levels. Flood Zone was an interesting map too with a pretty nice flooded landscape and some 3D feel.

The other 8 maps are either mediocre or bad IMHO. Movie Set, Rabid Transit and Fahrenheit were the biggest offenders. Completely baffled how George greenlighted them without asking for more.

The Birth was a weird hodjpodj, but it offered a new enemy and a new storyline about it which gave the episode an unique feel. The quality was uneven because too many people worked on it, and some new art didn't fit the theme of the original style. The best maps were Duke Burger, Going Postal and Derelict. Despite my bitter hate, Randy's levels, at least It's Impossible and Area 51 were good too.

I have been playing eduke32 with polymer renderer, and sometimes the floors glitch out like pic related? Anyone know why?

>>7385759
Don't fight with him anon, he's a neet who's never worked with anyone before

>>7387296

>>7385759
He literally did you stupid faggot, this motherfucker also got a cut of the profits in royalties on every copy sold. He was an autistic faggot who refused to fix things and hacked in random changes to his hacked together engine that broke weeks of work for the Blood team.

>>7388074
So is that what the Blood devs were you retard? Is that what Blood programmer Peter Freese who wrote below was:
>>7383039
>>7383068
>>7383083
>>7383107
>>7383119
And they had worked with many people. This guy was a veteran programmer and so was Nick Newhard. That was the whole problem, Ken DIDN'T work with them. He in fact made things way harder for them.

>>7382527
Duke 3D was overall a better game when it comes to a singleplayer experience. Gameplay interactivity was a big thing for Duke 3D. There's a very good reason why Duke 3D has had numerous ports to this day while Quake is barely given any treatment where as something like Quake 2 or Quake 3 are made into Quake Live or Quake 2 RTX. Not that Quake is a bad game, because it was due to Quake's flexible engine for modding that revolutionized the FPS genre. But it was barebones.

>>7388649
>There's a very good reason why Duke 3D has had numerous ports to this day while Quake is barely given any treatment
What do you mean by "ports"? Quake has been ported to literally every console imaginable. The only reason why Quake wouldn't be ported to something is if it couldn't handle it. I'm fairly confident to say that if there's a duke 3d port for a console after 5th gen there's a quake port.

If you misspoke you're still wrong. Quake has had countless new episodes, maps and mods released for it over the years, that's not even counting all the speedrunning and endless dueling competitions and shit. I don't know anything about the Duke 3d scene, maybe a cult scene has sprung up lately and it caught on. But it's hard to imagine it being bigger than Quake.

Are the Duke expansions worth playing? I just finished the Main game for first time.

I heard they were short so was gonna try to blast through them in a couple hours

>>7389210
Caribbean is good
DC is okay, but some levels are needlessly big
NW is really bad.

>>7389210
Nuclear Winter is fucking based

>>7382527

>>7370982
I'll pick this and DooM over any other shooter these days.

>>7391316
>that lighting
based zoomer

>>7388649
There's two source ports for Duke3D and both are shit and inaccurate.

>>7391584
Build GDX plays Duke flawlessly

>>7370982
If anything, 1996 was the latest you could get away with non-3D shooters. Everything afterward would get unreasonably criticized about it.

>>7387784
can't tell you the technical reason but my guess is that it has to do with sectors occupying the same 2d space and the game accidentally rendering a little bit of one where you shouldn't be able to see it, it happens a lot with eduke32. from my own experience messing with Build, I feel like subtle sector related issues that would go unnoticed back in the day show up more frequently with eduke32-- probably more the fault of build than of eduke