Quick Look: Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour

@7x_: If all they see is "angry viewer comment" they are out of touch. Viewers, fans and paid members give them a living. Developers work hard year round and expect outlets to show their game in an honest light (not with a broken controller). It's disrespectful to the viewers and developer if you are going to play a game in a way you aren't typically comfortable with (FPS on console) with faulty hardware (broken controller). Granted, maybe this was the platform they were given. I was looking forward to this QL so for them to playthrough it in less than ideal conditions and be soured because of it was a bit disappointing. More importantly, people who have interest in buying the game should know this isn't the experience they will have with working controls on the platform they prefer to play FPS on.

If you don't want to be banned again, I'd avoid linking that KiA site.

When that Apogee reboot still had the license, the plan was to have the team behind the Rise of the Triad remake team take a stab at Duke Nukem 3D. Would have been interesting. That RotT remake wasn't great but it had its fans.

As someone who played through Duke3D again recently, this looks okay. I wouldn't mind cheating my way through it while listening to the developer commentary.

But as someone who owns both "Duke Nukem 3D" and "Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition" -- both of which have been removed from the Steam store... I'm not sure I should be spending money on this game again. Especially since I also have third (physical) copy.

This should have just been DLC for the Megaton Edition.

I check everyday in the hopes of the next Big Rigs.

This seems... Really bad. This is really bad.

@lonelyspacepanda: The controller isn't broken. Gearbox didn't put in a deadzone.

Excellent wordplay at the start there.

Worst commentary ever? certainly seems so. I mean ffs you don't talk as if the player is seeing exactly what you see unless you take control from them, that's just moronic.

Also as much nostalgia as I have for dn3d, Forever left such an awful taste in my mouth everything remotely related to it, even the original game just makes me feel bad now. And as far as remakes go this one seems incredibly lazy. I've played a free modded version of the original that looks better...

Not only is the weird lack of polish for a 20 YEAR OLD GAME THAT ALREADY HAD MULTIPLE Re-releases over the past few years without such issues mind-boggling to me, but that Pigcop bit of the Developer commentary kinda sours my intention of ever buying this "newer" re-release. Luckily I have Megaton Edition (which has now been removed from all storefronts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) so no reason to ever buy this one.

Can someone tell me why (mechanically) looking up and down in these earlier FPSs looks so warped?

@tgjessie: Perspective Correction is the name for a term that prevents texture warping when using both the x and y-axis, it wasn't utilized until around 1995 with games such as Dark Forces, developers didn't think to find a solution to that issue at the time since their intention was that you would only ever use horizontal scrolling, so this allowed walls and ceilings to be rendered as simpler and less taxing objects in the game engine.

I might be wrong on some of that, but tl;dr - it looks odd because they were never intended to be viewed at a different vertical angle.

The idea that anyone would have any affection for Duke Nukem outside of nostalgia (and it's importance historically for its technical achievements) continues to utterly befuddle me. The idea that anyone was waiting with anticipation for DNF in 2011 was pretty damn surprising to me then as well.

I mean, people can like what they like, but the franchise as a whole seems more rickety than this release.

ugh god dammit

sexist much?

unfollowing!

"LOOK AT THOSE HIGH TECH FIRE SPRITES."

@tunacat: or jeff accidentally touched the stick when the game started. Has happened to me as well, games assume the position the stick is in when starting is neutral. So if you tilt the stick slightly down when that happens its gonna think your aiming up when its actually neutral. We can never know for sure but its very likely that thats what happened as restarting the game resolved the issue in this case.

And lol @ pigcop relevance.

dncornholio

dnstuff

dncashman

Probably the only way to play this game anymore. Not sure what Gearbox are going to do with the IP but I hope they can at least make a fun arcadey shooter.

Instead of linking directly to the imgur in that post, you felt it necessary to signal that following your suspension you opted to go to a Gamergate safe space to seek backpats and acknowledgment of your horrible woes of being suspended for two weeks for throwing a passive aggressive tantrum at mods for being unable to handle your post calling Brad a walking bummer getting deleted.

I don't know how you intended for that to be interpreted, but apparently you think that's supposed to make you look good?

Instead of becoming an outraged precious flower when exposed to the notion that you should treat others with respect, take a moment to self-reflect. And maybe in the future you can expect to circumvent a repeat incident. But you were essentially told this by mods repeatedly, so I doubt it'll get absorbed quickly.

Also, within your tantrum's attack words you complain about GB being unable to handle criticism, which I think is part of the schism, but while you say that "it's 'em", perhaps you've got it backwards.

While this is arguably new in a sense, you know what I'm saying when I'm asking if they're ever going to do anything new with Duke Nukem again? Can you?

Also they've re-released this thing three times now?

Was the Megaton Edition crossbuy on the PS ecosystem? I know I have it on my Vita, but can't remember if I ever had it on PS3 or XB360, and am about a week away from being home.

@tgjessie: Sure thing, It is because the Background (which is called a Skybox in dev terms) is a picture composed of 6 different pieces of art. Think of it as a panorama of sorts. Now, in the less modern days of FPS games during the early 90s, devs only used 1 picture for these skyboxes. It looks wrapped because thats how it is. Imagine looking at a piece of paper with your eyes close to it, if you look under the Paper, the part that is closer to your eyes appear bigger. Programmers wanted to create the similar effect because it involves perspective rather than just "looking at a flat picture", with mixes results (its what they could do at the time). Later on, they used the different method I write about in the next paragraph.

It should be noted that mid 90's and early 00's Skyboxes are usually made of a cube. This cube then needs 6 pieces of artwork (corresponding for each side of the cube) so the level artist can just leave blank space on a side of the cube that doesn't get used if its not seen by the player, such as the bottom side of it. Ideally the Skybox should automatically create a panorama-like effect. Skyboxes are actually not infinitely big, they just seem so due to the shading code implemented. Some ID tech Skyboxes for instance are actually just walls with a different piece of code (the Skybox one) when they're unreachable by the player. Like when you see a window that you can't jump out too because it is too highly placed. So a Skybox can be used to "patch" holes that lead into nothingness (called Void, a concept term which doesn't have a GB wiki entry). A void exist in every game that uses the Skybox and depending on what the programmers did to conceptualize void it also looks vastly different from game to game. Just use noclip and walk through a map, if you should see the game going psychodelic on you you're in the Void. If it turns normal you're back in the level. Modern Engines like Cryteks Sandbox doesn't use a cube to handle the Sky anymore as it is a seperate entity from the "regular" map the game plays on.

Another thing to note: On Source engine games, the "background stuff" is actually a miniature landscape that appears much bigger in game, since it is interposed and vastly increased in size when the player loads the level. These special shaders are handled like an artist would handle a color palette, just pick a shader and place stuff accordingly. A Skybox is needed in all FPS games within an open space, but how its handled directly is always different from engine to engine.

Hope you understand, if not, I'd gladly elaborate.

*muffled laughter in the distance*

EDIT: I just saw that others responded to you too, I just wanted to elaborate on it because Skyboxes, especially those on ID engine games are quite interesting and a good way to understand how some games were/are made. On another note, hearing that they removed previous editions of the game but also missed to programm deadzones on controllers sounds like Gearbox don't care about their game and see it as a quick cash grab.

Do people at least get a discount if they own the Megaton edition? I only own the original D3D so I don't know. If they don't, thats some shady practice. Can't support this kind of lackluster excuse to cash in on nostalgia. I'm disappointed that Gearbox does resort to such of business and I hope they didn't do such thing before and will refrain on doing so in the future.

I just want a remake of that Duke 3D screensaver where the bodies fall down from the top of the screen and pile up.

Actually, one of the nice things about 2.5d (Wolf3d, Doom, etc) was that they all had perspective correct texturing, provided you were always looking ahead. The inability to look up and down in Doom felt restricting at the time though, so later games started shifting the screen up and down to simulate looking up and down. Naturally, this method doesn't produce an accurate 3D projection.

I remember playing 3d back in my computer programming class in highschool. I remember I thought this game was so edgy for the time. Doom was more metal, but Duke was cool and in your face the way you could get away with in the 90s.

I loved when like you could turn the projectors on and stuff. It was my favorite. (Turns projector on 5 min later and woman in bikini is on screen dancing) Uh uh oh I mean like,it's not like what I remember. Rock the vote

Way that cursor balances is gonna drive me plain batty.

Doesn't this heavily depend on the hardware, though? I thought that was the whole reason that basically every PS1 game didn't have perspective correction.

@three0nefive: Well, it depends on the hardware since calculation is done by the same CPU that does the math (polymorphic CPUs).

From what I understand (in terms on how the hardware is actually capable on performing special for just a certain thing, such as graphics operation), GPUs are in a different class/specialization as they are built differently with a different set of standards in mind than those polymorphic CPUs that you find on and are more specialized into sorting the shader related math for these kind of things. Remember, the Playstation 1 had no GPU while the Nintendo 64 had one. They called it the Reality Coprocessor.

Programmers had to work around these things before 3dfx was a thing, maybe the perspective was just a byproduct but I highly doubt that. On Doom it was I think, given that you couldn't look up and down in the original game, but on Build engine games I'm pretty sure they at least partially handled texture mapping with the background differently so the whole texture changed perspective (and not by much, some games caused a few graphical glitches, I remember that Fade to Black and Destruction Derby hat some problems with textures everywhere if you got too close.)

EDIT: Just came back to look at the thread, fixed stuff and elaborated a bit just in case people read through it.

@ravey: Oh, I see. Your talking about bit rate Interpolation. That seems very likely. I wonder if they could give people an option to turn it off.

Yes. Instead of using 3D coordinates for the world, the Build and Doom engines cheat by using 2D, which is faster. All rotations are done around a single axis for performance, so you can turn left and right but you can't pitch up and down.

Build engine games fake looking up and down by moving all the points that make up the world vertically up or down at a rate proportional to their distance from the camera. They all move strictly vertically relative to the screen, perspective is not a thing, so everything stretches uncomfortably as all vertical edges remain parallel to each other.

In these games the world is really 2D, with closed areas marked out like a floor plan of a building. Each area can be given a floor height and a ceiling height and that's pretty much it (except Build adds sloping ceilings and floors which Doom didn't have)

This is why you can't have rooms over rooms - there is only ever one floor height and one ceiling height at any point in the world, you can't have two different floor heights in the same place. Sneaky teleporting tricks are used a lot to get around this limitation - Underwater is implemented by teleporting the player to a different part of the map, for instance, which is why you can't see through the water surface.

Knowing how limited all this stuff was makes the Duke 3D level designs all the more impressive for me. Unlike Doom's fairly abstract Mars base, Duke was going for real world places which is more of a challenge with such limited tools.

I... just don't think Duke Nukem is an interesting property. The game looks perfectly functional, the updated visuals are fine, the developer commentary isn't nearly the shit-show that comments are trying to make it seem like... it's just not interesting. It was a novelty 20 years ago when it was one of the first places i saw pixelated animated boobs, but it's just sooooooooo uninteresting in the context of modern games, even as a nostalgia piece.

No. Duke3D, Doom and Wolf3D are all software-rendered. All the hardware is doing is providing a screen buffer to draw pixels into.

There is no perspective error (unless you look up/down) because there are no 3D vertices or triangles at all. Everything is rendered as either columns of pixels for the walls or rows of pixels for the floors.

Check out this video of the Doom renderer in ultra slow motion, you'll see how it draws all the walls top-to-bottom, then the floors left-to-right. Not sure how the texture sampling works for the floors but I'd guess it's just some form of Bresenham's line drawing algorithm using an angle computed from the floor rotation and the view rotation, which you'd only need to compute once per floor sector per frame.

http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/E1M1.mov

It's from this page.

@7x_: googled it. Good to see you found a safe space with likeminded people so you can complain about complainers together.

@lonelyspacepanda@7x_ Lately I've really been reminded of Jeff's extreme pessimistic tendencies thanks to the PSVR launch. I wouldn't say his complaints are all invalid, but sometimes he really seems to be just looking for any excuse to completely trash a thing immediately.

This doesn't work perfectly, therefor fuck it all!

He seems to have a tendency to take an extreme position on things, even for stuff he genuinely likes, and this only sets him up for huge disappointment when a sequel comes around. It often feels like a self fulfilling prophecy. Boy, can't say I envy the guy, but I guess it's just a part of getting jaded in this industry.

Jeff needs to relax. Flipping off because a commentary repeats?

@icyeyes: Having worked in the industry before myself, becoming jaded is inevitable. But with it also comes the higher expectations a critic should have. Personally, I don't care much either way. I come to this site for the personalities and laughs, not criticism, so when they bring only criticism to a QL it's a bit of a turn off, regardless of if I agree with it. Ideally, if a game isn't great they'll find a way to have fun with it which is why Vinny & Ryan was always my favorite QL combo.

I don't agree with you on the PSVR. It's obviously frustrating to have this thing not work to the extent that it makes you sick, especially considering everything else seems solid about it. It is slightly frustrating how they pass it off as this is the average experience when they know darn well it isn't with every other outlet and owner telling them on Twitter they haven't had these problems. Will be interesting to hear their post-launch thoughts on the Bombcast.

@teekomeeko:

Yeah the overreaction in the comments is kinda sad, it's a package that could have been better; @jeff pointed out the issues he didn't endlessly rag on the game. Randy Pitchford, a lot of the ire always seems to surround the gamergate GDC thing...interesting no?

I finally got a gaming PC around this time. And I traded Chrono Trigger for this game at some point.

Yeah, I know.

"Haha! The cops are shooting people, so this is still really relevant?!"

Jesus, way to stay 'relevant' guys...

Somehow the weird random tidbits of commentary without context seem just right for this game. And I couldn't care less about who's talking, but I can see how that would be important for people who are really attached to the history of the game. Odd that they even tried using a controller for this vid, as Jeff says a mouse and keyboard would be way more appropriate for this game even without the deadzone issues.

I never get physically ill from games, but that dead zone stuff made me queasy. Also the approximation of central Amsterdam is not half bad.

Pitchford totally soured me on Duke Nukem.

Overrated. Always has been, always will be.

No QA back then, no QA today?

This game was AMAZING at the time.

By this moment, every line from Duke reminds me of Jeff's rendition over the years.

I had this same stick drift issue with Titanfall.

2 duke 2 nuke

Oh, that Randy!

:\

The dev commentary in this is amazing. Has given me an excuse to play this release at least.

I like Jeff just the way he is.