Topic: Gearbox looking for a developer for next Duke Nukem game.

[MysterD]

IGN - Looks like Gearbox is looking for a developer for the next Duke Nukem game.

"I did not acquire the franchise merely so we could all experience Duke Nukem Forever. That was the toll to pay to give Duke a chance. That said, I liked that game," he said (Randy Pitchford, Gearbox CEO). "I got to see it from a slightly different perspective and it was marvellous to me."

"We’ve done some concept development [for a new game] and I think the challenges are there. Gearbox is very busy. I think the faster way is that a correct developer can become interested and we can work with them. I think it’s a challenging problem. But, I’ll tell you one thing. When it does happen, there’s no doubt that the whole industry will turn its head and look."

[Quemaqua]

Sort of in the way one turns their head to look at a trainwreck, yeah.

[MysterD]

GamesRadar -> 11 dev's they want to see take on a new Duke game

[W7RE]

GamesRadar -> 11 dev's they want to see take on a new Duke game

Blood is nothing but a low quality, second tier ripoff of Duke? I'd actually rate it higher than Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior.



Fork Parker (Devolver Digital):

Gimme that Duke Nukem IP. Here's my resume: https://youtu.be/jJ45LTOwiwg

https://twitter.com/ForkParker/status/621300849914961920

[Quemaqua]

I don't want to say Blood was far and away the best of those 3 games, but it was easily on par, if not having the edge. Slightly different games, despite similarities ... but man, I loved Blood. I have much fonder memories of that one than the other 2 by a pretty wide margin.

[W7RE]

Blood is better than the other 2 for me just because of the style and setting. I find the level design (mostly) better as well. I could see someone saying one of the others was better, but Blood is definitely not a bad game.

[Quemaqua]

I agree. Blood was legitimately funny, where Duke and SW were pretty juvenile. The copious movie references and stuff were fun too, and yeah, there was some great level design. There was some pretty great level design in Duke also, though it's been long enough since I touched SW that I honestly can't remember what was there.

Blood 2, on the other hand, was ... I don't know. Iffy. It really wasn't a bad game at all, but I was never fond of that Lithtech engine, which I think they also used to make Shogo and ... maybe NOLF? But I think NOLF was a much later iteration of it that didn't look so weird.

[W7RE]

Yea Blood 2 was a mess because of it's engine. I think it mostly abandoned the key hunt map layouts of the first game too.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, it was a pretty different game. Got more serious, added more story. They had an expansion too, but I don't think I ever played it even though I have it around here somewhere. I'd go back and play it, but man, that engine really wasn't that great when it was current. I can't even imagine how badly it's aged.

[W7RE]

Blood and Blood 2  (both with expansions) are actually both on sale for $1.24 each right now. Steam activation. ITADEA-LGMGSA-LESVVC brings them down to $1.00 each.

I've had them both on GOG for a while now, and grabbed them both again when they shows up on Steam. Blood holds up really well, but it can be a pain to get working well. With no source code, there's no source ports, so you either use a weird hack job or DOSBox. Blood 2 will run without much issue, but it has aged pretty poorly. It's one of those early era 3D games, so it's really low poly with really low rez textures, and very sparse environments.

[Cobra951]

These games are all raycasters based on the Doom tech, from back before GPUs.  They're hard to stomach (sometimes literally) 20 years later.  I played  Doom and Doom II for over a year in their day.  I played all these other games extensively as well.  But I can only give them a bit of nostalgia attention now.

[W7RE]

I think they have a certain charm to the way they look, and even play them mostly looking like they did back in the day. I use source ports where available, but only go modern with the resolution and the controls. I'm sort of casually going through Blood and Heretic a level or two at a time, maybe once a week. I'm stuck in Blood though, trying to find the right area or key.

[Quemaqua]

I have zero issues with the raycaster engines. It's when the switch was made to 3D that stuff starts to real ugly. Doom was and is a fantastic-looking game, even without source ports (though with them ... well, hell). But I cannot at all stomach Lithtech games. They just look like complete garbage. And while Blood 2 was still pretty goofy and had some funny stuff, it sort of felt like it took itself more seriously or something. It didn't have the look of the first game at all, even aside from the 3D-ness.

Man, all this talk of Blood makes me want to go back and play it. Is there really no source port that it works with? I know a guy was working on one for Duke, I guess I assumed people might eventually shoehorn something in, but I guess that's just my lack of technical knowledge talking.

[Cobra951]

Well, I assumed from the conversation that the lack of a source port meant that the source code was lost or unavailable.  Without it, one is stuck either hacking the existing object code, or rewriting the game from scratch.

Doom and its descendants and imitators used face-me sprites--a single polygon which always faces the camera, with a 2D snapshot of a detailed model (or real-world object) texturing it.  Simulated rotation of these sprites was accomplished with snapshots at different angles on the monster model, or whatever else the sprite portrayed.  In the Dooms, only 8 angles were used, 45 degrees apart.  But the snapshot at each angle is only limited by resolution, and the artist's creativity.

Early 3D featured very crude, low-poly models, and this is why the earlier raycaster tech has much better-looking enemies lurking about, even if they do turn around in jerky steps.  BTW, face-me sprites are used to this day in some games, for abundant small background details and such.

[W7RE]

Is there really no source port that it works with?

Well, I assumed from the conversation that the lack of a source port meant that the source code was lost or unavailable.  Without it, one is stuck either hacking the existing object code, or rewriting the game from scratch.

I'm pretty certain the Blood source code isn't lost, but it is unavailable.

Jace Hall (co-founder of Monolith Productions) at one point tried to get Atari to let him to a source port, basically the same as Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition and Shadow Warrior Classic Redux. It would look and feel like the same old Blood, but run natively in modern versions of Windows, support leaderboards, etc. This would allow the game to run on modern systems, build up more awareness of the IP, but still hold the source code from the public. He never explained in detail what went wrong, just that Atari refused to cooperate so it couldn't happen.

Devolver Digital looked into getting their hands on the Blood IP, and gave up because "it's too expensive." source 1; source 2


There are some options for fan projects. There's XL Engine, which is progressing super slow because it's a fan project. It's also focusing on like 4 different games, and Blood seems low priority compared to the others (the main one being Daggerfall). BloodCM is port to the Duke3D engine, not sure how it holds up but I assume it's inaccurate in a lot of spots. zBlood is a remake of Blood on the Doom 2 engine, and fails in a lot of ways. It just doesn't look right, plus a lot of details on weapons and enemy placements are wrong and it seems pretty buggy overall. Transfusion is a fan project to port the game over to the Quake 2 engine, but all I've seen of it is multiplayer footage, so I don't even know if work has been done on the campaign.




I personally play Blood using DOSBox, with some of the tweaks from this guide. The mouse movement still feels a bit off, but it's better than the default. I don't turn off autoaim like the guide suggests. I like to play these old shooters with the autoaim they had originally, and just limit my looking up/down, either by disabling it or making it slower than the horizontal.

[Quemaqua]

That's essentially what I was asking, was why someone hadn't tried just taking the assets and moving it to the Duke engine. not really knowing anything about how well that would actually work. Apparently not very well. Real bummer. That game deserves a nice modernization. It's still a lot of fun.

[Cobra951]

Only the first part of my last post (what W7RE quoted) went into answering that.  I guess that wasn't nearly enough, but that has been covered nicely now by W7RE.  The rest of my post was reminiscence triggered by your comment about the early raycasters looking better than the early full 3D.  I worked on a raycaster demo back in the mid 90s at a small company called Pyrotechnix, so I remember a lot of the tech's details.  Very different animal from what followed shortly thereafter.

Without source code, realistically all you can expect that preserves the original game and gameplay is a hack.  It could be a very good hack, though.  Anything else is basically a rewrite.  Someone attempts to imitate the original as closely as possible in more modern tech, but never quite hits the mark.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, very true. And yeah, I think you're very correct that raycasters come out looking a lot shinier than early 3D. It's funny how a lot of things have come full circle. I've sorta wondered whether or not we wouldn't see some retro games that return to that sort of sprite-based FPS experience, and have been surprised not to see any in the flurry of indie Kickstarter games and such. Which isn't to say they don't exist, I suppose, just that I haven't seen them.

Talking about it makes me want to go back and play Daggerfall.

[MysterD]

GamesRadar -> Their thoughts on how to make Duke relevant in 2015

[Quemaqua]

I think the problem is that DNF was something none of the other games even tried to be. Even Duke 3D was just a grab-bag of silly gags and some goofy stuff that didn't really have a terribly cohesive character behind it. He was, despite the name, a 2-dimensional character, and once they tried to bring him out of that, the gag no longer worked. It just seemed offensive and stupid. So yeah, it would be sort of funny to see a game poke at that by creating a world around the character like he describes, but that's really more a commentary on DNF, not on the franchise history proper.