Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Build Discussion

I'll never understand this. The old 12 man team were likely making their own engine and that should have taken longer, but now it's 500+ and it takes 4-5 years with a DIY kit that comes with instructions.

My mind can't wrap around this.
Game devs nowadays mostly come from specific game dev degrees at university. They're taught to use tools provided (Unreal and Unity) and not really taught beyond that. And companies often insist on people having those degrees because those people are way more replaceable than a generic programmer with versatile skills.

Back in the 90's there was really no such thing as a game development course at Uni. So people just learned on the job. Made mistakes and expanded their skill set diagetically. This meant they had more all round skills. Which was neccessary with smaller teams. The level designer knew how to code, The art director could use the esoteric and hard to learn internal level editor, the programmer went to Uni for a music degree and is doubling as a lead programmer and soundtrack guy. If there was an issue there was less bureaucracy involved in fixing that issue. And because there was none of this pretentious auteur bullshit devs in general were less precious when it came to criticism from their QA guys. When a QA guy went

"Hey I noticed a bug on level 3 here's my reproduction log. It's pretty bad you better get that fixed."

A dev would go

"Oh shit, I pulled an all nighter and must have missed that in the code. I'll sort it out, thanks for pointing that out."

As opposed to,

"Um, we're artists sweetie. We're making art. Art isn't meant to conform to normal societal constructs. Games are art, don't you know?"

This shitty attitude of course extended to narcissistic trannies. To be a tranny is to force your delusions onto other people so of course they'd be narcassists looking for agrandization as opposed to making something fun and cool.
 
They're taught to use tools provided (Unreal and Unity) and not really taught beyond that.
This annoys me. I miss the days where companies would code their own engine that would do amazing shit. Now-a-days almost every game studio, even AAA ones rely on these two whore engines for everything. Now nothing is unique or special, and even an amateur can make the same bland "professional looking" shit as everyone else.
 
Without going too deep into it, I have a little insight actually as someone whos been through these courses; so get your autism badges ready.

For the most part your right. But also a touch wrong.

While I was in college for software engineering with one of my two additional modules being Game Design, we absolutely were taught to use Unity & Unreal. But we had to build our tools ourselves.

This lasted up until 3rd year, which then changed that we had to write our engines over a year. They didn't have to be mad complex, but they did have a checklist of things you had to hit, with bonus points for creativity in code, for feature, performance, etc.

Perhaps it's different in US college/Universities, but it sure weren't like that in my university.

Infact, I'd seen multiple students get punished pretty harshly for snagging code from the likes of Github or Stackoverflow. Even saw 2 fellow students get kicked out of the University for plagiarising so much.

It was one thing to do it for minor projects, especially so if you were just trying to get an idea or understanding of how to tackle the task. But if you were caught doing that shit during a major project; you were past fucked.

At the time, we actually had a few big name developers come in and give us some presentations and talk with us in a QA session, and one of the topics that came was the homogenization of game engines, and this is what we were told at the time (Paraphrasing a little):

"Its not necessarily that companies don't want their own engines. It's the cost of creating and maintaining one. Using a 3rd party engine means you just build your own tools and modules ontop of something that already exists as a baseline. But when you're developing a game and heaven forbid creating the engine at the same time it gets not just messy; but expensive in both monetary value and manpower."

For the most part, it's actually a fair statement. Look at the troubles that have been seen with alot of in-house engines. Crystal Tools, Frameworks, Frostbyte. All built for a specific idea, but ended up causing massive problems later.
 
This shitty attitude of course extended to narcissistic trannies. To be a tranny is to force your delusions onto other people so of course they'd be narcassists looking for agrandization as opposed to making something fun and cool.
As soon as I heard troons were infiltrating, I was expecting the strippers to get turned into dickgirls, and audio leaks about how much Duke preferred ladydick to ladyfronthole.
 
And the kicker is that 2011 is still using some assets and code from 2001
Playing 2011 again made me realize the strip club segment is like some museum of old toys/shame since they kept the same exact poker machines and keypads from 2001 along with a ton of other interactive crap. It's surreal walking up to open the office door and oh hey it's the same keypad from behind Duke's throne, they didn't bother updating those assets for a solid decade.
 
I'll never understand this. The old 12 man team were likely making their own engine and that should have taken longer, but now it's 500+ and it takes 4-5 years with a DIY kit that comes with instructions.

My mind can't wrap around this.
Because there's a lot of features people demand in engines are either difficult to make or take a long time to make.

I'll use art assets as an example then go back to engines. A good pixel artist these days could make all the assets for pacman or space invaders in less than a day. The ship in space invaders is basically two triangles and would take a minute tops. For a modern game, making a single character takes more than 48 hours of work with sculpting, modeling, textures, rigging, animations, etc.

The same applies to engines. For Mario, draw the screen, register player input, detect collisions in 2D, scroll the screen, load new levels. All of this has to work on the NES and only the NES.

For a modern AAA game, you not only have all of that, but you have draw the screen in 3D with perspective, lighting, shadows, bump maps, LoD, and stream in content as you move, but it's got to work on Xbox, Playstation, Switch, PCs of near infinite combinations, and be customizable with dozens of settings. And that's just drawing the screen. Player input, collissions, physics, saving and loading, all of these have to be written.

I remember when Hotline Miami was released (made on the game maker engine) and there was a weird crash that turned out to be caused by playing the game while a certain brand and model of printer was plugged in, and that was on a commercial engine. On Xbox 360, the certification process included the game working with a guitar hero controller plugged in.


I never made games back then, but my understanding is that the challenge back then was getting games to work within the limitations of the hardware. Now the limitation is getting the polish and content people demand.
 
I'll never understand this. The old 12 man team were likely making their own engine and that should have taken longer, but now it's 500+ and it takes 4-5 years with a DIY kit that comes with instructions.

My mind can't wrap around this.
Back then dev teams weren't spending 90% of the time they should be working browsing Twitter in a desperate quest to find something to bitch and cry about in return for ass pats so their shitty life choices in their warped narcissistic faggot minds will be justified.
 
It makes me wonder what engine the 2011 version of DNF was using. Guess I will google it. For the longest time I thought it was using the idtech engine that Doom3 used since it looks kind of similar in some ways just BNF 2011 doesn't look as good as Doom 3.
Unreal Engine 2???? Maybe 1? Definitely not 3.
 
Unreal Engine 2???? Maybe 1? Definitely not 3.
A heavily modified Unreal Engine 1, with some code from 2 and 3 backported to it, it is possible to run maps from the 2001 version in the 2011 version, it's extremely buggy though.
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We have a Moddb page set up! Check out our test dialogue with Graves and Duke, alongside some other stuffs.

Progress goes quite nicely, no drama serverside. We're actually doing auditions for General Graves right now, and we've got quite some good contenders.

VS22 support is also complete! We should be chugging along quite quickly now, our level designers have been itching to do stuff lol. Our blender fix is also done, so now we can really get some high quality work done.

In general, shit be fiiiine.
 
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There is a video that may be relevant.


It's not quite the same but close enough I'd say.
Nice! never seen this video before. Embedded for your viewing pleasure:

As an irrelevant youtuber with no legal authority whose opinion does not matter, I think you should obey the law. Make your own inspired IP. We live in a timeline spoiled for choice with incredible new IPs with inspired mechanics. It's the safest/best route for new game devs to take. But if you've decided to take the risk of making a fan game & I can't convince you otherwise: Learn from cancelled fangames of the past. Making fan games instead of original ones is bad idea, but advertising that you are doing so is a worse idea.
 
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