Finally played this thing after buying it on a whim years ago. It wasn't that bad though? Some fun bits here and there

It was supposed to me some sort of Messiah, it was game gone vapourware for years and years and years.

And then...

GEARBOX

>Half Life 2 is dog shit
100% agreed
>And what do you like?
Ion Fury had a lot of problems but did keyhunting right. As for replay value, It's only arbitrary: Nostalgia, or secret hunting nothing else.

>If a game is really bad nobody talks about it
This is factually wrong. Youtubers are full of worst games ever lists. The worst case is when the game is mediocre because then everyone forgets it.

And nobody shuts up about Skyrim because of this.

Why? Because it's shit? Probably. I never understood why people are enjoying it so much.

if your game is required to be memorable and outstanding to be even worth the purchase since there is too much actually good stuff around, yes it definitely is a bad thing.
it is even worse than being bad, since stuff like the room can be so bad that it is outstanding and memorable, "so bad being good", but there really can never be a "so mediocre and forgettable that it is good".

People give gearbox shit for this game, but this is the ONLY time the fault is not theirs.
It was 3DRealms

The original agreement was simple. Gearbox would own duke nukem's IP and could make any new duke games it wanted, so long as it was from DNF onward (ie, 3d games), and 3DR would own Duke's IP from DN3D and back, meaning they could make as many build engine dukes as they wanted (as well as finish the 3 games they already announced). However, the only way the agreement and IP sale would go through is if they 'ported' DNF

The reason I say ported is because the contract was crystal clear on what DNF could use. They had to use the Frankenstein of an engine they had (which was 5+ engines jammed together), and could only use assets 70% completed or higher. They could make whatever story they wanted and record any dialog they wanted, but they could only use that engine and those assets. The only thing they could do to the engine was get it wrapped for the consoles and basic optimization. Nothing more

As for the engine. It was a unholy mix of Build, Quake 2, unreal, unreal 2, a custom 3d engine and some other middleware. They engine was so fucked, that when gearbox tried to remove engines not even being called on by anything (quake being the main target), the game wouldnt even launch nor give any errors. It simply wouldnt work. No one could figure out why or how. Further proof of how backwards and retarded this engine was is in how it had to handle sounds. 99.9% of games have 2 types of ways to do sound. Either the soundfiles are called from a folder or the soundfiles are put into an engine specific megafile where it then calls upon the said soundfiles (ie, walking on grass triggers 'walkgrass.mp3', etc). DNF's couldnt do that. It instead was ONE single sound file. All voices, sounds, guns, ambiance and music in a single huge .ogg file. Instead of calling a specific sound file, the game had to be coded to call a timestamp.

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Skyrim doesn't get the shit it does because it's bad. Because it isn't bad. It gets the shit it does because it was a very high profile "casualization".

>which was 5+ engines jammed togethe
>unholy mix of Build, Quake 2, unreal, unreal 2,

Do you actually unironically believe this?
The DNF that got released started around 2007 with a modified unreal 2 engine.

>Half Life 2 is dog shit
t. can’t abh

Lol, you’re fuckin deluded if you think Skyrim is bad. It’s not much of an elder scrolls game but you already know it wasn’t made for you- it was made to meet the most mainstream audience halfway, and as an experience it comes out of that compromise relatively intact. It’s not much to my taste either but you’re a tool if you don’t see the quality of Skyrim as a casual, polished watercooler rpg

>As for the engine. It was a unholy mix of Build, Quake 2, unreal, unreal 2, a custom 3d engine and some other middleware.
That's not true. They went through several engines, completely scraping the builds and starting again each time. They did not slap them all together. The claim doesn't make any sense. Game engines are not things you can just merge together like that.
>the soundfiles are put into an engine specific megafile where it then calls upon the said soundfiles (ie, walking on grass triggers 'walkgrass.mp3', etc). DNF's couldnt do that. It instead was ONE single sound file. All voices, sounds, guns, ambiance and music in a single huge .ogg file. Instead of calling a specific sound file, the game had to be coded to call a timestamp.
There's not really any difference between these two things. You're not a software developer, are you?

Holy shit. I had no idea the game was this badly put together.

It wasn't that bad.
It just wasn't twelve years good.

He doesn"t know what he is talking about

Blood 2 could never be as bad of a game as Duke Nukem Forever because Blood 2 took twelve months to make.
A game that took less time to make, isn't as good of a game, but also didn't kill the studio that created it; is a better game than one that took twelve years to make and utterly killed one of the greats of the industry.

Nah Blood 2's still dog shit and I'd play DNF again any day of the week over it

>As for the engine. It was a unholy mix of Build, Quake 2, unreal, unreal 2, a custom 3d engine and some other middleware. They engine was so fucked, that when gearbox tried to remove engines not even being called on by anything (quake being the main target), the game wouldnt even launch nor give any errors.
This.
The game is basically a museum tour of what Broussard thought was cool in the late 90's.

It was a 7/10 game with 11/10 hype so everyone was pissed as all hell. Still not worth playing, but you could do worse now that the reaction spergout is long over.

Blood 2 was definitely rushed, and prematurely released. But even if it was complete it would have been shit. What were they thinking moving the story 100 years into the future?
DNF is at least a game that has it's tone right and is technically stable.

Duke Nukem Forever did not take 12 years to make. They just spent 12 years on it, doing not much of anything 99% of the time. Duke Nukem Forever is exactly why publishers don't give developers all the time and money they ask for. Contrary to what Yea Forums believes, it does not get you a better game to do so.

Wouldn't using one big file use more RAM?

This is why Star Citizen is not released yet. There is no control over them.

Big tiddy mods.

your CD/dvd player doesn't load the whole disk into memory, just reads out of it what's needed. You can read out smaller files from a big indexed data file. Don't be so dense. Are you a grandpa?

No no. Just dense.

No. Who told you when you open a file you have to load the whole thing into memory at once?

Let me put it this way, a "megafile" is like a giant audiofile and a "filename" to reference something in that "megafile" is like a timestamp. These are all just abstractions to make it easier for humans to deal with. The hardware is just reading arbitrary bytes off a disc and into memory. It doesn't really care how you abstract that. That's all for us humans.

I played it right after a trip to vegas and a tour of the hoover dam. It was kind of fun to do some extra sightseeing and they got a lot of the landmarks right so I had fun. I doubt I would have otherwise though. There isn't really anything noteworthy about it.

It is true and you can do the research for yourself. Gearbox did several interviews about the engine alone. And yes, you can (and they did) frankenstein the engines together. Instead of just restarting the game from scratch every single time he switched engines, which was a lot (another very easily found piece of information), he would simple integrate the old engine into the new engine (a process that would eat months of dev time according to multiple former 3dr programmers on the duke team).

As for the sound calling, from a tech standpoint, no. its not very different. Calling is calling. But from a sound engineer standpoint, thats a fucking nightmare. Having to have a perfect 1000+ call list based on timestamps for the engine is a nightmare for anyone. God help if he got some mixed up and had to go through the entire fucking thing, listening to it to find the sound file he needed.

It did not. Modders themselves have found multiple pieces of the old 1999 build in the 1.0 game files. You yourself can find a torrent with the launch build and see them for yourself.

>But even if it was complete it would have been shit. What were they thinking moving the story 100 years into the future?
This was GT's fault.

>This was GT's fault.
Did they press Monolith to change the setting? No wonder GT went bankrupt.

They did worse than go bankrupt.
They got bought out and retired with golden parachutes after ruining a few really good developers in the 90's.

>It is true and you can do the research for yourself.
>Soon after E3, a programmer suggested that they make the switch to the Unreal Engine, which Epic Games had unveiled soon after the release of the Quake II engine. The Unreal Engine was more realistic than Quake II and was better suited to producing open spaces; 3D Realms struggled to render the Nevada desert. The developers unanimously agreed to the change, which meant scrapping much of their work,[11] including significant changes 3D Realms had made to the Quake engine.[15]
>In June 1998, 14 months after announcing that they would use the Quake II engine, 3D Realms announced that they had switched to the Unreal Engine. Broussard said that Duke Nukem Forever would not be significantly delayed and would be back to where it was at E3 within a month to six weeks. He also said that no content seen in the E3 trailer would be lost.[16] However, according to programmer Chris Hargrove, the change amounted to a complete reboot.[11]
I don't care about Gearbox passing the buck. The people who built the engine said they scrapped almost everything of the old builds with each engine change.

>Having to have a perfect 1000+ call list based on timestamps for the engine is a nightmare for anyone. God help if he got some mixed up and had to go through the entire fucking thing, listening to it to find the sound file he needed.
I'm sure that same as the building of a "megafile" is an automated process the building of the audio file was also an automated process. Someone having to listen to the whole thing to find a missing sound file is about as likely as someone having to browse an entire megafile to find a missing file in there.

>All voices, sounds, guns, ambiance and music in a single huge .ogg file. Instead of calling a specific sound file, the game had to be coded to call a timestamp.
this
this was a fucking NIGHTMARE when i wanted to rip single sounds from this game to mod another one
imagine searching a 107 minute long ogg file for a single fucking metal footstep sound

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Pardon, but why would they do this? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just load the required smaller files than the entire fucking sound gallery?

Who says they are loading the entire fucking sound gallery into memory?

As I stated earlier, tech wise, theres almost 0 difference between calling a timestamp and a filename. Calling is calling.

The real question you have to ask is why they HAD to do it this way. And while I cant prove they had to with some interview or tell all, common sense tells me it was a engine necessity. No modern games do it this way. None. And by modern, im talking early 90's and beyond. almost every single game (and I say almost simply because I havnt played every game ever released and im sure some obscure game did it this way at some point) uses filename calling. So for them to do it this way HAD to be out of some sort of engine limitation. What it could be, I have no idea (because again, calling is calling), but no on does it this way simply because "why not".

Just out of curiosity, do you actually have proof that audio files are referenced by timestamp only in Duke Nukem Forever or is this just an assumption based on the fact that when you change the extension of the sound data file you get one giant long audio file? Because guess what most audio players will do with an ton of MP3 files concatenated together into a single file. They will treat it as one giant audio file but that's not what it is.

>playing this shit
>in 2019
literally kys faggot

i only managed to complete it back in 2011 because it came in the middle of a dry season, and then suddenly, i got skyrim, and a bunch of other 10/10 games NEVER LOOKED BACK
wish i had never even played it, what a damn waste of time

Dont have to change shit. It installs as an .ogg

Does it? I found multiple sources saying it installs as sounds.dat and is formatted as MP3. There's also an additional file called soundsdir.dat which appears to contain information for accessing the individual files within sounds.dat. It would appear that someone in this thread has been talking utter bollocks.

Ill be 100% honest with ya, I havnt reinstalled DNF since launch week, so I have no idea what the expansion packs and patches did to it, but the base 1.0 came as a .ogg in the "sound" folder. It was literally the only file in there

I think you are getting confused with a different game. I can find literally nothing that backs up your claim and several things that directly contradict it. And new expansions and shit didn't introduce the dat pack file because I've found people complaining the old extractor that worked on the base game doesn't work on the new content.

Id say reinstall the game and find out, but honestly, thats to much time for an almost dead thread. Lets just agree to disagree

>tfw the best thing that came out of Duke Nukem Forever was Alien Rampage that was based on the very first version of the game when it was still a sidescroller