Blood - From the workshop of Kevin Kilstrom, Plus mods/maps/launchers thread

[ironmask]

About freaking time.

 

[Curratum]

Blood is great, but it's like the special needs child of the bunch. It got a playable modern Windows port a decade and a half after Doom and Quake, now the editor is just over two decades late when compared to decent-quality Doom editors on Windows.

I really don't think this will lead to any influx of new maps. People who care toiled away in the old editor anyway, god bless their souls!

 

[lightbane]

I suppose the main issue is the game code being lost.

 

[thesheeep]

But there have been TONS of fan-made maps, campaigns, etc. for Blood.

Have they all been using dosbox or something else?
What's actually different about the "original" level editor?

 

[Bad Sector]

I suppose the main issue is the game code being lost.

AFAIK the game code isn't lost, Jason Hall still has it but despite asking (Atari or Warner Bros, i don't remember which... i think Atari though) he wasn't allowed to share it. Also one of the programmers has it too but again wasn't allowed to share it.

 

[Curratum]

But there have been TONS of fan-made maps, campaigns, etc. for Blood.

Have they all been using dosbox or something else?
What's actually different about the "original" level editor?

Yes, all those great levels have been produced on the indescribably autistic DOS editor.

 

[Riskbreaker]

^For something extra crazy, see NoOne's No Hope In Sight demo which can't even be ran with vanilla Blood.

But yeah, when you see the level of detail and the tricks pulled in some of these custom maps and then consider what they've been made on, God bless those guys and their 'tism.

 

[Bad Sector]

You all claim that but i remember back in the day Blood's map editor was by far the simplest to use map editor for 3D games with the ability to easily toggle between 2D and 3D views, place and align objects by flying around in the 3D view, have actual menus (instead of typing cryptic numbers as in Duke3D's editor - which itself was also much easier to use than other editors), etc. Here is a map (obviously unfinished) i made back when i was in high school:



It obviously sucks since it was the only map i ever made but in comparison i could barely rub two polygons together in other editors i've tried at the time.

The first time i remember thinking that there was an editor better than Blood's was when i first tried Doom Builder.

 

[Morblot]

Slightly off-topic but I loved the Duke 3D map editor when I was younger, spent so much time on that shit. I wish I had stored some of my maps to this day, but still, I regret nothing; time you enjoy wasting is not wasted and all that.

(In fact I have to this day this slight case of the 'tism or something that whenever I sit down somewhere, I sooner or later start thinking about how I would recreate the place in Build. Yes, I know, I'm not well. :D)

 

[toughasnails]

Blood's mapedit isn't that different from how Duke's Mapster (if that's the one you mean) used to be, a bit rougher and you have to run it trough dosbox. It wasn't particularly hard to figure out, you wouldn't still have new people starting to make maps for it decade, then two decades after the game's release if it was.

 

[Ol' Willy]

AFAIK the game code isn't lost, Jason Hall still has it but despite asking (Atari or Warner Bros, i don't remember which... i think Atari though) he wasn't allowed to share it. Also one of the programmers has it too but again wasn't allowed to share it.

"I have Blood source code and I won't share it under any circumstances but some vicious fella stole it from me and released in public..."

 

[Baron Dupek]

Someone managed to mix Brutal Doom garbage into sacred Blood

it's out
https://www.moddb.com/mods/blood-extra-crispy/news/bec-version-10-has-arrived
new guns, (kill) animations, and sounds

On E2M5 an Ash Williams Hero Powerup was added in the form of a Necronomicon Tome that you can use by pressing the "USE" button when near it and aiming at it.

groovy
I guess?

 

[Curratum]

The complete rock bottom of decline is what a random modder decides they need to "expand and enhance" the weapon selection of most revered shooters in history.

 

[toughasnails]

It looks like genuine effort went into this compared with most BD-gameplay mods, looks like there's a fair bit of polish and original assets (rather than just picking up random possibly clashing new weapon sprites for example).
I'll say though that finishers here show what a fine line there is to playing with gore. They just look uncomfortable, squishing someone's eyes or flaying their skin combined with sorta of tactile, mannikin look of Blood's enemies. It's satisfying in new Doom with its almost but not quite Pixaresque creature designs. Here it looks more like someone horror movie would use to disgust and disturb you and not something you'd do as empowering and satisfying...

 

[lightbane]

The intro movie is prosperian worthy. I always wanted new guns in Blood and more content, but aping Brutal Doom is NOT the solution, especially with the so out of place executions.

 

[Bad Sector]

Here it looks more like someone horror movie would use to disgust and disturb you and not something you'd do as empowering and satisfying...

So it fits Blood then, considering it is basically a horror themed FPS filled to the brim with stuff from horror movies :-P

 

[Ol' Willy]

New weapons are always cool. Executions are cancer that has to die

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Blood finally arrives on Amiga!

https://www.generationamiga.com/2021/07/21/first-public-amiga-release-of-ms-dos-classic-blood/

 

[agris]

Heads up for two interesting mods:

Upscale Pack (for BuildGDX and Nblood)
https://www.moddb.com/games/blood/addons/blood-upscale-pack-206

Upscale Pack (for Fresh Supply)
https://www.moddb.com/games/blood-fresh-supply/addons/blood-upscale-pack-fresh-supply-compatible

The instructions are in the .txt files, and thanks to that addon we have more clean sprites that look better in higher resolutions. Really good work

is this how someone should play blood for the first time? Which engine do you recommend? My inclination is to play in a widescreen analogue of whatever the original game’s resolution was without upscaled graphics but I’m curious what your or others’ take is on this.

first time, not Nth.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

is this how someone should play blood for the first time? Which engine do you recommend? My inclination is to play in a widescreen analogue of whatever the original game’s resolution was without upscaled graphics but I’m curious what your or others’ take is on this.

first time, not Nth.

If you can stand janky mouselook, then the original in DOSbox is fine. Otherwise, Nblood. GDX is really only if you want to play one of lesser known titles, and Fresh Supply changed the physics around. I don't know how much the physics are changed now, but there are some situations where having different physics makes things harder. I think just secrets, but I don't remember everything off-hand.

 

[agris]

Morpheus Kitami is Fresh Supply so different as to be disqualifying for the first playthrough?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Morpheus Kitami is Fresh Supply so different as to be disqualifying for the first playthrough?

The game has two things in it that were designed to function in certain ways. Severed heads and dynamite. The former is vital to at least one secret and the latter combat. Its also in a different engine, hence why it has these differences. NBlood and I think BuildGDX are still made with code from the Build engine.

 

[newtmonkey]

agris
Fresh Blood is not 100%, but it's close. The final patch that was released brought the physics quite close to vanilla Blood.

The biggest difference for me (having played through the original on DOS many many times) is that the cultists (hit-scanners) are way more accurate in Fresh Blood. You can tweak the difficulty parameters, though, so you can reduce cultist accuracy but keep everything else normal, for instance.

The game does run perfectly fine in Dosbox, and there's patch that helps the mouselook to feel a bit better. Having said that, the game can be played perfectly fine with mouselook disabled.

 

[schru]

Heads up for two interesting mods:

Upscale Pack (for BuildGDX and Nblood)
https://www.moddb.com/games/blood/addons/blood-upscale-pack-206

Upscale Pack (for Fresh Supply)
https://www.moddb.com/games/blood-fresh-supply/addons/blood-upscale-pack-fresh-supply-compatible

The instructions are in the .txt files, and thanks to that addon we have more clean sprites that look better in higher resolutions. Really good work

is this how someone should play blood for the first time? Which engine do you recommend? My inclination is to play in a widescreen analogue of whatever the original game’s resolution was without upscaled graphics but I’m curious what your or others’ take is on this.

first time, not Nth.

DOSBox, 4:3 resolution with appropriate screen scaling. I don't think any of the semi-source ports (aren't they more like recreations in case of Blood?) replicate the behaviour of the original version in an exact way. AI texture up-sales aren't that good of an idea—the results might look nice in certain cases, but they're not really recovering the detail that was originally there, and in case of very-low-resolution textures in 320x200 games the result can change the appearance of the game drastically, making it look cartoonish or as if it were run through a few low-effort image filters.

Modified DOSBox builds like SVN-Daum offer some additional features and more versatile renderers like Direct3D. All that's necessary to swap it for the standard version is to unpack it in the DOSBox folder in the game's installation and replace all the files. I think mouse look works quite smoothly with it and there's little to complain about. There are probably better, more frequently updated builds, I'm just not familiar with them as so far I've found SVN to be quite sufficient.

As for resolution, Build games supported higher ones than 320x200, but the latter was what the main ones were made in mind with. To display it correctly, aspect correction must be enabled in the DOSBox CONF file. The Steam and GOG releases come with preconfigured DOSBox set-ups, so you just have to change a few things in a text file. Using desktop as the full-screen resolution value will produce sharp image. Those custom DOSBox builds support screen shaders, so trying one that imitates a C.R.T. screen could be a good idea (in that case the resolution 320x200 will also require the doublescan setting to be enabled, and it's best to use hardware_none scaling, at least in case of SVN).

Also, use CD music for the first play-through; MIDI tracks for later (they were most likely composed for a Roland Sound Canvas 55 derivative module).

CONF file settings to change in case of SVN-Daum (in Notepad, the file will be in the main game folder, typically called something like dosbox_blood, but there may be more than one):

Spoiler

fullscreen=true

fullresolution=desktop / setting a lower resolution can create softer image

output=direct3d

pixelshader=[shader file's name from the shaders folder in the DOSBox directory] / optional

aspect=true

doublescan=true

scaler=hardware_none

 

[NerevarineKing]

I just played it with Fresh Supply and it was great. I had a bunch of problems with GDX and NBlood. (Music/FMVs not working, saves corrupting).