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

[felipepepe]

Bro, I had 144 characters. DOOM CLONE WITH VAMPIRE.

 

[A horse of course]

I believe the use of life essence is a holdover from when Caleb transformed into a Werewolf-like beast and maintained this form via Bloodlust or something (which is why Chinny planned to absorb all these combined powers himself in the final story).

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

DOOM CLONE WITH VAMPIRE.

Didn't know about the limit on twitter. You reminded me of that old ad.

Ah, the glorious 90's.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Bro, I had 144 characters. DOOM CLONE WITH VAMPIRE.

So you made a false statement because it would fit better within a narrow frame of expression, and thought people wouldn't notice?

...

Twitter is bad, mmkay?

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Via http://sgt-shivers.tumblr.com

Boy genius Ken Silverman, eighteen years old, working on the Build engine in 1994.

Ken Silverman was a programming prodigy, starting his journey on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A in 1983 at the tender age of eight. By the time he finished high school he had created Ken’s Labyrinth, a Wolfenstein 3D clone with a lighthearted funhouse theme he managed to publish through a young company called Epic Megagames.

Apogee Software took notice and offered Silverman, barely eighteen at this point, a contract to develop a new 3D engine for them. He had already done some work on an improved version of the Ken’s Labyrinth engine with angled walls and lighting effects, while John Carmack was doing the same for his Doom engine down in Texas. This is not to say the two were rivals; on the contrary, they talked on the phone from time to time and inspired each other’s work. For example, Silverman took the idea of sector-based levels from Carmack and found it let him get around the limitations of the grid-based paradigm he had been working with.

Over the next eighteen months or so, with Ken mostly working remotely from his parent’s home in Rhode Island with occasional trips down to the newly formed 3D Realms’ offices in Texas, the BUILD engine developed into a very capable and feature-rich 3D engine. It supported sloped floors, fake room-over-room, decals sprites on walls and floors, moving sectors for effects like vehicles and swinging doors, and many other interesting features.



Overall, the tech never felt quite as fundamentally solid as Doom or Quake, and its 2.5D nature made it an evolutionary dead-end by the time Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996. But in the hands of 3D Realms’s designers BUILD enabled the quirky, colorful, richly interactive game worlds of Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood — three superb shooters that brought a sense of fun to a genre that was then practically dominated by the sparsely designed, monolithic Quake.

Silverman continued to do great programming work post-BUILD, as evidenced by his awesome vintage-styled homepage — a treasure trove of old-school 3D programming wizardry. Yet he never grew into a game technology luminary like Carmack or Tim Sweeney. Here is Carmack in an interview from 1997, asked who he would hire if he could pick anyone from the 3D tech field:

“If I had to pick who I think is just the most talented, it would probably be Ken Silverman, the guy that did the BUILD engine. […] He writes all the code for everything, and he’s just extremely talented. I think it was one of 3D Realms’ worst decisions not to coddle him, or whatever it took, to keep him on board. I think if he was still working directly for 3D Realms, they would have a Quake-type game shipped by now, just because he’s extraordinarily good.”

It’s hard to talk about the history of 3D game engines without mentioning John Carmack, and deservedly so. But let’s not forget that teenage boy sitting at his 13" CRT monitor somewhere in Rhode Island over twenty years ago.

Carmack was right about 3D Realms bad decision about Silverman's departure from the company. Instead making their own engine, they've started changing engines from Q2 to Unreal to who the hell knows what and it basically killed the company. Ken is a real bro and sometimes you can see his posts in topics regarding the level building and the build engine.

 

[Anthedon]

I'm nearly done with all the official Monolith episodes. Is Cryptic Passage worth a look or is it best avoided so as not to sully the experience?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Cryptic Passage is alright.

 

[tormund]

Cryptic Passage is awesome.

 

[DraQ]

Cryptic Passage feels more like a fan-made mod than expansion.

On one hand it generally reuses - original assets in new roles, jokes, pop-culture references and so on - which feels very much like a mod - while not being really capable of tying into the original, official narrative properly which also feels like one.
On the other most of the stuff in it, in terms of both concept and execution, falls somewhere between solid and awe inspiring, often more than the original material - which again feels like a mod, ambitious and made by very talented people who treated the original material with the kind of obsessive religious seriousness that isn't generally considered healthy but is often found in fans and who put more heart in it than a bunch of people for whom it was a day job - the kind of mod that gets the modding team immediate and very lucrative employment offers.

tl;dr:
Of course you should play it.

 

[DraQ]

I believe the use of life essence is a holdover from when Caleb transformed into a Werewolf-like beast and maintained this form via Bloodlust or something (which is why Chinny planned to absorb all these combined powers himself in the final story).

Would have been awesome gameplay element if it made it to the release version.

 

[Anthedon]

Cryptic Passage feels more like a fan-made mod than expansion.

On one hand it generally reuses - original assets in new roles, jokes, pop-culture references and so on - which feels very much like a mod - while not being really capable of tying into the original, official narrative properly which also feels like one.
On the other most of the stuff in it, in terms of both concept and execution, falls somewhere between solid and awe inspiring, often more than the original material - which again feels like a mod, ambitious and made by very talented people who treated the original material with the kind of obsessive religious seriousness that isn't generally considered healthy but is often found in fans and who put more heart in it than a bunch of people for whom it was a day job - the kind of mod that gets the modding team immediate and very lucrative employment offers.

tl;dr:
Of course you should play it.

Will do, that sounds downright promising.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Somewhere Under the Sea

Just finished this one. Pretty enjoyable for the most part. Map 2 is definitely the highpoint: it's gorgeous and exceptionally well-made. One annoying part was that fight with two cerberuses, especially since the location of that particular fight was't exactly a good fit for it.
Map 3 was a wee bit too frustrating, it really needs a decent rebalance... or at the very least 100% less spidermums.

 

[Kutulu]

Always loved the game, actually its my favorite build engine game, over DN3D and SW.
I dont know if my version was special but it came with a Type-0 Negative Video, weird.

Also at that time i found the Video where he eats the cocooned person genuinly spooky/wrong.

 

[tormund]

http://www.moddb.com/games/bloodcm
Do you guys know about this? Attempt to remake Blood from the scratch in eDuke engine. For the long, long time looked like the project was dead, but then author silently updated it in august. Episodes 1-3 are now fully playable. Render should be switched to classic mode to preserve voxels and original lightning.
IMO this is a nice taste of Blood in native widescreen and with butter smooth framerate... stuff we would be taking for granted if there was a real source port of Blood.

 

[AngryKobold]

http://www.moddb.com/games/bloodcm
Do you guys know about this? Attempt to remake Blood from the scratch in eDuke engine. For the long, long time looked like the project was dead, but then author silently updated it in august. Episodes 1-3 are now fully playable. Render should be switched to classic mode to preserve voxels and original lightning.
IMO this is a nice taste of Blood in native widescreen and with butter smooth framerate... stuff we would be taking for granted if there was a real source port of Blood.

"XL Engine" was supposed to do the same... too bad it met the same fate as the most projects of that kind. The main (the sole) developer eventually gives up, no viable replacement. After all, the 5h that are left of a work day are not meant to be wasted on unpaid brain grinder.

 

[Grim Monk]

I dont know if my version was special but it came with a Type-0 Negative Video, weird.

Here is the reason:

 

[Riskbreaker]

I still hope that Kaiser will, one day, apply some of that reverse engineering wizardry of his on Blood. I actually recall how, in one interview about Powerslave EX, he mentioned that he's been interested in doing Blood EX for some time now but that he is wary of ZombieAtari's notoriously trigger-happy lawyers. Something like that.

 

[Astral Rag]

In other Build Engine-related news: Duke Nukem 3D finally gets a Sega Mega Drive release

There was a reason this was never released outside of Brazil..

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I had heard of that - but never imagined it was THIS bad.

 

[tormund]

Does anyone here have any experience with this mod for Blood 2?

I committed a sin of paying for Blood 2 :D on the last Steam Halloween sale, so I'm thinking about replaying it. From what I saw of that Extra Crispy mod, gunplay looks vastly improved compared to what I remember from vanilla Blood 2.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I committed a sin of paying for Blood 2 :D on the last Steam Halloween sale

I committed the sin of paying for Blood 2 FULL RETAIL when it was released.

At least I got the expansion pack at a great discount.

 

[tormund]

So I tried it and yes, weapons don't feel like shit anymore and enemies are much less of a bullet sponges than I remember. On the other side, there is some weird shit going on in other departments. First off, I dont remember Blood 2 throwing THIS insane numbers of enemies at the player. It starts with museum part, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of them behind every corner... According to ModDB page, he doubled the number of enemies in some levels, but it feels even worse that. Guy behind this mod did some tweak to their AI and reaction times, from the comments he is apparently really proud of them. In my experience, this meant that enemies stay behind corners in groups and open fire the same millisecond they spot the player. Their weapons do much more damage too of course. They also drop hearts much more rarely than I remember. I don't know what to think about this so far, gunplay so far feels like it was turned into something worthy of Monolith, but other tweaks feel like some classic modder alien logic. He completely removed civilians too, at least it looks like that so far.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Blood 2 is about as salvageable as Unreal 2, i.e. not at all. There ain't no fixin that, inferior gunplay was just a top of particularly large and rancid iceberg that is Blood 2.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[DraQ]

Blood 2 is about as salvageable as Unreal 2, i.e. not at all. There ain't no fixin that, inferior gunplay was just a top of particularly large and rancid iceberg that is Blood 2.

The funny thing here is that weaponry in general was definitely THE strongest point of Blood 2.

Oh, wait, I said 'funny'.
I meant 'sad'.