Back in 1996, a little company in Garland, TX called 3D Realms released a game that would change PC gaming forever: Duke Nukem 3D. While the technology behind Duke3D is dated at best by today’s standards, the addictive gameplay has rarely been duplicated since. And so it was with great amusement (and much pleasant nostalgia) that I finally installed the recent Windows port of this classic game.

My friend Sparse talked about this a little while ago, but I was too swamped to go check it out. But hearing that he and Pooch enjoyed a classic DukeMatch a couple days ago courtesy of the Win32 port, I decided I just had to see it for myself. Wow. This is one of the most flawless DOS -> Win32 game ports I’ve ever seen. I had absolutely zero issues, and the game ran like a bat out of hell at 1365×1024 in OpenGL rendering mode. Hail to the King, baby! Duke Nukem is back!

None of this would have happened had 3D Realms not released the complete source code to Duke3D last year. Once that occurred, the original developer of the Build engine—Ken Silverman—and his Aussie friend Jonathon Fowler undertook the task of rewriting the engine to make it run natively under Windows, and to support advanced features for future mod-makers. The result is fantastic. Already, loyal fans of the game (and there are many of them) have started a Duke3D High-Res Retexturing Project, where they are collectively, and by hand, recreating all of the game’s textures at super high resolutions, for use with OpenGL rendering mode. Somebody has even talked of creating polygonal models to replace the sprite-based objects and actors!

As for me, I was having a blast just playing the original, unmodified game last night. It was weird actually using the mouse and keyboard to play as I do with all modern games; back in the days of Duke, I was still a keyboarder, and I don’t think I could get used to doing that again. I had trouble installing the Plutonium Pak upgrade (enabling the fourth episode), since the DOS-based installer seemed to think I had less than 8 MB of RAM! (A common problem with these old things.) I managed to patch the GRP file manually, but realized too late that I needed to update the CON files as well. I haven’t investigated it yet, but I’m sure it can’t be too hard.

As if this wasn’t enough, Ken and Jon also ported the Build level editor to Windows! I discovered this by accident last night when I executed build.exe without intending to. This stirred a child-like sense of excitement in me, since I used to be a pretty big mapper back in the day. (Duke3D, incidentally, was the last game I ever made any levels for.) I even had a killer reproduction map of my high school started, but it was taking too damn long (I’m too much of a perfectionist, always going overboard with detail), so I dropped it after a few areas. My friends have asked me to see if I can dig that up. I’m sure I’ve got it saved somewhere—I know for a fact, for instance, that my entire GAMESDUKE3D directory, containing every TC, mod, and add-on I ever downloaded, is on a CD-R someplace. I’ll probably put everything else on hold tonight while I look for it.

Of course, now the inevitable has happened—this has got me wanting to create game lavels again. So much great stuff can be done nowadays, in terms of realism and special effects, that we gamers couldn’t even begin to dream about back in 1996. The problem is that I appear to be totally incompetent at any kind of pure-3D level creation, which is odd, because when I got my hands on two professional grade modellers in college (Maya and SoftImage, namely), I did pretty damn well. But that’s just it—I can follow tutorials and directions like a piece of cake, but as soon as I try to recreate an idea in my head, I find myself staring at the orthographic views as if to say, what the hell do I do now? I can’t figure out how to create anything other than a frickin’ cube! It doesn’t help that most of the level editors out there have a huge learning curve for somebody coming from, say, MAPEDIT or DETH experience only.

I wouldn’t even know which 3D game to start learning how to mod! Quake 3? RTCW? Devastation? Chaser? Max Payne? The latter two, in particular, were supposed to have easy-to-use editors—easy for someone relatively experienced in such things, I’m sure! At one time I tried making levels for Half-Life, but was able only to successfully follow a tutorial. One day I’d really like to create a finished level designed after my high school, since I’m still brewing with contempt for the place, but it looks like maybe I’d better just fire up that ported copy of BUILD and finish what I started oh so many years ago. Provided I can find it first.

Books help a great deal, but I’ll be damned if I can ever find any good books on 3D level design. A guy named Tagliaferri published what is, in my opinion, the definitive book on Duke3D level editing back in the day, and that one book taught me how to do everything there is to do with the Build editor. How come there’s nothing like that for, say, Quake or something?

Ah well…I’ve already got too much on my plate without game design thrown into the mix. I’d better just “chill down.”