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Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game if you were the type of kid that liked to modify your games rather than just consume them. For a lot of us in grade school, it

Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game if you were the type of kid that liked to modify your games rather than just consume them. For a lot of us in grade school, it was our first introduction to games that actively encouraged you to mod them, it came with a level editor for the Build engine, and you could open up the CON files to physically alter the actual scripts and behavior of items and entities. And when compared to id software's games (particularly the brown horribly muted color palette of quake), Duke Nukem 3d absolutely shone with personality and interactivity. There's a reason that it consistently scored in the 90s in old school PC gamer magazines.

pengaru 3y ago
What I'm hearing is that you loved the Build engine and tooling surrounding it. That's somewhat orthogonal to Duke3D the game played-as-shipped... I did software-rendered graphics programming back in the VGA days and a lot of your muted color palette complaint stems from a necessary compromise to support dynamic lighting in 256-colors. A huge part of what made DOOM so amazing was the dark environment and atmospheric, dynamic lighting. That they managed this in 256-colors was unbelievable a the time. Quake supported a software rendering mode on VGA as well, IIRC, also with dynamic lighting. I tried playing with dynamic lighting w/texture mapping hacks in 256-colors after playing DOOM showed it was possible, and it only really worked well with dark/goth-y muted textures because you have very little dynamic range. Try fitting an RGB color cube in 8 bits... Unless my memory is flawed, Duke3D didn't even attempt any dynamic lighting in the 8bpp VGA modes of the era. It was bright and colorful, but so were Wolf3D and Commander Keen.