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 softw

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.