Have any of the builds of Duke Nukem Forever ever leaked?

[flyingjohn]

you'd think he watched his family get massacred or something

Plus,he got to live the Levine dream of forever building a game and getting paid.

 

[gerey]

What worries me, firstly, is if the leak is actually genuine. Anons are not known for their patience or restraint, so why are they blueballing everyone by drip-feeding screenshots and videos instead of leaking the whole thing now? It could very well be that someone is fishing for a payout from the IP holders to not release the leak.

Secondly, even if the leak is genuine, and the people behind it really want to share it with the internet at large, what happens when they do release it?

The best case scenario would be complete apathy from the IP holders, letting the somewhat dormant Duke Nukem fandom run rampant with the assets and source code and usher in a new Golden Age of Duke Nukem modding. After all, both the code and assets are now two decades old, Randy already cashed in on the Duke Nukem Forever hype and nobody has really seemed interested in doing anything with the IP ever since.

But then, as some have pointed out in the shoutbox when discussing the leak, there's the question of licensing. You're going to be hard pressed to find enough talented and motivated modders to dig through the assets and code to bring the game to some semblance of completing with the threat of a DMCA and court time hanging over their heads. And yes, a team could decide to go fully dark and work on the project until it is completed and then released it, making any attempt to DMCA the project utterly moot, but that's a very unlikely scenario.

And even if the IP holders decide to go for a PR win and give the community their blessing, or a least hint they won't stop them, what about third-party proprietary code and technologies are embedded in the source code? Would Epic care fans were mucking about with the Unreal 1 engine? DNF has been in development hell for a very long time, and there's bound to be all manner of possibly legally troublesome stuff to be found among the assets and code of the 2001 build.

 

[Dodo1610]

Since we have lived in the time of retro shooters for the last few years I have at several times asked myself why Gearbox doesn't just release the old version on DNF as a "boomer shooter"? Anyway nice to see that it's coming with source code and all. Looks great!

DNF was never finished so there is nothing Gearbox can sell. Randy Pitchfork certainly isn't going to give it away for free

But how much would it actually cost to finish it? The PR is for free since everyone will be talking about it. Other companies can make profitable boomer shooter so why can't Gearbox? And DNF 2001 would be the boomer shooter that outsells them all.

The Boomer shooter market is really small. Even the biggest hit yet Dusk only has 13K reviews on Steam after nearly 4 years. Gearbox already invested money in this game over 10 years ago. DNF 2011 was a commercial and critical flop either despite or because of a decade of hype and memes. So investing any money in Duke Nukem today seems like a bad idea.

 

[deuxhero]

And even if the IP holders decide to go for a PR win and give the community their blessing, or a least hint they won't stop them, what about third-party proprietary code and technologies are embedded in the source code? Would Epic care fans were mucking about with the Unreal 1 engine? DNF has been in development hell for a very long time, and there's bound to be all manner of possibly legally troublesome stuff to be found among the assets and code of the 2001 build.

Honestly, I think Epic is the biggest unknown in all this. With Randy gone, THQ Nordic and 3D Realms are smart enough to just ignore it and accept free publicity, if not just go and make it official. In 2014 Tim Sweeney said on the official forums he hoped to get UE1 open source someday and it's not like there's trade secrets in there (Unreal's modern source is publicly visible, albeit on a non-free license)

We definitely can’t open source Unreal Engine 2 or 3, because of dependencies on a large number of external closed-source middleware packages with complex licensing requirements.

Open sourcing Unreal Engine 1 might be possible, but getting the source and dependencies into a releasable state would take a lot of cleanup effort that we just haven’t been able to find time for. I hope we can do it someday!

Thus they could use this as a reason to actually do it. At the same time, Epic is a big dumb corporation that seems perfectly capable of blindly DMCAing everything. Ideally THQ Nordic would talk some sense into them, especially since they own Deus Ex (one of the most famous UE1 licencees) and like to re-release stuff and could really benefit from UE1 genuinely being open source (if the Deus Ex source code still exists, that could also be open sourced along side a re-release).

 

[gerey]

Okay, so it looks like I was wrong, the madlads actually released the leak into the wild. It's around 900 MB and people have seemingly already begun fixing up bits of the code to make what is there functional and playable.

EDIT: Here's the IA link for those interested.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I'm pleying eeet!!!!11

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Broussard, that fat useless fuck, is the reason we never got to see this finished. His mismanagement and his misplaced sense of perfectionism buried DNF and 3DR.

Can you elaborate on Broussards perfectionism and how it affected DNF please?

DNF 2011 was a commercial and critical flop either despite or because of a decade of hype and memes.

No DNF 2011 was actually profitable. People still bought it even though they new it would be shit, for different reasons.

 

[Morgoth]

Can you elaborate on Broussards perfectionism and how it affected DNF please?

IIRC he changed engines more often than his underwear, and kept pushing for new features with no regard of deadlines or engine limitations. His magical bullet was always "When it's done", but that's just masking his managerial incompetence. Eventually, they ran out of money and closed shop.

 

[Ninjerk]

I'm pleying eeet!!!!11

piracy is wrong

Spoiler

do it anyways

 

[Drop Duck]

Can you elaborate on Broussards perfectionism and how it affected DNF please?

 

[Tacgnol]

Can you elaborate on Broussards perfectionism and how it affected DNF please?

IIRC he changed engines more often than his underwear, and kept pushing for new features with no regard of deadlines or engine limitations. His magical bullet was always "When it's done", but that's just masking his managerial incompetence. Eventually, they ran out of money and closed shop.

Broussard is a good example of a good developer/designer not translating to being a good project manager. A few DNF devs have talked about it on various sites over the years.

Everyone apparently liked the guy, but he was awful at actually managing a big project. Never really understood how to allocate resources or keep things to deadlines.

Some have accused him of running a scam, but it always looked like classic project management incompetence to me.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

Its definitely unfinished, not much is playable, but you get the impression it was going to be very interactive shooter, and theres a lot of shades of Deus Ex and Postal 2 in it.
Theres also some pretty strong horror vibes going on.

 

[gerey]

Can you elaborate on Broussards perfectionism and how it affected DNF please?

As Morgoth said, it was basically the same situation as with Daikatana, only ten times worse.

If you're unfamiliar, Daikatana started development based on the Quake 1 engine, and halfway through development, once id released Quake 2 Romero decided to switch over the whole game to the Quake 2 engine, which caused massive delays and headaches, as all maps and assets had to be either laboriously ported, scrapped and made anew or simply discarded.

Same thing was going on with Duke Nukem Forever - the ego of the fatass in charge got too big and he wanted DNF to be the best thing ever, so any time a new FPS got released and he saw something he liked or though was cool in it he demanded it be included in the game, which prolonged development times, and when the game inevitably lost its graphical cutting edge he had the team switch over to a new engine or to remake assets and maps to a higher degree of graphical fidelity now possible thanks to more potent hardware and modern engine.

IIRC they switched engines at least three times over the course of development, and with no end in sight and the project in complete chaos they eventually had to throw in the towle and declare the development of the game cancelled.

That's basically the gist of it.

 

[gerey]

Its definitely unfinished, not much is playable, but you get the impression it was going to be very interactive shooter, and theres a lot of shades of Deus Ex and Postal 2 in it.

Haven't had time to play what's there, or to dig through all the files, but from what I've been able to hear from other people that had the chance to shift through the content there's actually quite a lot of stuff.

Many maps are basically complete, many maps are nearly complete but blocked out and inaccessible directly from the game, and there's plenty of other maps that are in a rough state, either unfinished or lacking proper polish, but the leak also features the source code and IIRC the dev tools, so it should be very much possible to finish the game if a dedicated team takes up the challenge.

Arguably, the holy grail, the 2002, which is rumored to be even more complete, is still out there, but with what's in this package you don't really need it for fans to release a completed version of Duke Nukem Forever from circa 2001.

 

[Wunderbar]

IIRC they switched engines at least three times over the course of development, and with no end in sight and the project in complete chaos they eventually had to throw in the towle and declare the development of the game cancelled.

That's basically the gist of it.

they started development on quake 2 engine, then switched to unreal 1 (2001 iteration), then to unreal 2 (released game).

 

[randir14]

Its definitely unfinished, not much is playable, but you get the impression it was going to be very interactive shooter, and theres a lot of shades of Deus Ex and Postal 2 in it.
Theres also some pretty strong horror vibes going on.

Episode 2 of Duke 3D kind of had a horror theme. Lots of dark areas inspired by Aliens, and props like skeletal astronauts with their limbs ripped off. All the games that came after leaned into the comedy too much.

 

[Morenatsu.]

This game is fully playable.

 

[lightbane]

Where's the link with the latest leak then? Can this be played in Windows 10, or do I need a Virtual Machine or something? I dunno if modders bothered to make the files actually playable for modern systems or if they released in the state they were found.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

It has a Postal 2-style piss button!

10/10 GOTY!!!!!

I also bumped into that chick from the E3 trailer

Worked out of the box for me.

Where's the link with the latest leak then?

You'll find plenty of links here.

 

[Viata]

Good ol' Unreal 1 engine. Crisp, clean, graphics.

Will play.

Yeah, Unreal 1 Engine was the shit. Sadly, Tim Sweeney will now be remembered for his video game store than anything else.

 

[gerey]

Where's the link with the latest leak then? Can this be played in Windows 10, or do I need a Virtual Machine or something? I dunno if modders bothered to make the files actually playable for modern systems or if they released in the state they were found.

Internet archive link

Quoting some twitter fag:

Select all the .rar files and extract them to a singular folder of the same name as the regular name of the .rar files by right clicking on the selected files. (This option should appear if you use Winrar.)

Upon extracting; 1. Copy the contents of Patches/MegaPatch/ into the october folder 2. Run October 26/System/DukeForever.exe And to activate the objectives system, paste this file on the System folder (courtesy of Zombie from Duke4):https://t.co/kuUyiGMDKJ

 

[randir14]

Doesn't work for me, it just launches the DNF logo and a white box, then my computer slows to a crawl.

 

[Wunderbar]

The first two maps have unfinished scripting and you can't beat them, but starting from the third one the game is actually playable. Got to the rooftops, found an assault rifle, killed a bunch of infected EDF soldiers.

This is basically Half-Life 1 clone with some minor feature bloat (you can loot corpses, collect currency and spend it on buying supplies from vending machines, switch between alternate ammo types, etc). Graphically looks very impressive.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

Spoiler

God normal maps and PBR stole something from us.

 

[gerey]

This is basically Half-Life 1 clone with some minor feature bloat (you can loot corpses, collect currency and spend it on buying supplies from vending machines, switch between alternate ammo types, etc). Graphically looks very impressive.

Sounds rather similar to what Duke Nukem 3D was in comparison to Doom - Doom gameplay with more realistic maps and random touches of interactivity.

Aiming to be like HL1 isn't that bad of a goal, I just wish the maps were a tad less linear and encouraged more exploration and fucking around with the gimmicks - like how Hedon tends to do in its maps.