Incline Ion Fury (formerly Ion Maiden) - Build Engine powered FPS by Duke Nukem 3D mappers - now with Aftershock DLC

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

John Carmack?

Fuck this loser!

 

[Drax]

Tbh, I do inmensely respect JC.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

John Carmack?
Fuck this loser!

WTF? If John Carmack is a loser then I don't want to be a winner!

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

The last arguably good game Carmack was involved with was Quake 3. Since then, his projects were uninspiring both gameplay-wise and technology-wise. Furthermore, now he is occupied with bringing about the VR decline.

 

[Morgoth]

I always appreciated Carmack's independent mind, technical acumen and clear articulation on technical talks. Who cares if he was "difficult" to work with?

Playing devil's advocate here, I also think the last engine where he was personally involved (id Tech 5) was underappreciated. Rage running in 60 fps with large outdoor areas on shitty consoles is a damn master stroke. id Tech 6 was in many ways a regression, particularly the tiny levels in Doom 4 and Wolf 2.

 

[Makabb]

Rage running in 60 fps with large outdoor areas on shitty consoles is a damn master stroke

borderlands did that and much better, plus rage textures were a joke, in borderlands atleast they hid the horrendous textures with cartoon look.

 

[Roguey]

Megatextures were a massive misstep.

 

[fantadomat]

Rage was playable until i run in to a few bugs,also respawning enemies.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[JBro]

Does it still run like crap?

 

[SharkClub]

I don't imagine anyone here actually cares for this side of it, but the game has a speedrun.com page for Preview Campaign runs already.
https://www.speedrun.com/Ion_Maiden

Does it still run like crap?

They haven't patched it yet even once since release, so probably yes. They are working on the performance among other things (bowling bomb strength vs the boss, health/armor pickups on hard difficulty, etc.) from what I hear.

 

[JBro]

As soon as they fix performance, I'll grab it again. That was my only issue.

 

[soulburner]

I always appreciated Carmack's independent mind, technical acumen and clear articulation on technical talks. Who cares if he was "difficult" to work with?

Playing devil's advocate here, I also think the last engine where he was personally involved (id Tech 5) was underappreciated. Rage running in 60 fps with large outdoor areas on shitty consoles is a damn master stroke. id Tech 6 was in many ways a regression, particularly the tiny levels in Doom 4 and Wolf 2.

I agree about the Id Tech 5 engine. I think it was amazing and Rage really does look beautiful when looking at the open areas. Not only the megatextures look great, but also there is no LOD pop-in effect anywhere. No objects suddenly appear before the player, what you see in the distance is what you will see when you get there. Of course, it wasn't perfect. The texture pop-in effect was very visible, at least some time after the release of the game (though after testing several AMD drivers, the effect was barely noticeable on my Radeon 4850 back then).

The textures were blurry when viewed closer, but seeing how the game already is quite a few gigabytes in size, I think the problem with making them more detailed was the I/O. Streaming everything from an HDD would not be possible and probably require a fast SSD, even by today's standards. I remember John Carmack promised Id Tech 5 was going to be in some sort of on-going development and that thanks to Steam they would be able to add cool stuff after release. 64-bit support and higher resolution megatextures, for example. After a while, though, Carmack said something about such a download being gigantic but having no real visual benefits. Probably the textures were already authored in such low resolution already, who knows. All we got in one of the patches was bicubic texture filtering and I don't think it has become a standard in other games and engines.

So... I think Id Tech 5, just like the earlier engines, was ahead of its time but people and developers didn't see the advantages. Everyone focued on how the walls look from half a meter away and not on the fact that in overall, the world generated in Rage was very beautiful, rich and - yes - detailed.


Edit to add - this might be a tiny bit more on topic: http://advsys.net/ken/buildsrc/build2.htm

 

[Dreed]

The game received a patch!

Changelog:

• Overall Performance Boosts!
  
• An occasional crash when performing random actions, including flipping lightswitches, has been fixed.
  
• A bug that would cause the player to sometimes switch to the wrong game mode when loading a game has been fixed.
  
• Optimizations to the game world logic have been made to improve performance in some circumstances and shrink savegame file sizes.
  
• Mouse aiming has been reworked to allow much greater precision of movement.
  
• The mouse axis scale sliders can now go all the way to zero.
  
• New "save setup" menu, allowing autosaves to be disabled and a limit to be set on the maximum number of autosaves to keep at any one time.
  
• Savegames can now be deleted with the Delete key.
  
• Keyboard bindings for aiming up, down, and returning the view to the center can now be configured.
  
• A key or button can now be assigned to switch to the player's previously selected weapon.
  
• The sizes and brightness of certain pickup items have been increased
  Armor fragments are now more visible.
  
• Awkward delay after SMG reload has been fixed.
  
• The easiest skill level should now be easier, and the hardest should now be harder
  
• Volume slider no longer treats 50% as 0%

 

[soulburner]

Performance is slightly increased with OpenGL renderer on my laptop, but there's still some latency when pressing 'fire' with all the weapons.

Also, the OpenGL renderer still has the following issues:
- without vsync, but frame limit at 60, there is a huge screen tearing problem (Intel HD4000)
- enabling vsync introduces big mouse movement latency
- limiting frames to 30 seems to eliminate tearing and latency, but is too choppy for my taste

But I think all "modern" Build games have the exact same problem (Shadow Warrior Redux and the recent Duke re-release). Any tips would be nice!

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Ideally of course making a game more difficult should involve better, smarter AI. Bullet sponges and hit point bloat are a big no no for me. Which path does Ion Maiden take in its new difficulty settings? All natural or huge pendulous tits of silicon?

 

[JBro]

Performance is slightly increased with OpenGL renderer on my laptop, but there's still some latency when pressing 'fire' with all the weapons.

Also, the OpenGL renderer still has the following issues:
- without vsync, but frame limit at 60, there is a huge screen tearing problem (Intel HD4000)
- enabling vsync introduces big mouse movement latency
- limiting frames to 30 seems to eliminate tearing and latency, but is too choppy for my taste

But I think all "modern" Build games have the exact same problem (Shadow Warrior Redux and the recent Duke re-release). Any tips would be nice!

You have to use windowed mode. Use borderless gaming for fullscreen windowed. Build games are complete garbage in fullscreen because of the screen tearing or huge input delay. I don't even know why they bothered with v sync.

 

[Durandal]

This update pretty much eliminated all performance problems on my end, it's largely consistent with no dips. Larger areas do feel a little less smooth, but without a FPS counter it's hard to tell, in any case the game doesn't shit itself anymore when there's a lot of stuff going on at once. The improved visibility on armor fragments is very welcome, though I didn't notice anything different with the difficulty changes. I think enemies deal a lot more damage when you have no armor equipped, but other than that it all felt the same.

 

[Roguey]

Ideally of course making a game more difficult should involve better, smarter AI. Bullet sponges and hit point bloat are a big no no for me. Which path does Ion Maiden take in its new difficulty settings? All natural or huge pendulous tits of silicon?

These kinds of shooters were never about enemy AI.

 

[fantadomat]

As long as it doesn't shoot in the opposite direction,i am fine if the AI of the walking blood fountains is little bit janky.

 

[SharkClub]

This update pretty much eliminated all performance problems on my end, it's largely consistent with no dips. Larger areas do feel a little less smooth, but without a FPS counter it's hard to tell, in any case the game doesn't shit itself anymore when there's a lot of stuff going on at once. The improved visibility on armor fragments is very welcome, though I didn't notice anything different with the difficulty changes. I think enemies deal a lot more damage when you have no armor equipped, but other than that it all felt the same.

I think there are new placements of health/armor on Easy mode and fewer than before on Hard mode. The difficulty changes have mostly been about the amount of resources afaik, which was the major complaint of mine about it.

Performance is definitely a lot better now, by the way.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

A recent interview with the heads of 3DRealms and Voidpoint focused around the tech used, the current Build engine and new techniques.
Very indepth.

 

[Astral Rag]

Very good video except for the fact that the devs call Quake the first True 3D FPS™

Why does everyone always seem to forget Future Shock.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Very good video except for the fact that the devs call Quake the first True 3D FPS™

Why does everyone always seem to forget Future Shock.

He wants a word with you.