Duke Nukem 3D User Map Recommendations?

Mugenmidget · October 2008

There's a huge pack of a large assortment of user maps for Duke Nukem 3D found right here:

http://www.duke4.net/download.php?view.33

But does anyone with a lot of experience with the game know of some of their favorites? It's hard to go through so many maps with so little time, I was wondering if some people here had some immediate favorites that sprung to mind.

Hillean · October 2008

Holy jeez... it's been so damn long, I can't recall anymore.

I used to make maps for Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and Outlaws (Lucasarts, first game I knew of that you had to manually reload), but unless I pull out the ol' floppies, I don't think I have any around.

joshofalltrades · October 2008

Yahtzee has a total conversion at his site.

slash000 · October 2008

This forum should have a level design contest. And by contest I mean just anyone who wants to, make their own map and share it.

BlindPsychic · October 2008

I recall Duke in DC being pretty neat, but I don't remember what that was, I got it with some Duke Ultimate pack that had other user made stuff and a bunch of other crap in it.

Dr Mario Kart · October 2008

city@war if its there. I believe its the one I'm thinking of.

I lost a friend over that map. All of the spawn points are in this central courtyard surrounded by buildings, and the 2-3 ways out could be camped HARD. I beat him 101 to -1 in the span of about 20 minutes.

oh how I wish I could remember the other names. I imagine at least one of them had death somewhere in the title.

slash000 · October 2008

I think probably at least 85% of user maps had some combination of the words "city," "war," and "death" in them :P

Just kidding. Actually, 96% of user maps were houses. Houses of the guys creating the maps. That's UNIQUE AND CREATIVE! I want to duke it out in your house! What a clever death match map!

Dr Mario Kart · October 2008

oh how I miss the one sided walls mechanic

Those traps that squished you and left a gummy trail from floor to ceiling were classy also.

Einhander · October 2008

slash000 wrote: »

This forum should have a level design contest. And by contest I mean just anyone who wants to, make their own map and share it.

The Build engine is so easy to create levels for, you can literally have a playable map less than five minutes from the first time you fire it up.

Sure, it will be a really shitty room with no items and four textures, but it's still a map.

slash000 · October 2008

Einhander wrote: »

slash000 wrote: »

This forum should have a level design contest. And by contest I mean just anyone who wants to, make their own map and share it.

The Build engine is so easy to create levels for, you can literally have a playable map less than five minutes from the first time you fire it up.

Sure, it will be a really shitty room with no items and four textures, but it's still a map.

I know. It's the greatest fucking level editor ever.

I created so many maps.. but there was this one map, the final map I ever made for the game, it was my opus. The level was so long and complex that I had actually combined about 3 levels worth of ideas and jammed them all into one, and managed to just fit the map into the maximum grid area when I was finally done.

I had more fun making single player maps (and coop maps), although I did make a few good multiplayer ones. Mostly for 2 people though because I mostly played multi via modem to modem directly over the phone line.

I should try and see if I can dig up that old map off an old HDD somewhere... I know I have it somehwere... still...

Uselesswarrior · October 2008

It's sad that it took playing it on 360 for me to remember how awesome duke 3d was.

I think I read somewhere that they were going to make a sequel.

slash000 · October 2008

Oh man I just reinstalled my PC copy of this game. And the Jonof source port. Now to find my old level.....

Uselesswarrior · October 2008

Slash you gotta back that stuff up, I still have the .map file for the q3 level I invested months in.

slash000 · October 2008

Uselesswarrior wrote: »

Slash you gotta back that stuff up, I still have the .map file for the q3 level I invested months in.

Oh it's all good. I finally found the map. I was just now playing it.

Holy shit this level is so much less awesome than I remembered it. It's still a fairly good single player romp, but it's pretty lacking in detail - and it's hard as hell!

I just got my ass kicked repeatedly. And it's so damn long that if you die without saving you... you gotta go back far.

I'm going to beat my own level just to take a trip down memory lane. But I kind of forgot how good I was back when I played this game every day. This shit was easy back then. Not so much right now...

oh the other problem is I used some crappy extra texture pack that I found and since I don't have that now there are a few missing texturesd which makes shit pretty hard to discern in some areas.

RandomEngy · October 2008

Oh man I made an awesome map back in the day. It had genetically altered sharks that swam through the air, a reactor that you could blow up with explosions that chased you down a hallway, nifty secrets like a rooftop garden accessible by jetpack and a cool sewer system.

But now it's gone forever. And I do believe it had a stupid name, since I made it in middle school... ahh yes, "Urban Chaos".

Though really the best part of BUILD was the ability to create two distinct rooms that overlap each other. You can break people's brains with that stuff.

Dr Mario Kart · October 2008

Your comment about overlapping rooms has reminded me of a duke level which may have been called death1. In the early days of half life 1, I had the ambition to get into level building, and it was killed when I tried to recreate that level in an engine where two hallways cannot overlap each other.

Its a good multiplayer level though.

Mblackwell · October 2008

Level editing in Duke, it's true, is way easier than modern editors. And, once you have the appropriate skills, you can build similar structures to modern games.

My one qualm is the inability to slope a surface it two different directions without a really crazy trick that is fairly ridiculous. It basically amounts to making a triangle in the center of the sector you want to slope and then making one of the walls of the triangle the sloped sector's "firstwall". Then you have to shrink the triangle to something super tiny and lower it out of sight.

I used to love sitting and figuring out how to make curves and completely connected and consistently angled objects like mountains.

Oh, and if you ever played the StarShip Troopers TC, you should check out the usermaps one of the original mappers put together.

Dartboy · October 2008

slash000 wrote: »

Actually, 96% of user maps were houses. Houses of the guys creating the maps. That's UNIQUE AND CREATIVE! I want to duke it out in your house! What a clever death match map!

Yeah. This. I remember buying the DukeZone map pack, which contained "OVER 1000 LEVELS!!!!" or something like that. But it turned out that half of them were like people's houses, or different versions of the same map. And when I say version, I don't mean day/night, I mean version 1, version 2, etc. I'm sure that whoever put that thing together just grabbed every single level they could get their hands on, regardless of whether or not it was the same thing.

However, there was one level in it that was totally awesome. It was a city that took up the entire maximum map size that Build allowed. And it actually was an entire city. There was a transit system to take you to the different portions of the map because there's no way in hell you'd actually be able to walk there. And it had things like residential sections with entire apartment buildings, full-on shopping malls, I think a powerplant facility in the middle, and other stuff that seemed like you could build an entire RPG-like game off that one level.

I even remember trying my hand at building stuff for this. I never learned how to do any of the really cool tricks, but I did put together a couple cool spaceship/ space station levels that I liked.

Einhander · October 2008

Dartboy wrote: »

However, there was one level in it that was totally awesome. It was a city that took up the entire maximum map size that Build allowed. And it actually was an entire city. There was a transit system to take you to the different portions of the map because there's no way in hell you'd actually be able to walk there. And it had things like residential sections with entire apartment buildings, full-on shopping malls, I think a powerplant facility in the middle, and other stuff that seemed like you could build an entire RPG-like game off that one level.

If you ever remember the name of this level, please let us know.

Because a full-on Dukematch in a level like that would be incredibly tedious and incredibly awesome at the same time.

Also, if any of you have one of these:

And one of these:

Then let me know and we'll get some some Netlink Dukematch going.

Jblade35 · October 2008

everytime I see a Duke3D topic I get the urge to put together a list of mods to check out, but then I always forget to - in anycase, Eduke32 is the best sourceport to use since it's basically a continuation of Jonof's work. If you're looking for mods to play for it as well, it's best to start here (Nuclear Showdown's my mod) and if you just want regular usermaps, start here.

I'd recommend checking out DukePlus if you wanna try Duke with some more modern features, my mod NS if you want to play with some more gadgets and enemies, and Duke Nukem: Weapon of Mass Destruction for a bit of a combination of the two.

TVs_Frank · October 2008

slash000 wrote: »

I think probably at least 85% of user maps had some combination of the words "city," "war," and "death" in them :P

Just kidding. Actually, 96% of user maps were houses. Houses of the guys creating the maps. That's UNIQUE AND CREATIVE! I want to duke it out in your house! What a clever death match map!

Hey fuck you. I made two of those. :P

Undead Scottsman · October 2008

TVs_Frank wrote: »

slash000 wrote: »

I think probably at least 85% of user maps had some combination of the words "city," "war," and "death" in them :P

Just kidding. Actually, 96% of user maps were houses. Houses of the guys creating the maps. That's UNIQUE AND CREATIVE! I want to duke it out in your house! What a clever death match map!

Hey fuck you. I made two of those. :P

A buddy of mine made a recreation of the school we were going to. While at school.

Luckily he was in the smart slacker program at our school, so the teacher's either knew him well enough that he's not going to shoot up the school; or just didn't care.

Velmeran · October 2008

The teacher was hoping he really got the facaulty office really well done and realistic, and then probably gave him spawn points for certain "monsters" at about 7:15am on any given friday...

slash000 · October 2008

Ooh yeah, school maps were a very popular one as well.

And so many maps were full of completely ill-proportioned objects. Desks and chairs that would come up to the player's eye level or higher.

Because if you didn't know what you were doing in Build, you wouldn't get the proper perspective on the scope inside the map (because the sprites when you placed them were placed larger than they are in-game). And so many user maps ended up with huge enormous doors and tables and chairs and desks and stuff.

shanis · October 2008

Speaking of the Duke, is the XBLive version of Duke 3D worth getting? You don't get to use mods or new maps, but it seems like it would have a greater multiplayer following given the platform it's on.

ExoVark · October 2008

Duke in Black was the worst TC ever.

Dr Snofeld · October 2008

ExoVark wrote: »

Duke in Black was the worst TC ever.

Duke Carribean was pretty good, I thought. I have that on disk, can I play it with EDuke?

ExoVark · October 2008

I'm not familiar with eDuke but if it's anything like jonof it will read all the original files. So I don't see why it wouldn't.

Shadowfire · October 2008

One of the other guys on this forum made a map of our old Software Etc store (complete with stripper in the backroom), and our Babbage's store (included garbage compactor with rocket launcher - is the RPG worth the possibility of getting squished?). Good times.

xzzy · October 2008

Pretty much everyone's first map was either their house, or their place of employment. Maps like that pretty much dominated the 90's, and Duke 3D was worst than most because it was so easy to make a mpa.

ExoVark · October 2008

I dunno, my first map started out with just a room full of palette-swapped strippers.

Palette-swapped sectors too. The world didn't see a more garish user-made map until Quake 2 came out.

slash000 · October 2008

The very first map I started actually ended up being incorporated into the very last map I ever did for the game. I dunno, kind of funny how it ended up like that. It involved a city, some retail stores, a government base, a secret government base, a sewage system, and some other junk.

I definitely am guilty of making my own house though.

Made a couple of decent multiplayer maps that I have since lost though.

slash000 · October 2008

HOLY SHIT

This is the BEST COINCIDENCE EVER

So I'm sitting here studying for my Copyright course which I'm taking (law school), and I SHIT YOU NOT I'm half way through tomorrow's reading assignment and guess what court case pops up in this book:

Micro Star v. Formgen, Inc.
154 F.3d 1107 (9th Cir. 1998)

Micro Star involved another videogame, Duke Nukem 3D, a first person "shooter" game that comes with 29 "levels" of play. The game also included a "Build Editor" which allowed users to design their own levels. Formgen, the copyright owner, encouraged users to post new levels to the internet for others to download for free. Micro Star downloaded 300 user-made levels and stamped them onto a CD which it then sold commercially as Nuke It . Judge Kozinski described how the game worked as follows:

The game consists of three separate components: the game engine, the source art library and the MAP files... In order to create the audiovisual display for a particular level, the game engine invokes the MAP file that corresponds to that level. Each MAP file contains a series of instructions that tell the game engine (and, through it, the computer) what to put where... The MAP file describes the level in painstaking detail, but it does not actually contain any of the copyrighted art itself; everything that appears on the screen actually comes from the art library... when the player selects one of teh Nuke It levels, the game engine references the Nuke It MAP files, but still uses the Duke Nukem 3d art library to generate the images that make up the level

Id. at 1110. Micro Star argued that the MAP files were like the Game Genie, in that they only temporarily altered the play of the game. The court disagreed, holding that the MAP files which defined the new audiovisual displays were sufficiently "concrete or permanent" to qualify as derivative works. Id. at 1111-12. Micro Star also argued that the new MAP files did not incorporate any of the protected expression of the original work, because although the MAP files referenced the Duke3d art library, they did not themselves contain any images. Again the court disagreed, saying "a copyright owner holds the right to create sequels, and the stories told in the Nuke It MAP files are surely sequels, telling new (through somewhat repetitive) tales of Duke's fabulous adventures. A book about Duke Nukem would infringe for the same reason, even if it contained no pictures." Id. at 1112.

Wow. That is fucking funny.

Funny because I'm in law school and a case pops up about Duke Nukem 3D. Funny also because this thread happens to be here. At the same time that we're covering this particular thing in class. hah.

it's also funny to hear how these courts talk about stuff like this in their court opinions.

TVs_Frank · October 2008

I love how level is in quotation marks.

Joeslop · October 2008

So what all do people use to play this game online nowadays? I'd be down for some multiplayer action on these newfangled maps.

Or even on the 360 later.

slash000 · October 2008

Guys. I just gotta post this somewhere, and this seems like the most recent and most appropriate thread..

So, the newest VGCats comic actually references... me:

I thought it was kind of funny. Such an obscure reference. Not sure how many people are going to get it. It's me!

TVs_Frank · October 2008

Nice! Did you get that receipt laminated yet?

slash000 · October 2008

TVs_Frank wrote: »

Nice! Did you get that receipt laminated yet?

hahah, nope!

I should do that. But I always say that... yeah it's getting even more yellowed and brittle. If I find some lamination around here I guess I'll do it. It's starting to get hard to read the text on the paper...

Prohass · October 2008

I remember i'd just make a little fort, fill it with ammo, and make thousands and thousands of those jetpacky grunt dudes, the sound of the mingun going "pew pew pew pew" is premenantly imprinted on my brain.

Phoenix-D · October 2008

TVs_Frank wrote: »

I love how level is in quotation marks.

I like how they actually used the phrase "Duke's fabulous adventures"

FyreWulff · October 2008

slash000 wrote: »

Guys. I just gotta post this somewhere, and this seems like the most recent and most appropriate thread..

So, the newest VGCats comic actually references... me:

I thought it was kind of funny. Such an obscure reference. Not sure how many people are going to get it. It's me!

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