Deep Freeze mod for Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project is finally and completely released!
This is a big mod with its own storyline. Deep Freeze contains 10 levels of the main storyline and 17 separate maps from its alpha version.
You can play the mod in English and Russian (text + voice). It also supports several widescreen modes.
Duke Nukem Tabletop Meltdown is a homebrewed roleplaying game where players can unleash their inner action hero, kicking alien ass across the galaxy and beyond. This rulebook has everything in one place that you would need to run a game with a group or even play solo (who needs friends). The rules are simple and easy to pick up and learn, while giving enough details to add plenty of depth and believability without being too math heavy or technical. Perfect for both beginning and advanced Game Masters! Run short mission based sessions, or use the optional traveling rules for longer epic journeys, the choice is yours! Everything from the video game is present, from chewing bubblegum to dishing out spicy one liners to give yourself a slight edge over the alien menace!
What does version 3.0 bring to the table?
– Entire book has had a facelift, more art, new cover, and neater organization
– Rebalanced weapons, aliens, and player stats and abilities
– Creation tables for the default Duke Clones, as well as special characters such as EDF marines, average joes, and modifiers to create the real Duke Nukem. Each character type changes the tone of the game dramatically, from power fantasy to survival horror.
– EDF headquarters and store page has been added, now the Dukes have a place to kick it when they aren’t on the field and resupply. There are loads of interesting NPCs to meet as well!
– Firearm and Close quarters combat (CQC) rules have been modified to make combat easy and streamlined
– Optional rules for combat and long distance travel have been added for extra realism. These include: Bleed and shock damage, exhaustion levels, hunger and hydration, and extreme cold and heat rules
– Added rules for rolling for large unit combat to make a 30 vs 30 fight easy to calculate casualties
– New generation tables for creating your own alien planets, weather patterns, and inhabitants with unique traits and behaviors. Perfect for taking your Dukes on intergalactic adventures!
– Updated character sheets, new personality quirks and status boxes, as well as some structure changes.
– Special rules for splicing alien DNA into a duke clone, very simple and can create pretty wacky scenarios
– Updated spaceship rules, upgrades, and pricing.
– Rebalanced experience points tables
– And much more!
Gregor Punchatz says that, “we poured everything we had into making the most awesome cinematic Janimation had ever created,” which the studio hoped “could help us compete with bigger players in the game trailer market at the time.” Unfortunately, due to the project’s secrecy and cancellation that never came to pass. “It crushed us.”
An idea to start a “Duke monthly map club” was discussed ironically in the “Duke Nukem is dead” thread and it met with positive response, so I guess it’s time to finally start doing stuff instead of just talking. Since it’s a new month and all, I guess it’s a good time to start with this thing: Duke Map/Mod of the Month Club. Credits to FistMarine for the idea – to better explain what we mean here, I’ll be blatantly ripping basing on the Doom Megawad Club principles, which are listed below:
What’s this thing?
We play through a set of maps/mods during the month, and use this thread to discuss it as we’re still all fresh with our comments/opinions/feelings about the maps.
What’s the purpose?
Basically, there are 4 purposes:
Showcasing some of the older mods/maps to wider public – they definitely deserve the attention!
Getting more people to actually enjoy and appreciate the user content – because let’s be honest, over the past 25 years this was really what kept Duke alive after all.
…and while we’re at it – keeping Duke alive by still enjoying it, as there’s no new games in the franchise on the horizon (and let’s be honest, they wouldn’t be as good as some of this stuff!).
Having a more structurized discussion on maps than what’s going in “Last map you played” thread – which is great, but it’s basically a monologue most of the time.
Can I join?
Sure, as long as you find some spare time during the month to play the stuff that’s on the table!
Warning, the mesh swap isn’t free of bugs, and here’s a list of the currently documented issues:
1) Hair alpha transparencies don’t work, this is because I’m swapping default texture to get duke’s hair in and that doesn’t support alpha transparencies. A very ghettolike way of hacking duke’s hair, unfortunately necessary as otherwise no hair texture loads in for him.
2) His eyes and teeth have the hair texture in as they are not texture mapped by default – this is likely because 2009 duke, much like the 09 edf troopers drew from a pool of generic separate teeth and eye textures. This was likely changed for performance reasons if I had to guess.
3) His left leg bends a bit weirdly in certain animations, this is due to leftlegroll (a bone exclusive to 09 duke) weights not properly mapping to leftleg, so they had to be mapped to leftfoot to work.
4) Lefthandindex2 had to be mapped to lefthandindex3 to get it to work right, so you might notice the finger bending a bit different than what 2009 duke’s left index finger did.
5) No changes were done to multiplayer duke’s textures meaning his textures are currently a jumbled mess. To be fixed later.
6) Glove diff is an original design based off the 09 glove norm and spec – this will be replaced with an accurate recreation in the future.
7) Dismemberment and gibbing works fine, but the stuff that gets spawned is static meshes from retarget. There’s no static mesh equivalent for 2009 which means you get jumbled messes of gibs atm. To be fixed later in the future.
I haven’t done a full run of DNF’s campaign or DLC so I can’t comment if there’s any other issues.
Can you believe it? Duke Nukem 3D was released January 29, 1996–25 years ago to date. Later this year, it’ll also be the 30th anniversary of the Duke Nukem franchise. Time sure does fly! While there have been no official celebrations, the community is pulling through for us as always. Check out this new Grabbag remix by Mike Norvak of Noise Boulder Records:
Then there’s Dzierzan SmoothDuke project, which has been ongoing since last year. He writes: “There has been a topic recently about if there’s any smooth weapons mod for Duke. Apparently there is not. Since I do like SmoothDoom and I have some experience in sprite editing, I decided to give it a shot.” You can check out the thread for all of Dzierzan’s updates, which are looking quite impressive:
Up next, we have Telee’s new map. He writes: “It’s great that the Duke community is still alive all these years later. 🙂 Here’s a peek at a couple levels I’ve been working on for an episode. The first map (plane) is basically 95% complete, sitting at 16,321/16,384 walls so not much more to be done but tweaking and gameplay testing. The second map (airport) is at 9,992 walls, a lot of work done but still much to do (including shading which I’m waiting to tackle until all the architecture is complete). Having a lot of fun with it.” Duke loves to visit the casino site, and we’re sure he’d love to visit this map soon too as soon as it’s done:
There are so many that we can’t list here, but we can’t forget about jimboob’s (AKA jimbob’s) upcoming map, which is looking quite pretty as well:
