[Duke3D] Alien World Order (v1.55)

[NightFright]

Many of you just want to play the new episode of World Tour ("Alien World Order") without all the other fancy stuff it comes with (normalmaps, revamped episodes 1-4 etc), also since a full WT installation weighs about 900 MB. For those I have made a batch script which will create a minimized version of World Tour, containing just the new episode and everything needed to run it, compact in a single groupfile (worldorder.grp, about 120 MB large) with grpinfo. Technically it's a renamed zipfile, so you can open it with 7-Zip if you want to see what's inside - but that's just for the curious ones.

Important: This is just a script and does NOT contain any files from World Tour! You will need an existing Steam installation of World Tour (you can uninstall it again after you are done with everything and got it working, though).

DOWNLOAD ON GITHUB

Requirements:
> Windows Vista or newer (to be able to use robocopy command)
> Existing Steam installation of "Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour"
> Raze v1.0.2 (or newer)

What you will get:
> "Alien World Order" maps (not the overhauled episodes 1-4 with colored lighting)
> World Tour CONs, including the Firefly enemy, Incinerator boss and Overlord/Emperor minibosses
> 8-bit parallax skies + skyboxes (ep.5 only)
> Lee Jackson's OGG music (ep.5 only)
> New Duke voice acting (ep.5 only)
> No developer commentaries or normalmaps

How to use:
1) Unpack this zipfile (worldorder_raze.zip) into your Raze installation folder, then launch worldorder.bat.
2) Choose your Steam (source) and Raze (target) directories. You can either enter the paths manually or use defaults (Steam: reads registry, Raze: current dir) by pressing "Enter".
3) You will be given two [Y]es/[N]o choices now:

a) Choose whether you want to copy over duke3d.grp from World Tour and convert it to Atomic Edition. There might be a UAC popup during this process which you need to confirm. In case you have duke3d.grp from Atomic, be sure to copy it to the "data" subdir.
b) Choose whether you want to patch the original "Prima Arena" map (E5L8) to make some sections accessible which were cut from the original release. There might be a UAC popup during this process which you need to confirm. The original map will be saved as E5L8B.map in case you want to revert manually later.

4) You can (and should) uninstall World Tour on Steam at this point. Also the script file itself (worldorder.bat) is no longer needed.
5) Launch Raze (raze.exe). In the selection menu, choose "Alien World Order (worldorder)".

Insider tip:
If you want to shrink filesize further, you can recode the music tracks, e.g. with Audacity, and reduce them to OGG quality level 4. While you won't hear any difference ingame, it will reduce filesize of the entire pack by another 70% or so (30 MB total size).

[Graf Zahl]

3) After the creation process of "worldorder.grp" is completed, the script will pause, giving you the chance to note down the CRC32 value of the file. DO NOT SKIP THIS! Paste that 8-digit value (e.g.: FECD26D9) after "0x" in the "crc" line of worldorder.grpinfo (e.g.: crc 0xFECD26D9), located in the "data" folder of your Raze dir. After you are done, save your edited grpinfo file.

Raze can identify files by content (see the records for Route66 or Cryptic Passage), so the same approach makes sense here. I think I'll add automatic detection for such a file to the core definitions because this is a lot more handy than that bloated original installation that wastes 1GB of disk space.

[NightFright]

That would surely simplify the process. Be sure to let me know once this is ready so I can adjust this package accordingly. The simpler it is for the user to get it working, the better. That tempering with the grpinfo file is something I had to add since whenever you create a zipfile, you end up with a different hash. Automatic file detection would put a swift end to this.

(Come to think of it now, I guess the distinction between World Tour and Atomic is kinda redundant if you just use the groupfile. Both contain ep.1-4 maps, so the slightly edited user.con I provided for Atomic should work with both. It's needed since WT user.con uses "maps" subdir for all episodes while groups alone won't support that, so the first four episodes won't load unless you change file paths.)

[Graf Zahl]

Like I said, you can set file detection to work by content as well so that you won't need the CRC - but I just added a record to handle this with the Atomic Edition GRP. Additionally, the skies are already internally defined, so the .def file isn't needed.

One issue remains: Setting this up for the WT .GRP as well may cause some issues if it is loaded from a full WT installation with add-on content added on top.
I have no good idea how I can set up dependencies for that without causing potential conflicts between the loose WT content in the folder and the add-ons and at the same time allow an installation that uses the .GRP as a standalone where add-on content would be fine.

[Dynamo]

The .grp I get is a mere 55 KB in size, surely that's not intended?

[Graf Zahl]

Surely not. this sounds like you selected the wrong directory and it didn't find the game data.

[Dynamo]

https://i.imgur.com/IECKifh.png

I just installed Duke3D 25th anniversary from steam immediately before launching this, and well, it doesn't work at all, not sure what's wrong here exactly, but the game directories are correct as I copy&pasted them.

EDIT: nevermind, seems I'm supposed to use the main steam directory, disregard this one.

[Graf Zahl]

It wants the Steam root as its input, not the WT directory. I think this should be changed, not everybody keeps their stuff under Steam supervision.

[Dynamo]

Works perfectly now, thanks for the help. One question: does this also work with EDuke32 and BuildGDX? Because if all I have to do is keep a .grp and .grpinfo file around everytime I want to play alien world order without ever having to install the bloated steam version again, that would be great.

[Graf Zahl]

With EDuke32 you still need the stopgap as it hasn't implemented native support yet. With GDX is should work, but you may have to rename the .def for the skyboxes.

[NightFright]

The def file, even though it's just for the 8-bit tiles, is still needed to stretch the sky images so they fill the entire height of the screen without tiling. I tried without the defs and it looked like the Polymost renderer in EDuke32 before Nuke.YKT's famous fix. It can probably be fixed through the engine as well somehow, eventually.

People that want to stick to their Atomic groupfile without having to live without WT content are the ideal target group for this script, but you may still just use it to have the new maps playable without the need of a bloated 900 MB installation. You should only use this really if you extracted duke3d.grp from your WT installation and you want to get rid of all the rest. Uninstalling WT after executing the script (and having salvaged duke3d.grp from your Steam installation) is normally the next thing you would be expected to do.

BTW, after playing through the entire episode, I gotta say the maps look pretty bland without the colored lights which work in the WT port and EDuke32's Polymer renderer. I assume right now Raze isn't able of reproducing these effects?

[Graf Zahl]

I changed the default sky offsetting for WT today because the offset value I initially chose chose apparently was not correct. The skies now align properly to the top.

About the lights, no, with Polymost that's not possible. Polymost mangles the geometry in such a way that you do not have the needed info to process them on the GPU.
Replicating Polymer lighting isn't the goal anyway - there surely will eventually be some lights but they'll look differently. But - where's the light definitions for WT? I can't find them. Are they in the EXE?

As for being "bland", they look just like the first 4 episodes in that regard - you just aren't used to it.

[NightFright]

I think ep.5 maps have the light effects embedded into their map data. That or it's hardcoded via the engine and Polymer is somehow able to tap into that. The original maps were also edited for WT to implement the new lighting. I am not an expert in this, but I know there are no explicit defs for EDuke32 to make colored lights work in AWO. The EDuke32 coding guys would certainly know more about it.

As for whether the lights work or not - maps are perfectly playable without them, but many areas have large surfaces with a single texture being used. Visually, there isn't going on too much in many cases. Lights help a lot to compensate this, but without them, this stuff looks a bit like some better community release from the early 2000s, at least IMHO.

Good to know the skies are fixed. I will remove the def from the package after the next official Raze release, then.

[Graf Zahl]

I don't think these maps look any more bland than the originals - but for me the first experience with them has been DukeGDX so there's nothing missing for me.
About the lights, I really have no idea. Looking at the maps in an editor reveals nothing - no sprite picnum that stands out as a sign for control items - there's also no data attached at the end of the files that may contain lighting info

[NightFright]

Then it might indeed be hardcoded. I know that EDuke32 added light definitions for maphacks to be used in Polymer, but the WT episode explicitly doesn't need them to make colored lights work. Gotta ask some folks over at the EDuke32 forums about it.

But well, good news is WT is generally fully playable until the very end, even the cutscene. That incinerator boss still sucks hard, though - but that's a fail of the designers.