Build Engine Poll!

Some random people may be playing Fresh Supply, ok, I'll give you that. But anyone who visits the steam forum, or any other forum, or any discord server, or any subreddit with ANY question about it gets an answer telling them to use another port.

The Spray Can is half-working in FS. And damage resistance is all wrong.

I don't regret buying it, though!

About Blood: Fresh Supply...
 

If you get it I hope you have the right video card or isn't playing on an old laptop, because if you get things wrong you'll get the problem shown in the video. I know I got that shit and switched to NBlood in a heartbeat. 

It can go both ways. My eight year old AMD GPU didn't handle NBloods legacy OpenGL renderer very well. Before FS mouselook was janky so I switched in a heartbeat when it came out. These days mouselook is more consistent across ports but AMD is still an issue.

4 hours ago, VGA said:

Some random people may be playing Fresh Supply, ok, I'll give you that. But anyone who visits the steam forum, or any other forum, or any discord server, or any subreddit with ANY question about it gets an answer telling them to use another port.

 

The Spray Can is half-working in FS. And damage resistance is all wrong.

 

I don't regret buying it, though!

No need to raise your pitchfork against these "random people". Everyone has their own preferences and needs, simple as that. No need for that kind of talk.

Also the Voodoo Doll is still insanely broken - it's basically unusable...

I really wanted to like FS, and I'm glad I supported NDS' efforts, but I am massively disappointed by the fact that they had to cut support so damn early and leave the game with many glitches. So, Raze all the way.

4 hours ago, [Vitz!] said:

If you get it I hope you have the right video card or isn't playing on an old laptop, because if you get things wrong you'll get the problem shown in the video. I know I got that shit and switched to NBlood in a heartbeat. 

This is usually sprung from a common misconception - that old games should, and must, run on toaster hardware.

But this isn't true, even more so in the case of FS - an old game running on a new engine, and not an old game running on an old engine, so naturally, if the hardware is too old (note that I said "old", not weak), it is only to be expected to run into such issues.

27 minutes ago, seed said:

But this isn't true, even more so in the case of FS - an old game running on a new engine, and not an old game running on an old engine, so naturally, if the hardware is too long (note that I said "old", not weak), it is only to be expected to run into such issues. 

Indeed, this is really one of the big misconceptions when dealing with old hardware.

I've ran into this with GZDoom multiple times, when trying to make it work better on current hardware.

Certain tweaks on the renderer over the last few years led to a 25% performance improvement on some maps - but these changes also caused major slowdowns on older hardware - one was due to using multithreading - got only one core and nothing of this will work, and the second one was about better using the capabilities of the shader hardware by passing less draw calls, but more triangles into the hardware - great for anything modern and semi-modern, but utterly disruptive for old integrated Intel hardware.

But in cases like this, you have to check where the real priorities are: When 80-90% of the users are running hardware that really benefits from the change and less than 5% are running hardware where it causes a performance regression - what's more important? Giving the majority something better or catering to a shrinking minorty and forfeiting the performance gain for the rest of the users?

18 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

what's more important? Giving the majority something better or catering to a shrinking minorty and forfeiting the performance gain for the rest of the users?

Trying to cater to everyone and end up with nothing ofc.

4 hours ago, seed said:

No need to raise your pitchfork against these "random people". Everyone has their own preferences and needs, simple as that. No need for that kind of talk.

I am just saying people install Fresh Supply because it is on Steam, it is not their fault. As soon as they get even slightly involved in the community, they get directed to a better port where the weapons work as they should and saving doesn't result in a stutterfest. 

Saying people play Fresh Supply is like saying people use Internet Explorer. :D

I still support NightDive, have bought Strife Veteran Edition, Fresh Supply, System Shock Enhanced and I intend to support them in the future, too!

14 hours ago, VGA said:

I am just saying people install Fresh Supply because it is on Steam, it is not their fault. As soon as they get even slightly involved in the community, they get directed to a better port where the weapons work as they should and saving doesn't result in a stutterfest. 

 

Saying people play Fresh Supply is like saying people use Internet Explorer. :D

 

I still support NightDive, have bought Strife Veteran Edition, Fresh Supply, System Shock Enhanced and I intend to support them in the future, too!

Oh god, don't remind me of the save bullshit... oddly saving from the menu was always fine, but quicksaving was slow as molasses...

FS still has its niceties, at least for now, such as DX11 and Vulkan renderers, but otherwise, yea, I agree: Fan ports that work correctly vs commercial products that lack polish and are buggier in addition to being less faithful? I'll always choose the first...

19 minutes ago, VGA said:

As soon as they get even slightly involved in the community, they get directed to a better port where the weapons work as they should and saving doesn't result in a stutterfest. 

 

Saying people play Fresh Supply is like saying people use Internet Explorer. :D

Who is to say what a good or bad source port is for everyone?

3 minutes ago, markanini said:

Who is to say what a good or bad source port is for everyone?

Well, in this case, the choice isn't that hard... Also some mods have or had issues with FS, such as DW.

@markanini

For the first couple of months I was trawling around the Fresh Supply steam forum and Discord. I am talking about my experiences interacting with the community and playing the port versus other ports. Just shoot a Fatso with the Spray Can and see how long it takes to burn him. Or shoot a bunch of zombies with it and realise it doesn't go through them and only hits the front one.

"But but but people can use whichever port they want, you are not a dictator!"

People can use whichever port they want but if they ask for help and information, I will explain which port is best in my opinion and how to solve their problems. 

Call me uneducated, but I'm personally fine with Fresh Supply, at least in its current state. At launch it was pretty rough and it could still use some more patching but I'm glad it got any post-game support at all, short-lived as it may have been. I can understand why people prefer nBlood, and I don't even necessarily disagree, but I'm fine with both.

What bothers me more is Atari (?) pulling the DOSBox version when Fresh Supply released.

Quick edit: I'll admit the reason I'm fine with Fresh Supply is probably that I don't remember most of the problems it had. I remember a couple standout problems, but I also remember them being fixed.

Blood tops it. DN3D below that with SW a bit below that.

I played through Redneck Rampage and the 2 sequels last year. They're annoying slogfests that are a chore to play, the food & booze mechanic that replaces armor is hard as hell to manage, your jump barely hops off the ground(sure it may be realistic, but it's useless), hitscan drift is so bad you can barely hit anything at a distance, the shotgun makes Doom 3's look good by comparison, having all keys the same color was bad design, the enemies are overpowered and the end level mechanic can easily be broken if you kill the NPC. The games also have no music if you don't use the CD and vocal pieces kind of distract from playing the game(it's also odd that they went with southern rock over country for a game centered around rednecks, but oh well). RRRA also had vehicle segments that were unpolished.

That said the level design is creative and unique(even if "road out of the area" segments could be added into some of the first game's maps- but Blood, DN3D and SW suffered from the same design oversight), there's a fair bit of detail, segments where you can blow up a gas station or a tornado destroys a trailer park show how impressive the Build engine could be, and the bowling minigame gets points for fully functioning. Oh and the TARDIS-like RV in RRRA being done in-engine without a separate loading zone shows one advantage of older game engines over new ones. I'd be surprised if there are more than a couple modern games that can do that trick.

It would be a better game with modding- I know BuildGDX colors the keys(but not the doors) but it needs a lot more. I don't think the source code was ever released and probably never will be. I would assume SOMEONE owns the games now since they're on GOG and Steam but they may not even have the code on hand from obtaining the Xatrix back catalog(Interplay was the publisher and likely didn't have it, either). I believe the source ports work by modding a DN3D port, and BuildGDX did feel like it had its issues as a result.

But as it is I don't think I'd replay them for several years.

5 hours ago, VGA said:

@markanini

 

For the first couple of months I was trawling around the Fresh Supply steam forum and Discord. I am talking about my experiences interacting with the community and playing the port versus other ports. Just shoot a Fatso with the Spray Can and see how long it takes to burn him. Or shoot a bunch of zombies with it and realise it doesn't go through them and only hits the front one.

 

"But but but people can use whichever port they want, you are not a dictator!"

 

People can use whichever port they want but if they ask for help and information, I will explain which port is best in my opinion and how to solve their problems. 

 

One hard nitpick I had with Fresh Supply was that the color palette really messes up hard on any GPU that is "too old" and Nightdive said they wouldn't fix it. The game came out in 1997. It shouldn't need a PC that can run Skyrim at max settings to display properly even with a source port. Though it's a miracle they did fix any bugs at all, or even made the port, considering how trash WB has treated the game since they bought the rights. At this point there's no excuse for Caleb not to be in Mortal Kombat, they wouldn't need any licensing to make it happen either(Erron Black is almost a Caleb ripoff), but someone at WB seems to have contempt for the game.

53 minutes ago, diosoth said:

One hard nitpick I had with Fresh Supply was that the color palette really messes up hard on any GPU that is "too old" and Nightdive said they wouldn't fix it.

Not won't, can't. The GPU that exhibits this issue is a specific selection of legacy ATI GPUs (IIRC?) and Intel iGPUs, which we cannot acquire and do not have any modern driver support, which makes it impossible to adequately perform any support for because we'd be attempting to fix what appears to be a shader flop precision issue completely blind without it.

It's the paradox of graphics rendering, the older the system you are trying to support, the newer and more complex techniques you need to adequate handle the gap in functionality. Skyrim is comparably more straightforward because it was already designed to render in 32bit colour space and normal polygon rendering, thus less likely to exhibit any odd issues, the functionality is already there.

4 hours ago, diosoth said:

 

One hard nitpick I had with Fresh Supply was that the color palette really messes up hard on any GPU that is "too old" and Nightdive said they wouldn't fix it. The game came out in 1997. It shouldn't need a PC that can run Skyrim at max settings to display properly even with a source port. Though it's a miracle they did fix any bugs at all, or even made the port, considering how trash WB has treated the game since they bought the rights. At this point there's no excuse for Caleb not to be in Mortal Kombat, they wouldn't need any licensing to make it happen either(Erron Black is almost a Caleb ripoff), but someone at WB seems to have contempt for the game. 

Sigh...

How often do we hear this stuff? Here's reality: The internal workings of these old games is so alien to GPU acceleration that in order to display them correctly you basically require modern hardware. It is entirely impossible to replicate the original lighting with anything below OpenGL 3 / DX10 hardware. GL 2 nominally has shaders, but trying to do complex math with them on this old hardware will kill all your performance. Trying to do palette lookups with such hardware runs into precision issues. When ZDoom was still using D3D to present the software renderer's output there was quite a bit of palette fudging going on to ensure that it picked the correct indices - because, you may gues, some hardware's floating point units were too imprecise.

So, the only way to be efficient here is doing all rendering in 32 bit with generic lighting and depth fading - FS obviously chose not to implement such an option - so it falls victim to the quirks of the poor shader support on this hardware.

So, the inevitable conclusion is: If you got hardware that does not support OpenGL 3.3 or equivalent DirectX features, you are not equipped to run hardware accelerated ports of these old 2.5 D games properly. To support the lighting features of these games you need a decent hardware feature set - a feature set that has been available since 2006/2007 but unfortunately Intel has seriously dropped this ball and was 5 years late to the party.

10 hours ago, VGA said:

For the first couple of months I was trawling around the Fresh Supply steam forum and Discord. I am talking about my experiences interacting with the community and playing the port versus other ports.

So did I, I wanted the inside scoop. Turned out the majority of bugs were present in the original, the rest had to do with toaster systems. I lost respect for the loud complainers pretty fast because they didn't even own the game. OTOH who ever complained about stuttering or mouse look issue on other ports got shut down or called an idiot.

5 hours ago, diosoth said:

One hard nitpick I had with Fresh Supply was that the color palette really messes up hard on any GPU that is "too old" and Nightdive said they wouldn't fix it.

Steam requirements are:

Quote

GPU with OpenGL 3.2 or DirectX 10 support (256 MB)

And there is this warning:

Quote

Additional Notes: Intel CPUs rendering graphics may not be OpenGL 3.2+ compatible.

Which GPU did you have a problem with?

@markanini

Whoever complained about vsync not working and bad frame pacing in other ports was correct! I hope Raze is the ultimate solution to that.

On a separate note, talking about Build games not mentioned in the poll, I've always found Powerslave to be closer/more similar to Doom than other titles, except it feels much darker to me for some reason. As a matter of fact, I would name PS among the very few actual "Doom clones" in the narrow sense of the word, that is having similar mechanics, pace and engine capabilities (as opposed to a relatively large number of 2.5D FPSs from the era that barely surpassed Wolf3D engine-wise -- 90 degree walls and stuff).

Granted, the level design philosophy in PS is markedly different from that of Doom, not only because of the Ancient Egyptian theme with aliens mixed in, but also due to the console-type checkpoint progression system. Yet most of the weapons, monsters and items would feel very much at home in Doom levels. For example, the Magmantis monster -- a huge centipede-like creature that pops out of lava pools and hurls fireballs at the player -- would probably make a neat addition to E3.

I never used Fresh Supply. I'm just aware of the palette issues, which neither BuildGDX nor NBlood suffer so it seemed rather strange that the official port endured it- nor would I have bothered anyway as I already had a copy of the game with several options to run it(DOSbox with BMouse setup has been my default, and 2 decent enough free source ports I can pick from) and I'm not picky about "100% accuracy" like I'll notice many of the tiny nitpicky things anyway. It's only the game-breaking bugs I'm likely to worry about.

My onboard is the Intel GMA X4500 which I would 99% assume is not compatible, either. I would guess the GTX 750 Ti SC I'm running now is more than capable(it can run Skyrim at max) but, again, I own a copy of the game, I'm not going to buy another copy to test.

I'm perfectly aware Microsoft & hardware manufacturers don't much care if old programs can run. A 64-bit OS can't run 16-bit natively(DOSbox can bypass this in some cases), not that they couldn't make it work if they wanted, but they have no incentive to. Us playing old games or programs that we've had on hand for 20+ years or bought used on eBay don't make them a dime. Selling official new source ports does make them money.

6 hours ago, diosoth said:

One hard nitpick I had with Fresh Supply was that the color palette really messes up hard on any GPU that is "too old" and Nightdive said they wouldn't fix it. The game came out in 1997. It shouldn't need a PC that can run Skyrim at max settings to display properly even with a source port. Though it's a miracle they did fix any bugs at all, or even made the port, considering how trash WB has treated the game since they bought the rights. At this point there's no excuse for Caleb not to be in Mortal Kombat, they wouldn't need any licensing to make it happen either(Erron Black is almost a Caleb ripoff), but someone at WB seems to have contempt for the game.

I'm thinking more of a Clint Eastwood kind of ripoff, as Caleb is also inspired by him...

11 hours ago, Pokemanic33 said:

Call me uneducated, but I'm personally fine with Fresh Supply, at least in its current state. At launch it was pretty rough and it could still use some more patching but I'm glad it got any post-game support at all, short-lived as it may have been. I can understand why people prefer nBlood, and I don't even necessarily disagree, but I'm fine with both.

 

What bothers me more is Atari (?) pulling the DOSBox version when Fresh Supply released.

If you play in any fan ports, or even DOSBox, you'll immediately notice that some things are either different or broken, for instance: Spray Can's damage is highly inconsistent, Voodoo Doll is broken, Tommy Gun is too accurate while simultaneously being useless underwater, and so on - VGA also provided some examples.

I'm glad it got some pretty big patches, but honestly considering its situation at launch it absolutely needed them, it was going to be very poorly received otherwise. But the point still stands, support was dropped too early. It should've gotten 2 more big patches at least. Apart from these issues, I've been hearing that MP is extremely glitchy, but since I don't care about MP in the slightest I never bothered to see things for myself.

Also, DOS OUWB was not taken down immediately, which is pretty curious. Someone told me it was taken down around September/October, and that was well after FS' initial release.

5 minutes ago, diosoth said:

I'm just aware of the palette issues, which neither BuildGDX

GDX didn't even have palette emulation until recently, by the way. It was there since day 1 in NBlood though.

10 minutes ago, diosoth said:

My onboard is the Intel GMA X4500 which I would 99% assume is not compatible, either. I would guess the GTX 750 Ti SC I'm running now is more than capable(it can run Skyrim at max) but, again, I own a copy of the game, I'm not going to buy another copy to test.

https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-750-ti/specifications

Seems to be mighty fine. But comparing it with Skyrim is not a good idea, because you're comparing two games that work very differently.

@MrFlibble The problem with Powerslave is that people acknowledge its PSX/Saturn port more, which uses the custom SlaveDriver engine, instead of its initial PC release using the Build engine (which is version 5, rendering it unmoddable within the Big 3's Build editors).

The fact that it does not have in-game saves (you can only load at the beginning of the last level you saved your game at) and hi-res mode similar to the Big 3 also contributes to that.

6 minutes ago, diosoth said:

I'm not picky about "100% accuracy" like I'll notice many of the tiny nitpicky things anyway. It's only the game-breaking bugs I'm likely to worry about.

I am not either. Fresh Supply's problems are not about nitpicking or going for 100% accuracy.

Let me explain, there are some gameplay staples in Blood, for example, using the Spray Can to efficiently burn a mob of zombies (it goes through them and burns them). Another standard thing in Blood is to burn Fatsos safely by crouching near them and using the Spray Can, they burn very fast. It takes too much ammo to shoot them.

When I was doing these things in FS they were not effective, the Spray Can only hit the zombie in the front and I was getting cornered and taking damage! And it takes a long time a lots of Spray Can ammo to kill a single Fatso.

This isn't nitpicking, this is like if in Doom you had a port that made the SSG not go through enemies properly. For example if you shot a low-health Imp, the remaining shots did not go through it to hit the monsters behind it and the whole SSG shot was absorbed by the imp. Sorry, that's unacceptable, even though you can still play the game and have fun.

7 hours ago, taufan99 said:

@MrFlibble initial PC release using the Build engine (which is version 5, rendering it unmoddable within the Big 3's Build editors).

The fact that it does not have in-game saves (you can only load at the beginning of the last level you saved your game at) and hi-res mode similar to the Big 3 also contributes to that.

Well, these concerns can be put aside now that there's the PCExhumed port (and before that, CTPAX-Cheater's utilities that allowed to run the game in higher res and added some other QOL things). Also PS turned out to be not that unmoddable, with a short community add-on recently released.

5 minutes ago, MrFlibble said:

Well, these concerns can be put aside now that there's the PCExhumed port (and before that, CTPAX-Cheater's utilities that allowed to run the game in higher res and added some other QOL things). Also PS turned out to be not that unmoddable, with a short community add-on recently released.

Raze also supports Exhumed ;) 

Once it gets fixed, of course. ;)

Currently the focus lies elsewhere - the one important thing I added  is proper savegame handling, though. That part really bothered me to no end.

8 hours ago, VGA said:

I am not either. Fresh Supply's problems are not about nitpicking or going for 100% accuracy.

 

Let me explain, there are some gameplay staples in Blood, for example, using the Spray Can to efficiently burn a mob of zombies (it goes through them and burns them). Another standard thing in Blood is to burn Fatsos safely by crouching near them and using the Spray Can, they burn very fast. It takes too much ammo to shoot them.

 

When I was doing these things in FS they were not effective, the Spray Can only hit the zombie in the front and I was getting cornered and taking damage! And it takes a long time a lots of Spray Can ammo to kill a single Fatso.

 

This isn't nitpicking, this is like if in Doom you had a port that made the SSG not go through enemies properly. For example if you shot a low-health Imp, the remaining shots did not go through it to hit the monsters behind it and the whole SSG shot was absorbed by the imp. Sorry, that's unacceptable, even though you can still play the game and have fun.

If only all systems could run all ports equally well. I ended up adapting my strats for FS for a while. The thing I missed the most was flares no longer blocking a gargoyles melee attack. FS brought a few good things to the table, the new collision code made dynamite throwing much more satisfying. In the original near perfect hits would often not register at all. And the scripting capabilities made it possible to fix enemies flying around erratically. Basically FS isn't that bad, focusing on the negatives makes you miss the positives, stuff that the community could capitalize on, and that's a losing proposition.