 Looking down in the Duke Nukem 3D level Raw Meat, notice the lines of the walls are perfectly vertical. The Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like Doom, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites to populate the world geometry with objects. It is generally considered to be a 2.5D engine as the basic world geometry is two-dimensional with an added height component as each sector may have a different ceiling and floor height, and the ceiling and floor may be angled along one line of the sector. The engine renders the world in a way that looks three-dimensional. However the sizing for perspective only depends on the horizontal distance (most noticeable as the fact that wall vertices are always straight vertical lines on screen). This can cause noticeable distortion when looking up and down and so most Build games restrict this to a fairly limited range of angles. Image File history File links Rawmeat_classic. ...
Image File history File links Rawmeat_classic. ...
Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens...
Doom, one of the games that defined the first-person shooter genre. ...
A game engine is the core software component of a video game. ...
He invented the Build Engine Ken Silverman (born November 1, 1975) is a jewish game programmer best known for writing the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s. ...
Corporate logo of 3D Realms 3D Realms is a computer game publisher and developer based in Garland, Texas, United States. ...
Doom (or DOOM)[1] is a 1993 computer game by id Software that is among the landmark titles in the first-person shooter genre. ...
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. ...
2. ...
The rewrite of this article is being devised at Talk:3D computer graphics/Temp. ...
Technical features
Sectors The Build engine allowed for more complex and flexible worlds than Doom by virtue of its representation of the world information. Sectors could be manipulated in real-time; their shape, heights, and slope angles being completely variable, without requiring recalculation of rendering information. Doom (or DOOM)[1] is a 1993 computer game by id Software that is among the landmark titles in the first-person shooter genre. ...
Developers of games based on the engine used reserved sprites, often called sector effectors, that when given special tags (numbers with defined meanings), would allow the level designer to make a dynamic world that appeared to be 3D. Similar tag information could be given to the sector walls and floor area to give a sector special characteristics. For example, a particular sector effector may let a player fall through the floor if he walked over it and teleport him to another sector. In practice, this could be used to create the effect of falling down a hole to a bigger room or creating a body of water that could be jumped into to explore underwater. A sector could be given a tag that made it behave like a simple elevator or lift. Sectors could overlap one another provided they could not be seen at the same time (if two overlapping sectors were seen at the same time a corrupted display resulted). This allowed the designers to create, for instance, air ducts that appeared to extend across the top of another room (however doing so could be tricky for designers due to the 2D viewpoint used for much of the editing process). More interestingly, this allowed the designer to create worlds that would be physically impossible (e.g. a door way of a small building could lead into a network of rooms that was larger than the building itself). While all these things made the game appear to be 3D, it wouldn't be until later first-person shooters, like Quake, that the engine actually stored the world geometry as true 3D information. Doom, one of the games that defined the first-person shooter genre. ...
Zombies attacking the player. ...
Voxels Later versions of Ken's Build engine allowed game selected art tiles to be replaced by 3D objects made of voxels. This feature appeared too late to be used in Duke Nukem 3D but was seen in several of the later Build engine games. Blood uses voxels for weapon and ammo pickups, powerups, and occasionally eye-candy (such as the tombstones in the Cradle to Grave level). Shadow Warrior makes even more advanced use of the technology, with voxels that can be placed on walls (all of the game's switches and buttons are voxels) and even a rudimentary 3D enemy mode that can be toggled via the F5 key, and replaces all of the game's enemy sprites with voxels. This is extremely buggy, and seems to be little more than an unfinished test mode. A voxel (a portmanteau of the words volumetric and pixel) is a volume element, representing a value in three dimensional space. ...
Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
It has been suggested that Lo Wang be merged into this article or section. ...
For several years Ken has been working on a modern engine based entirely on voxels, known as Voxlap. Ken Silverman (born November 1, 1975) is a game programmer best known for writing the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s. ...
Room over room Several Build engine games used a trick involving rendering multiple times to draw two sectors that were joined floor to ceiling. As building the sectors over top of each other was not really feasible due to limitations of the editor, the sectors could either be moved at map load time (which made calculations during the game simpler), or left where they were. The two best known games to use this trick were Shadow Warrior (which moved the sectors at map load time) and Blood (which did not). This trick was not a feature of the Build engine but rather a trick that was discovered by game developers.
Build engine games
 Duke Nukem 3D is the most famous game that used the Build engine. Though the Build engine achieved most of its fame as a result of powering the classic first person shooter Duke Nukem 3D, it was used for many other games. Duke Nukem 3d screenshot This work is copyrighted. ...
Duke Nukem 3d screenshot This work is copyrighted. ...
Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens...
Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens...
- Games that were built directly on the Build engine.
- Games that were based on the Duke Nukem 3D code
- Unreleased Build games
- Legend of the Seven Paladins (completed but never released, used the Build engine illegally)
- Fate (not completed, only a demo exists)
- Corridor 8: Galactic Wars (never released, source code available)
- Eradicator 2: Death in Transgression (in production)
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens...
Powerslave is a First-person shooter, developed by Lobotomy Software and published by Playmates Interactive Entertainment. ...
It has been suggested that Lo Wang be merged into this article or section. ...
It has been suggested that William Shatner SciFi DVD of the Month Club be merged into this article or section. ...
TekWar is the title of a series of science fiction novels by William Shatner which gave rise to a TV series and short series of TV movies in which Shatner also appeared. ...
Witchaven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance (full name) is the sequel to Witchaven which was released in 1996 by Capstone Software and used Duke Nukem 3D Build engine. ...
Extreme Paintbrawl is a paintball videogame released the PC on October 20, 1998. ...
NAM stands for: National Association of Manufacturers Non-Aligned Movement Number Assignment Module Network Analysis Module National Assembly Member, a member of the National Assembly of The Gambia. ...
Redneck Rampage is a 1997 first-person shooter game designed by Xatrix Entertainment and published by Interplay. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
Corridor 8 aka Corridor 8: Galactic Wars was the planned sequel to Corridor 7. ...
Source release and further developments On the June 20, 2000 (according to his website) Ken released the Build engine source code. June 20 is the 171st day of the year (172nd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 194 days remaining. ...
Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ...
The early days A few total conversion teams for Build games decided to work from Ken's Build code directly and the Matt saettler's Eduke project (which had already sent 2.0 to 3D realms for packaging) started moving towards using Ken's released Build code but the project made no further public releases until the source releases after the source release of Duke 3D. It was claimed at the time by many on the 3D Realms forums that it would be impossible to port Build to a multitasking OS as it needed a large contiguous block of memory that wouldn't be available in a multi tasking environment (the people who claimed this did not appear to realize how virtual memory works). An enhanced version of the Build editor known as mapster was also developed. A total conversion, in the computer gaming sense, is a mod (short for modification) of an existing game that replaces 100% of the artistic assets in the original game, as well as a good deal of the gameplay. ...
The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage. ...
Mapster is an enhanced version of the Build editor (the map editor for games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc. ...
The ICCULUS port Ryan C. Gordon (ICCULUS) made the first port of the engine using SDL. The port was first to Linux, then to Cygwin and finally to a native Windows build using the Watcom C++ compiler, which was the compiler used for the original DOS build (despite being compiled with Watcom C++, Build is plain C). There was some talk of Matt Saettler using this to port Eduke to Windows but nothing came of this. Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library that creates an abstraction over various platforms graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, BeOS, FreeBSD...
Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating system. ...
Cygwin is a collection of free software tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to allow various versions of Microsoft Windows to act somewhat like a Unix system. ...
Watcom International Corporation was founded in 1981 from the research of the Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. ...
The JonoF port A second port was made to Windows and later Linux by Jonathon Fowler (JonoF). Unlike the icculus port, this used DirectDraw rather than SDL on Windows and so was generally faster. However it didn't have network game support until much later and when network support finally did arrive for a long time it only worked with two players. DirectDraw is part of Microsofts DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to render graphics in applications where top performance is important. ...
The Duke Nukem 3D source release On the April 1, 2003 3D Realms released the source code to Duke 3D after years of saying it would never happen. Not long afterwards both Icculus and JonoF had ports made. It was now possible to play Duke Nukem 3D well on the NT line of Windows (including Windows 2000/XP) and interest in the ports soared. April 1 is the 91st day of the year (92nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 274 days remaining. ...
Polymost
 Looking down in the Duke Nukem 3D level Raw Meat in polymost mode, the true 3D perspective is apparent. Note that the corners of the walls are no longer exactly vertical. The task of updating the Build engine to a true 3D renderer was taken on by the author of the engine. In the release notes for JFDuke3D, Silverman writes: Image File history File links Rawmeat_polymost. ...
Image File history File links Rawmeat_polymost. ...
When 3D Realms released the Duke Nukem 3D source code, I thought somebody would do a OpenGL or Direct3D port. Well, after a few months passed, I saw no sign of somebody working on a true hardware-accelerated port of Build, just people saying it wasn't possible. Eventually, I realized the only way this was going to happen was for me to do it myself. The Polymost renderer allows for 3D hardware accelerated graphics using OpenGL. It also introduced "hightile," a feature that made it possible to replace the game's original textures with high-resolution replacements in a variety of formats. OpenGL official logo OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). ...
Polymost has been utilized in Jonothan Fowler's JFBuild, JFDuke3D, JFSW, and ports derived from their codebases. It also plans on being featured in Eradicator 2: Death in Transgression.
Other ports Source for the last private beta of Eduke 2.1 (which never made it to a release version) was released soon after the Duke Nukem 3D source. There was a port of this based on the ICCULUS code known as wineduke but those working on it became frustrated with bugs introduced by Matt Saettler as a result of inadeqate testing during the eduke 2.1 development process.
Source for Eduke 2.0 was also released but this took a lot longer due to issues in making Matt Saettlers archived source for it compile. TerminX merged this with the JonoF port of Duke Nukem 3D and many features from eduke 2.1 and various other eduke branches to make Eduke32. wineduke has since died off leaving Eduke32 the only Eduke port still in development.
Eduke contained the code from Nam and WW2 GI so these could probably be made to work with it without too much effort but there does not seem to be any projects that do so currently. There has also been the Transfusion project which aimed to re-create Blood but as of 2005 this is far from complete. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Shadow Warrior source was released on April 1, 2005. And JonoF released a port of it on April 2, 2005. However he admitted that he had access to the Shadow Warrior source about a week before its release. It has been suggested that Lo Wang be merged into this article or section. ...
April 1 is the 91st day of the year (92nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 274 days remaining. ...
April 2 is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 273 days remaining. ...
The source code of Witchaven, Witchaven II, Tekwar and Corridor 8 are also released. The legal status of these releases is however somewhat unclear. Witchaven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...
Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance (full name) is the sequel to Witchaven which was released in 1996 by Capstone Software and used Duke Nukem 3D Build engine. ...
TekWar is the title of a series of science fiction novels by William Shatner which gave rise to a TV series and short series of TV movies in which Shatner also appeared. ...
Corridor 8 aka Corridor 8: Galactic Wars was the planned sequel to Corridor 7. ...
The videogame Eradicator 2: Death in Transgression is currently under development by 3dfx Development and also uses a variant of the JFBuild technology. This is considered the last game for the aged engine. The games developers are currently at-work with the project, but the legal status is still unclear. It is the sequel to the Accolade shooter Eradicator. Look up accolade in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
BuildFX This is new technology, based off of the original Build engine, being built by 3dfx Development for Eradicator 2: Death in Transgression. It currently remains to be seen if this is actual full-featured technology. Based off of the JFBuild port.
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