This area of my site provides a complete listing of commercially designed games based on the BUILD Engine. Including Early Designs; Alphas and Betas, plus shareware (demo) provided here for completeness.

BUILD BASED GAME PAGES

LIST OF COMMERCIALLY RELEASED GAMES | LIST OF DEMOS AND RETAIL PATCHES

BUILD GAMES SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

BUILD BASED GAMES PAGES
The list below are RTCM's pages dedicated to each game. The pages linked will explain what the game is, details and notes. You'll find some of these pages provide graphical displays and moving animation. Note: 'Level CDs' are listed on some of the game pages. They are typically circa 1996/97 and are maps that where taken from the Internet (or other online type services) and are nothing hard to find today as most of those maps are still available online.

A display of commercial BUILD products. Some Items may or may not still be available, produced, not available from the original distributor. /!\ Attention: These are all DOS products. They will run on Win95, 98 and ME systems in a WinDOSBox with special configuration. Since those WindowsOS versions are on DOS. You also can run them under DOS directly. Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Win7 users will also need special configurations and software, which are available for free to run them.

• BUILD Based Games : Index
  Games Covered - Contains Information about the game. Details and Review.

   

All games based directly off of 3DRealms code are compatible and are closest in design to each other. Some teams have coded their own game and may contain enhanced performance and features, such as 3D Depth Sound, Windows Frontends and Enhanced CON's just for a small example, read on for more details.

There is some confusion on which part of the game that supplies these features. In hopes to clarify this I'll explain further.

BUILD Engine: This is NOT the Map Editor. This is the engine responsible for many of the features incorporated in the game. If a similar feature is present in separate build game, it maybe coded in the Game Engine or added to the BUILD Engine as an extension.

Game Engine: Some of the Game Engines are coded more advanced then the BUILD Engine or other Game Engines. Sometimes it supplies mapable features for the Map Editor.  Most of the advanced or enhanced features found in Blood and Shadow Warrior are coded in the Game Engine NOT the BUILD Engine.

Map Editor: This is the program that allows you to edit maps using what the Game and/or BUILD engine supply. Some Map Editors have enhanced features that the Game Engine can not display.

Here is a compiled list of features that the BUILD Engine and Game Engines can produce. This list shows Duke3D features, other games if they contain a different method or advanced version of a BUILD/Game Engine function, this information is available in bold brackets: [#other build games info] The following Engines are not included at this time: (EDuke, JFDuke, JFSW or EDuke32 or their related editors).

BUILD ENGINE Features:

• Sector based.
• A 2.5D aspect engine (perspective shifting); Detailed 3D worlds with any height, thickness or angle walls.
  {Two dimensional (2D) game that is tweaked to appear 3D. The engine contains perspective warping which limits its ability to look straight up, straight down, and in virtually any direction with graphic clarity as a true 3D game engine.} 4.5 D.O.F. (Depth of Field), looking up/down is done via shearing (stretching the screen vertically) in Y. About 40 degrees up and down.
• Moving vehicles (restricted on "tracks" in duke3d)
• Moving sectors (Doors to swing open, staircases to move and floors that move like a treadmill,) The floors and ceiling can crush you or be used as elevators to reach higher areas.
• Morphing environment; Walls can move at will. Entire rooms can be changed into new structures, or any areas of the map, can morph in to larger or smaller areas, crushing you or other effects. Special effects can be created such as True hinged swinging doors that have thickness.
• Sloped/Slanted floors and ceilings. (Math co-processor used due to a lack of free general purpose registers.)
• 2D overhead in game map mode (non-texturized / texturized modes)
• Sprite Based, Capable of Full 3D; 3D Sprite capable without a Voxel engine present.
  [#Shadow Warrior has True Voxel objects for three-dimensional "sprites". Shadow Warrior can have Voxels on walls, Shadow Warrior can have dynamic Voxels, one replaces the other]
  [#Blood has True Voxel objects for three-dimensional "sprites", Blood can have Voxels on walls but they are not dynamic like SW, where one replaces the other]
• Rotating sprites
• Translucent sprites (for ghosts, explosions, windows, masked walls etc.)
• "Wall" and "floor" - wall aligned flattened sprites
• Reflective floors. (Simulated in duke3d)
  [#Lameduke and Ken-BUILD Use "True Reflective" floors]
• Stacked sectors would be a 50-50 effort on the BUILD Engine and Game Engine programming side of things.
• Ability to JUMP over things, DUCK shots or other hazards and CRAWL around the realistic 3D environment.
• Animated environment - Any surface can animate. Walls, ceilings, floors.
• Mirrors. (built by building extended rooms behind the mirrors.)
  [#Ken-Build uses True Mirrors where the extended rooms are not required]
• Multicolored lighting assigned with palette values; Lighting effects like: Strobing, flickering, fading, total darkness and more!
• Parallaxing backdrops up to 1024 pixels wide!
• Fully texture mapped environment (walls, ceilings and floors)
• Screen size can be changed during game; speeds up game for slower computers.
• Light sourcing creates pools of light from windows or any other light source. (simulated with shading)
• Fog (Simulated in duke3d)
  "Black" Fog (Controllable Visual depth); Up to 64 levels of light diminishing in the distance. (Duke3D and games based on it where reduced to 32 levels, The reason is that at one time, Duke3D had 64 shades in their "palookup" table. Then when they noticed that this extra memory used by 64 shades increased overhead and slowed down the frame rate of the game noticeably)
• SVGA support (Pentiums); High-resolution VESA 2.0 mode (page flipping or bank switching/Vesa 1.2) up to 1600 x 1200; with a frame rate that is not limited to 35 frames per second; 20+ frames per second on a 486/50 (without local bus!). A 486/66 with local bus can get frame rates of 38-40 frames per second! [#Blood and Shadow Warrior require a more powerful system]
  Game can run in unusual chained modes (Mode-X)(Ex: 360*240)
• Modem and Network play! (Synchronized only) You can link up and play against your best friend or enemy! Custom Commit Driver; IPX , Serial w/null modem.

GAME ENGINE Features:

• User-modifiable parameters (CONs in duke3d and a few other Build Games)
  [#WWII GI has new weapon R.O.F. and User definable Variables in CON]
  [#NAM and WWII GI use the pipebomb as a grenade, timer CON coded]
• Duke3D Atomic: A.I Bots (added in plutonium pak) (Ken-Bots)
  [#WWIIGI has Friendly Bots, hardcode and con coded]
• [#WWIIGI uses a new Morale System]
• Full sound card support (including Gravis Ultrasound/GUS, PAS 16, Roland, Adlib/OPL2 FM, Sound Blaster, AWE32 etc... including General Midi/Midi Support)
  Full 8 channel stereo sound effects.
  [#Blood has 3-D Depth sound]
• [#Blood and Powerslave have have their own physics engine]
• [#Powerslave has spawning rubble walls, non blocking]
• Game supports different glasses/Headgear
  (stereoscopic modes: Red-blue pseudo 3D effect/Crystal Eyes virtual reality/Nuvision)
• [#Blood has moving sectors that can be made to rotate, incline, and move in numerous other ways]
• Head canting, clockwise and counterclockwise, 360 degrees used with headgear type of virtual viewing.
• 2.75D Game; Overlapping sectors; Rooms above rooms (Simulated in duke3d with unseen teleporters), Bridges (Simulated in duke3d with laying down sprites).
  SoS is "Sector over Sector" where you cannot see both sectors at the same time or it will produce the hall of mirrors (HOM) effect.
• [#Blood, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, Witchaven, Tekwar and Powerslave have stacked sectors/room-over-room (ROR) effects at game load. Allows you to move between multiple floors WITHIN a single level.]
  RoR is "Room over Room" as done in SW by using sector effects and you could look into the different floors. It is used for transparent water. It is much easier to make ROR for Blood with a few clicks.
  [#Blood leaves the sectors where they where mapped in the editor at map load. ("separated")]
  [#Shadow Warrior moved the sectors over each other at map load. (combined)]
  [#Redneck Rampage leaves the sectors where they where mapped in the editor at map load. ("separated")]
  [#Witchaven moved the sectors over each other at map load. (combined)]
  [#TekWar moved the sectors over each other at map load. (combined)]
  [#Powerslave moved the sectors over each other at map load. (combined)]
• [#Shadow Warrior has sectors with health points]
• Duke3D ATOMIC: Autosizing sprites and support for the new effects like rain
• Duke Nukem actually can FLY around his 3D world with a jetpack!
  [#Shadow Warrior has a "jetpack"-like cheat mode. You enter god mode and press J, the player will levitate and can then be controlled like a jetpack.]
  [#Witchaven1 and II has a "fly" spell that allows you to go up or down, forward and back.]
• [#Powerslave has simulated dynamic light, either by brighten the texture]
• Environment can be destroyed (Exploding walls, Breaking glass and objects)
  [#Witchaven has some destroyable objects, Witchaven II has breakable glass.]
• Underwater swimming
• [#Powerslave has replenish able underwater air]
• [#Blood has and option for Fog, Fog effects, depth cueing]
• Real-time shadows on the floor.
• [#Witchaven II has reflective water, it ripples the reflected object.]
• [#Shadow Warrior has free-movement vehicles, restricted to one sector]
• [#Redneck Rampage RA has free roaming Vehicles, sprite based HUD with different 'physics' for the player character]
• [#Redneck Rampage has mirrors withOUT extended rooms behind]
• [#Redneck Rampage has muddy surfaces that slow player movement]
• [#Redneck Rampage uses non-crushing doors]
• [#Blood has a mappers options for non-crushing doors]

MAP EDITOR Features:

• Map Editors are in full 3D mode, FOV (Field Of View) Change between "3D" and 2D "Top" , changes on the fly
• Limits not set- A popular editing feature. The Maximum Limits not set in the game and tools allows us to modify the Build Games further, to trick it and to exploit editor bugs. These quirks are daily designed into Maps and Mods as workable features.
• Sector Effectors (reserved sprites) are tagged with a numerical value to allow the Engine to dynamically change.
• [#Blood's mapedit has pulldown menus to set map parameters]

• ...and more...

Title: Rock'n Shaolin: Legend of Seven Paladins 3D Version: v1.0 (1994) Author: Accend Inc (Taiwanese) / TWIM (Korean) Distributor: Accend Inc / SKC Media: CD-ROM