History
Survival is based on a pen, paper and dice game I made myself where you must build bases in a post apocalyptic world. You rolled on a 'discovery' chart every few minutes, and you could find a number of things. One of them was a Junkyard - in Junkyards you could roll on a chart to see what you found (If you rolled a 12 you could have any reasonible item you wanted) There was very little point to it as there was no end, but I found it very entertaining building my own base with inventions made out of wood and the like. At some point I decided to try and create a Duke Nukem Survival mod, and so Survival for Eduke began.Survival Version 1
Survival began development at around 2000-2001. At this time it was just myself, and I was using Eduke version 2. With Survival I was hoping to use art completely by myself, although the enemies were from a game called 'Domination' The weapon 'models' were made with Bryce.
As you can see the textures were very simple, however I was proud of it (and still am to an extent) that I managed to make a level using almost just my own resources. At that point I had managed to code in Footstep sounds for different surfaces (It was extremely primitive) which I had believed was the first TC to do so (However, later I found out TerminX's 'Project X' had beaten me to it) It also had some basic scripted sequences, and conversations with NPCS. There was also a very basic 'invention' system - in your home base was a building where you could go and build stuff depending on the blueprints you currently hold. Despite being old I like to think I coded some innovative things in it. Truthfully, this version of Survival really was closest to the original game I had developed. However, since I was the only person who played it I don't think anybody cares that I deviated from the source so much ;)
Survival Version 2
It was at around 2004 that I decided to pick up work on Survival again, when TerminX's Eduke32 was released. I decided to scrap what I had and start from new, and I decided to make a Hi-tile only game (Eduke32 is based on Jonof's Duke Nukem port, which has a OpenGl mode for Duke developed by Ken Silverman, the man behind the original Build engine. Support for High res textures was eventually added to this mode) The basic plot was changed - In Survival V1, the basic plot was that you had to fight against the Mutants, Monsters and aliens called 'Pitfiends' (Who featured in IW) In Survival v2, this plot was changed and your 'mission' was to travel to the spaceship which had crashed on Earth and destroy it's Reactor before it went critical and spread super radiation across the Galaxy (Crazy yes, but realism has never been my aim when it comes to story) This time, I decided that it would be crazy working on a large TC myself as I often have a 'problem' of aiming too high. It was due to this that I asked Geoffrey, Quakis and Rusty_Nails to assist me with mapping. Eventually I had coded in a 'base' with some weapons and we all worked on a map or 2.
Definitly a different move from Survival V1's 'style'. Work was moving very slowly, and we all began to lose interest (myself moving between IWv2 and Survival) In this Survival, I immediatly implemented the texture based footstep code I had coded into Iwv2 (Previously, in Survival V1 I had a primitive method that involved actors changing the footstep sounds if you stepped near them) and also began working on the weapons. I had also started to code an inventory menu, where you could see what you were wearing (armour, gloves and helmet wise) and what items you had.
Survival Version 3
As I was working on Survival, I began to look again at the plot I had. It tied strongly to IW v2's, however I felt it was going back into the same 'style' as IWv2 in that you always had a mission to accomplish. I was also getting sick of building bases and city style areas. I decided that I wanted to remove the 'safe' style of gameplay where you have a homebase which you return to with people there to talk to, and scrapped the plot of the game (spare the beginning part) and rewrote it. Admitidly I did this without talking to Geoffrey or Rusty, and so I sprung my new plan to them. Luckily they both approved of the new storyline, and with a little discussion and their suggestions the plot was changed quite alot. It would mean scrapping most of the work we had done, however since we had little map work done this was not much of a problem. After a few months of silent work with a few hints passed about we made our work public. It was at this point that Rob Wijkstra and William Gee joined the project. Later on Sangluss and Numan were added to the Roster.
Survival V3 so far has much more work done on it than the past 2 versions, and also features the most complex code. The HUD was totally recoded, and the movement style has been changed to remove it from the Duke Nukem 3D feel as much as possible so it truly does play like a new game and not just like Duke Nukem with a new skin.
Downloads
Download the Survival v1 Tech demo at Fileplanet To run this mod, download Eduke32 and install it into your Duke Nukem atomic edition directory. Unzip the Survival tech demo into the same directory, then download this patch and unzip it into the same directory, than run the batch file included with the Survival tech demo. Please note this demo is very old so there's bugs in it, although nothing huge.Download the Survival v2 alpha version at MSDN (Thanks to Mikko Sandt for the hosting!) To run this mod, extract the package and than drag and drop a Duke3D atomic edition group file into the same directory. This is basically what we had done with version 2 of Survival. There's a detailed synopsis of the development behind Survival in it. Be warned that the file's 60MB, and there's probably about 5-10 minutes of actual levels in there, so unless you've got a decent connection you might want to give this one a miss if you're not interested in it's development or the resources (which you are free to use as long as you credit me, Geoffrey Van Dijk and Rusty_Nails)
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