here are some new features that were added (that were not in the first game)
and there should not be any useless weapons
this approach was changed because after a few levels I just run out of guns to put in secrets
the plan now is that you will lose your items at the start of an episode and get a new set for each
(and able to collect all of them on the last episode - unless you used cheats of course 🤭)
an easy to set up mpeg1 player (the format became pubdom a while ago)
originally I wanted to replace the demo playback in the menu with a movie
(after nearly every patch the demo desynced at some point and it was getting increasingly silly)
and the only good small video player I found was pl_mpeg
and then I got mad with power and added a movie theatre level 🤭 (in the spirit of Duke)
turns out generating an ingame map for a full 3D level is no small task
I finally had a breakthrough after ditching the wireframe idea
and built a tool that can generate a low poly version of the level
(after throwing every triangle decimation technique known to man at the problem 😓)
but this came with a lot of problems: compatibility, setting up offscreen rendering is a nightmare
and of course on many video cards encountering a mirror slowed everything down 😓
this was solved with going back to an earlier technique: the copytexture feature in opengl
which copies part of the screen into a texture
I expected it to be slow but it's fast, compatible with even ancient machines and looks good enough
only tricky part of course is that it's limited by the window the game runs in but it's worth the trouble
in the original game I went out of my way to make glass break into the triangles
the glass model used - which was slow and didn't look good enough to make it worth it