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Duke Nukem Sheds Light on Brain

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-could-it-not dept.

bodger_uk writes "The BBC is running an article on the use of Duke Nukem in long term memory research. From the Article: 'It has long been thought that sleep deprivation affects your ability to consolidate memories. To test the theory, the researchers gave the volunteers place-finding missions in a virtual city created in the Duke Nukem game.' Slashdotters already know that Duke Nukem aids long term memory research of course. Just look how long we've been remembering about Duke Nukem Forever!"

50 comments

  1. of course it sheds light on the brain... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    bullet holes don't usually help to keep it out.

  2. Only... by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 1

    I hope they added a "You should not be here... --Level Lord" message on some in-accessible portion of the map. Hadn't seen that kind of loving development of a game since Rise of the Triads.

    1. Re:Only... by PFI_Optix · · Score: 1

      I miss ROTT. Deathmatch just hasn't been the same since.

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    2. Re:Only... by smbarbour · · Score: 0

      Me too. I find the lack of magic mushrooms and the Hand of God in modern games as a big turn-off.

      I'd really like to see another drunk missile launcher. It was awesome in open areas.

    3. Re:Only... by dohzer · · Score: 1

      I'm fairly sure they had something like that in one of the 3D GTA games.

  3. Stop with the DNF jokes by mwvdlee · · Score: 1, Redundant

    We all know Duke Nukem Forever is going to be a Phantom release title, it'll be released as soon as the console is released.

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    1. Re:Stop with the DNF jokes by Tepshen · · Score: 1

      "We all know Duke Nukem Forever is going to be a Phantom release title, it'll be released as soon as the console is released" Be careful with that joke. Its an antique.

    2. Re:Stop with the DNF jokes by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 1

      The reason that DN:F has been continually delayed is because game testers keep getting eaten by a Grue.

      --
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  4. WHAT!? by joshsnow · · Score: 2, Funny

    /.ers already know that Duke Nukem aids long term memory research of course. Just look how long we've been remembering about Duke Nukem Forever!"

    That is so unfair!! Why should the article submitter also steal the troll which rightfully, belongs to the First Poster!? And every other troll in this thread!

  5. Forever by cheese-cube · · Score: 0, Redundant

    [insert obligatory Duke Nukem Forever quip here]

    1. Re:Forever by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      After the first few billion times, [insert obligatory Duke Nukem Forever quip here] isn't that funny anymore.

    2. Re:Forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      neither are chuck fucking norris quips.

    3. Re:Forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ya, I caught that one too. Silly jokesters

    4. Re:Forever by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Hey, it's not my fault someone got me started on Chuck Norris. Read my F.A.Q. at the very bottom.

    5. Re:Forever by cheese-cube · · Score: 1

      My point exactly.

  6. Dear Zonk. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even though you obviously made an effort and thought long and hard about your punchline, the joke was so contrived and convoluted as to be "dark-funny": not just lack of funny but the removal of funny.

    1. Re:Dear Zonk. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You'll notice that the entire post is a quote from 'bodger_uk'. Give all the 'sappy totally saw it coming' joke credit to him.

    2. Re:Dear Zonk. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dear fucking illiterate moron, Zonk didn't make that joke, the poster of the story did.

      I can see why you didn't sign in for that one.

  7. i was going to post something witty by digifuzz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    but i forgot what i was gonna write.

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  8. Sleep?? by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 4, Funny
    TFA: The volunteers were then split into two groups: those that were allowed a good night's sleep and those that were not.

    That's no experiment! Any hardcore gamer will tell you, sleep deprivation is absolutely necessary for the full experience.

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  9. I've heard... by julienbh · · Score: 1

    I've heard that the next Duke Nukem game should be out in the next year! ... *sigh

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  10. well go ahead and post anyways by JeanBaptiste · · Score: 1

    cause you can never have too much random useless crap on the internets.

  11. Summary of scientific findings: by ZombieRoboNinja · · Score: 4, Funny

    You can pee in the urinals to regain health.

    1. Re:Summary of scientific findings: by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 1

      I got soft between the shareware version and trading games on 3 1/2 diskettes at school until I found someone with duke3d. My first play through the moon base, I abused the water fountain +1% health like it was going out of style :(

      Might've been because I'd been playing alot of wolfenstein and assumed the secrets were pushwalls instead of creative jumping/shooting/searching puzzles. Just sorta gave after after the red light district level.

    2. Re:Summary of scientific findings: by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      red light district is tricky, i couldn't do it until someone showed me.

      afaict there is no way to complete that level without passing through a secret (an airduct to be precise) to get behind the curtain and open it (a friend and i have checked quite hard in build and we can't seem to find any other switches that open it).

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    3. Re:Summary of scientific findings: by Radres · · Score: 1

      You take the stairs up to the projector room and turn a switch (I think it was by the window facing the movie screen) and the movie starts playing, then the curtain opens. Shoot an RPG at the crack in the screen (or place a pipe bomb nearby) and you can jump behind the screen.

    4. Re:Summary of scientific findings: by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      you are describing holywood holocaust not red light district.

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  12. It makes perfect sense. by J.+T.+MacLeod · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The level editor was quite easy, and I'm sure that they had to worry less about having PCs capable of handling more recent games. It was the most logical choice.

    However, I have to wonder, do any more recent games have such easy to use level editors? Aside from Second Life, I mean.

    1. Re:It makes perfect sense. by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      Valve has some really nice editing tools for both the original Half-Life and now HL2.

      --
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    2. Re:It makes perfect sense. by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      yeah while builds overuse of the keyboard (its the only app i've seen that used the two control keys seperately and used the numpad for totally different things to the corresponding keys on the main keyboard) took some getting used to The principle was very simple, draw a 2D map and then fill in the heights.

      True 3D editors are much harder to learn as our main means of interacting with computers are all 2D. I tried once with unrealed but never got very far (the fact it was slow as molasses on my pc probablly didn't help much either).

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    3. Re:It makes perfect sense. by adavies42 · · Score: 1

      Marathon, Bungie's Mac FPS from the same era, used an editor almost exactly like that. It's due to the design of the engine, which it shares with Build--it's called "2.5D". Marathon has now been open sourced and modernized as Aleph One, available on sourceforge, and an editor for Windows exists (Obed).

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  13. Duken Nukem?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why not use a more modern true 3D engine like Quake2 or Quake3? Both are open-source and have tons of design tools.

    1. Re:Duken Nukem?! by MindStalker · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Have you seriously ever designed a level for Duke and Quake. Sure you can do so much more with Quake but it takes 4 or 5 times longer to develop anything. These people wern't interested in graphics just a computerize maze.. Realistically they should have used Doom which in my opinion is the easiest level editor in existance. Or mabye Wolf3d, though that might have been pushing it.

    2. Re:Duken Nukem?! by Haeleth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Realistically they should have used Doom which in my opinion is the easiest level editor in existance.

      Doom is a game, not a level editor. You are probably thinking of one of the dozens of third-party level editors for Doom, which range from hideously-hard-to-use all the way down to merely mindbendingly-hard-to-use. Seriously, unless it was released in the last 10 years or so, there's no Doom level editor that even comes close to being as quick and intuitive to use as the Build editor for Duke3D.

    3. Re:Duken Nukem?! by MindStalker · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I found the doom editor to be really easy. Though in my sadness you did catch me in a partial lie. I've never used the duke editor, though I assumed it had to be someway between doom and quake..

  14. Ob by Headcase88 · · Score: 1

    [insert obligatory quip about [insert obligatory joke about obligatory jokes here] here]

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  15. It makes perfect sense.-Map Converter. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Talk about perfect timing. Does anyone know of a Duke Nukem 3D map converter that goes from there to say Unreal? There's one but development only goes up to 2000 and it's incomplete. Of course there's the legality, but for those who already own the game, there shouldn't be a problem.

    BTW anyone know if this is any good?

  16. Teens these days... by GroeFaZ · · Score: 2, Funny

    You don't know what is was like, Back In The Days. Ain't had no fancy Duke Nukem Forever announcement, nobody promising us "This decade it'll be released for sure!", and you better damn well believe we ain't had no Phantom console announced. Basically we had to make up our own vapourware! We did have the "Linux ready for Desktop next year", though. Aah, those were the days.

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    1. Re:Teens these days... by Wordplay · · Score: 1

      On the other hand, we did have Daikatana, Prey (still have it!), Black and White: The Original Design, the 2nd gen 3DO, and the Super Nintendo CD...

  17. It's been over 10 years.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and I still remember the level LA Rumble like the back of my hand!

  18. Details of the study by Bueller_007 · · Score: 2, Funny

    The study methodology was as follows:

    Researchers asked the subjects "Do you remember when 3DR first announced Duke Nukem Forever?"
    If the subjects replied "yes", they were judged to have a good long-term memory.

    1. Re:Details of the study by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 1

      Unless they were too young to remember.

  19. Duken Nukem?!-2.5 level design. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well it's hard to get much simpler than a closed-form polygon with a height parameter.* Level editing got harder the minute levels started being true 3D. Although descent's editor wasn't too hard compared to more modern editors.

    *Some would say it was too simple. Try doing a room above a room in Build.

    1. Re:Duken Nukem?!-2.5 level design. by DimGeo · · Score: 1

      Easy, just draw two different sectors that cross each other, and make one of them higher than the other one (or you might end up with a room-inside-room thing, really cool indeed, but leads to many bugs usually). In Doom-engine games, however, this is impossible. Only in Build games. And, I believe, Dark Forces had something similar.

  20. Katamari Damacy 2 had it by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 1

    If you rolled into a glitch in the geometry that took you off the map, the King would appear and take you back to a safe spot on the map, and spend about 2 minutes telling you all about how wonderful the "Royal Warp" is.

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  21. If Duke Nukem can shed light on the brain... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...then Duke Nukem forever can shed light on procrastination.

  22. how exactly do you define 2.5D? by petermgreen · · Score: 1

    build always allowed sectors that couldn't be seen at once to overlap and later build games found a way to join sectors floor-ceiling (duke unfortunately didn't and while there have been attempts to add it getting it right is a lot harder than it looks)

    And with the additon of the polymost renderer you have true 3D viewpoints too.

    but yeah you still map in the 2.5D style even though you can create true 3D constructions in the later variants.

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    1. Re:how exactly do you define 2.5D? by adavies42 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, you can do that overlap in Marathon too--it's a consequence of the "portal" engine architecture, and is completely impossible in BSP engines like Quake. (We call it "5D" in Marathon, because of a net map in the original game which used it deliberately as an effect.) Marathon's engine is somewhat more limited than Build, though--you can't have slanted surfaces at all, and things approaching 3D effects like stacking open spaces over each other are only possible through horrible hacks.

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  23. LOL! LOLOLOL! LOL! Wooooo LOLOCAUSTASTIC-ROFFLE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OMG !! Moar jokes about Duke Nukem Forever guys! They're so FRESH and PUNCHY!! MOAR!!!!!