http://www.bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm…tdm_game01.pk4

Download this file and drop it into your darkmod folder. Make sure if you’re using internet explorer that it doesn’t rename the file to .zip. If it does, rename it to .pk4.

Once you have overwritten the old file with this one, delete your old save games and start the mission anew. That should hopefully take care of it. If not, let us know.

As for the ingame performance, my best advice is to go into your video options and make sure you’re using the ‘fast’ ambient method and that your interaction shader is set to ’standard’ not ‘enhanced’.

Also, if you find the load times a bit much..go into your doomconfig.cfg and see if image_usecompression is set to 0, if it isn’t…set it to 0 and that might help your loading time slightly. We still need to iron out a few issues, considering this is a beta, but we’ll get there.

(reposted with the magic word this time)

If you look deeper into the history of Duke Nukem Forever, one of the weird contract clauses they had was that they were paid to WORK ON the game…not to finish it! By milking the dev process indefinitely, they were on a never-ending gravy train. That’s rare in game dev land, so I don’t completely blame them for taking payroll forever off vaporware hype and empty promises. That has now changed, so they’re looking to actually finish it up soon. So it makes sense.

In our case, NO ONE IS PAYING US TO WORK ON TCFH. This is an important point….it means our progress on the game has been interrupted repeatedly and frequently by having to take real, paying work to keep the lights on and the cats fed.

We’re a two person team and not full time. We aren’t using an existing engine. Do the math on how many full time people work on a regular game, times how many years they work on it, and you’ll find that by a man-month metric, we shouldn’t be finishing until sometime in 2073. It’s simply a lot of work to do.

As we’ve coped with having to interruptions, illness, limited resources, etc…time marches on. Game players become more demanding. Computers become faster. SDKs/APIs change. Expectations grow as you take longer: “X years? This better be good!” We’re fighting an uphill battle in terms of having to go back and redesign and improve the graphics and core engine just to stay anywhere near current technology. That’s where we are right now — a MAJOR rework of the core engine and entire asset pipeline, being worked on in between our paying work. We’re actually making far more of a game than we started 7 years ago. More like a 2.0 or 3.0. And factor that’s 7 years calendar time, not man-hours.

So THAT’S why it’s taking so freakin’ long. It has nothing to do with programming skill or difficulty, and everything to do with logistics. We aren’t happy about it any more than you or anyone else is. We’re horrifically embarrassed. We hide from going to the GDC or talking to our peers for fear of being asked about it. It’s NOT A FUN SITUATION FOR US. I’d really like to be able to recoup some $ in trade for that significant fraction of my limited lifespan I’ve sunk into this project. So yah, if we could “just ship it” we would — but it’s just not there yet. If anyone still cares about the game, know that it WILL get done, because there’s no way I’ve sunk this many hours of my life into something that will wither on the vine. In the mean time, we’re trying to lay low until we have something REAL we can show people, and have an HONEST ship date.

The best we can hope for, when we finally do get there, is that people will be understanding: forgive us for the wait and align their expectations to reality.

But I guess I understand if they don’t.