You should pay attention to your viewer rating and such after this review. Blood's one of those 'retro hipster millenial' dos games.

The blood episode could have done with some brightness increasing and you seemed to have Q-Studios whatever misspelled during the startup text..

leileilol wrote:

You should pay attention to your viewer rating and such after this review. Blood's one of those 'retro hipster millenial' dos games.

As a, "retro hipster millenial" who is a fan of this game and many other DOS titles, I am happy to see Kris covering this game. Going to load it up and watch it in a bit, can't wait for some more Ancient DOS Games.

Watched the episode and you gave a good assessment on the game, I love it to death but I can agree with the flaws though which took me a while to get around when I first played the game. Regarding the CD looping problem, it is related to DOSBox apparently because I ran the game on a DOS system and the tracks loop. If anyone here is intending to play Blood with DOSBox, check this out if you want the tracks to loop:
http://www.gog.com/forum/blood_series/a_custo … pport_for_blood

Just replace your DOSBox 0.74 exe with this one and you are good to go.

WolverineDK wrote:

And well okay, make an MK2 reference. And every one will have a laugh.

Well hey, it was worth a shot, plus it was the first thing that came to mind the first time I set someone on fire in the game and they came running towards me. ;D

Harekiet wrote:

The blood episode could have done with some brightness increasing and you seemed to have Q-Studios whatever misspelled during the startup text..

The game is supposed to be really dark and it just looked odd when I tried to turn the brightness up at all, even in post. As for the typo, I've got a correction added now on my website... I must've been more dyslexic than usual when assembling the images for the episode considering I also made the mistake "Epsiode" but caught it before uploading. ^_^;

Blood is on Steam too. Sadly, it's not a modern port like Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition.

SpooferJahk wrote:

Watched the episode and you gave a good assessment on the game, I love it to death but I can agree with the flaws though which took me a while to get around when I first played the game. Regarding the CD looping problem, it is related to DOSBox apparently because I ran the game on a DOS system and the tracks loop. If anyone here is intending to play Blood with DOSBox, check this out if you want the tracks to loop:
http://www.gog.com/forum/blood_series/a_custo … pport_for_blood

Just replace your DOSBox 0.74 exe with this one and you are good to go.

From the sounds of things in the initial post there, I'm guessing there isn't anything special that isn't in the current DOSBox SVN.

Firtasik wrote:

Blood is on Steam too. Sadly, it's not a modern port like Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition.

The Blood build engine source has not been released, hence the reason why it is not "like" Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton edition, and that is sad . That the this version of the build engine source has not been released, since after all it is not like it is the Strife doom engine source, which has gotten lost.

Someone on Patreon noticed something about one of the things I spoke about in the episode and I thought it might be prudent to ask everyone here if they know anything about it.

Apparently, this person was playing Blood just fine on an old DOS system with only 16 MB of RAM, even though the game complained on my system when I tried to run it with 24 MB allocated in DOSBox.

I'm wondering what's up with that? Is it possible the expansion pack bumps up the memory requirement? Is it possible older versions had lower requirements? Is it possible that the guy's memory is faulty? Maybe he was overriding the memory check and didn't realize it? (The game will still run if you have less memory, owing to the fact that the Build Engine can cache textures and stuff in and out at will, but I imagine if you go too far less you could run into choppiness from disk thrashing.)

Any ideas?

Adjusting sound sampling rate/bits helps the memory. 16mb can be too slow for Blood if you play with 22khz 16bit sound, and it's been this way since 1.00. The 16mb player probably used 11khz and 8bit sound

This also applies to Shadow Warrior which also similarly treads the limits of 16mb memory usage despite having 99% 10989hz audio. Sounds get resampled to the native mixing rate on load for fastest possible playback and consistent pitch shifting, IIRC

Kudos for that MK4 parody. Genius!

Do any DOS games, aside from Quake, actually take advantage of 16-bit audio? I thought most of them stuck with 8-bit samples to save space.

SpooferJahk wrote:

leileilol wrote:

You should pay attention to your viewer rating and such after this review. Blood's one of those 'retro hipster millenial' dos games.

As a, "retro hipster millenial" who is a fan of this game and many other DOS titles, I am happy to see Kris covering this game. Going to load it up and watch it in a bit, can't wait for some more Ancient DOS Games.

Heh, I'm a "retro hipster millenial" and Blood is probably my least favorite Build engine game, at least out of the ones I've played. The voxel effects are kinda cool, and it's evident they tried to do some unique things with it, but the "feel" of the gameplay and controls is just horrid. Duke3D plays much better despite being on an earlier version of the engine, and I think it actually has better looking graphics. Shadow Warrior is pretty cool too, but the level design goes off a cliff after the first area, and some parts of it are just retardedly difficult.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Do any DOS games, aside from Quake, actually take advantage of 16-bit audio? I thought most of them stuck with 8-bit samples to save space.

You'll note that most setup programs offer the choice between 8-Bit and 16-Bit "Mixing". So yes, most of the samples are still 8-Bit, but are mixed at 16-Bit for greater clarity. :B

OK, but how would 16-bit mixing improve the sound quality if the samples are only 8-bit?

You're multiplying and adding samples together when mixing. You'd get more dynamic range with 16bit output then

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

OK, but how would 16-bit mixing improve the sound quality if the samples are only 8-bit?

Think of it this way: If you try to divide 24 by 10, you get 2.4. BUT, if you're working strictly with integers, you can't have a decimal value, so you'd end up with 2 or possibly 3 instead.

If all you're doing is mixing samples with no regards to pitch or volume, then 16-bit mixing isn't a factor (technically, though it is because of something else I talk about further down) because all the math involved would be addition or subtraction. The moment you want to alter the volume of a sample or the pitch of a sample, multiplication and division come into play, which means having better granularity of the values will result in more accurate manipulation of the sound.

If you have one spot in an 8-bit waveform with a value of 24 and you're dividing the volume down to 10%, with 8-bit mixing that spot in the waveform will now have a value of 2 or 3, not 2.4. If you're doing 16-bit mixing, 24 becomes 6144, 10% of which will be 614 or 615, either of which will be much more accurate than an 8-bit 2 or 3 which would be 512 or 768 if bumped up to 16-bit.

True, most people aren't going to notice stuff like this, at least, not if the channels count is low. The thing with doing accurate mixing at the software level is that the more channels you have, the quieter everything needs to be by default to avoid distortion, in which case it becomes even more important to be doing 16-bit mixing over 8-bit.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Do any DOS games, aside from Quake, actually take advantage of 16-bit audio? I thought most of them stuck with 8-bit samples to save space.

SpooferJahk wrote:

leileilol wrote:

You should pay attention to your viewer rating and such after this review. Blood's one of those 'retro hipster millenial' dos games.

As a, "retro hipster millenial" who is a fan of this game and many other DOS titles, I am happy to see Kris covering this game. Going to load it up and watch it in a bit, can't wait for some more Ancient DOS Games.

Heh, I'm a "retro hipster millenial" and Blood is probably my least favorite Build engine game, at least out of the ones I've played. The voxel effects are kinda cool, and it's evident they tried to do some unique things with it, but the "feel" of the gameplay and controls is just horrid. Duke3D plays much better despite being on an earlier version of the engine, and I think it actually has better looking graphics. Shadow Warrior is pretty cool too, but the level design goes off a cliff after the first area, and some parts of it are just retardedly difficult.

Im an old fart and I love Blood. Its much better than duke3d and Shadow Warrior.

Blood episode 2 is like an entirely different game compared to the other episodes. Has this perfect eerie atmosphere combined with some of the best FPS level design I've ever seen. The last level or two are a huge letdown though.
About the review, first thing I noticed... Where's the awesome MIDI music? 😳

And Nitemare 3D. Oh god. That game literally gave me nightmares as a kid... unlike Blood for some reason. I don't think I ever even finished the first level.

jwt27 wrote:

About the review, first thing I noticed... Where's the awesome MIDI music? :O

I had the brilliant idea of capturing game footage using the CD Audio music and didn't realize until around the third level of the first episode that it was relatively mediocre, mostly just haunting/creepy sound effects set to dull tunes, and didn't notice it cutting out due to DOSBox compatibility issues and didn't notice how completely inconsistent the volume was until the third level, by which point I was committed really. :/

That 'homage' to Mortal Kombat in this week's video was priceless. Keep up the great work. You are incredibly talented.