The BUILD Engine

The BUILD Engine powers the following commercial games:

• Duke Nukem 3D
• Blood
• Shadow Warrior
• Redneck Rampage
• Witchhaven
• TekWar
• Extreme Paintbrawl
• Powerslave
• NAM/Napalm
• WWII GI
• ...some sequels, some unreleased games, and a bunch of TCs.

A more detailed and graphical list is here.

What is here is a port of the engine itself, originally written by Ken Silverman, to Linux and win32 systems. This ported codebase still compiles under DOS, too. Please note that Ken has nothing to do with this porting project, so you should harrass us and not him with any questions about this work that you might have.

Does the port work? Judge for yourself.

This project is still being actively worked on, but volunteers that would like to tackle it are always welcome.

What works:

• "2.5 dimensional" renderer to a software framebuffer.
• The entire "KenBuild" editor and game.
• All the features you'd expect in the engine powering Duke3D.
• Basic editing of Duke Nukem 3D groupfiles.
• Linux, Win32, DOS4GW ports.

• No sound. The API is different for every Build game. There is a closed source reimplementation of the Duke3D API in the works.
• No networking. This is COMMIT and IPX based under DOS, and no one has moved the API to a modern operating system yet. We aren't sure if the API is equivalent for the various BUILD games, too.
• No (game) source. The engine is here, and complete, but the games built on top of it aren't available in source form. That means no source mods, and no ports to modern operating systems. UPDATE: Duke3D has been open-sourced (thanks, 3DRealms!), and we've got a port in progress.
• The external utilities, such as the .ART editor and grpfile packager, have not been ported, and probably need work. We DID write our own (GPL'd) grpfile extractor, though.
• OpenGL support. There is the very basics of this in there, but no actual rendering, yet. I hope to write this, or hope someone else writes this, at some point.

If you are one of those companies, there are several people that are willing to work, for free, to port those games to a modern OS, under non-disclosure agreements if necessary. Please contact me for more information.

The BUILD Engine is licensed under a homemade license by the original author, Ken Silverman:

"Build Engine & Tools" Copyright (c) 1993-1997 Ken Silverman
Ken Silverman's official web site: "http://www.advsys.net/ken"
See the included license file "BUILDLIC.TXT" for license info.


(I assume companies with prior Build licenses can use those instead.)

Prepackaged source code and binaries:

• READ THIS BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD ANYTHING.
• Here is the CHANGELOG.
• Here are the latest officially released binaries and source.

Downloading from Subversion:

BUILD's source code may be downloaded using Subversion. Subversion allows you to get up-to-the-minute fixes and enhancements; as a developer works on a source tree, you can use Subversion to mirror that source tree instead of waiting for an official release. Please look at the Subversion website for more information on this tool.

Here is the web interface to BUILD's Subversion repository, and here is the web interface to the related utilities' Subversion repository.

To download BUILD via Subversion:
svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/buildengine/trunk buildengine

The external utilities can be grabbed as such:
svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/buildutils/trunk buildutils

Page maintained by Ryan C. Gordon.