Today I thought about writing about Blood and it’s remakes, freegamer already did it first (yesterday) but I hope I could add some new stuff he didn’t write about.
I’m a huge fan of Blood, yeah that old 3D shooter from 1997.
I think that Blood is the best game that used the BUILD engine, and even today with it’s outdated graphics it is one of my favorite 3D shooters of all times.
Luckily I am not the only fan of this great game and there are several fan made games/mods inspired by blood.
1. Blood: The Flesh Game :
As you can guess from the name this is a flash version of blood which runs on all OS’s.
Although it’s just a demo of what never became a full length game due to lack of time, it was praised by the fans.
Blood : The Flesh Game is an adventure game based on Blood and Blood 2 in which you are play the role of Caleb at a 2d platform shooter.
The game is closed source but I think that if you would like to finish developing this demo into a full game you can contact Tamás Tóth (at adatjoe [at] vipmail {dot} hu) and he will help you in your quest and maybe even release the source (who knows).
2. ZBlood :
ZBlood (sometimes spelt Zblood or zblood) is a game that runs on the ZDoom engine, which is a modified version of id Software’s Doom engine aka id Tech 1 . ZBlood itself is a modified version of the Doom II WAD, Blood TC. However ZBlood includes many new weapons, levels and features and is currently being updated while Blood TC is no longer being worked on.
As id Tech 1 was released under GPLv2 and works with GNU/Linux, this mod should also work on GNU/Linux.
The original BUILD engine is more feature heavy then id’s 1 engine, so I consider it a downgrade in terms of technology.
3. Transfusion :
Transfusion uses the DarkPlaces engine in order to recreate Blood in full 3D.
Darkplaces is a very modified and improved Quake engine.
Currently Transfusion is a death-match game like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament (but with much less impressive graphics), but it’s a Free software (FOSS) and still under heavy development.
The goal is to recreate Blood so there is much work to be done still.
As you can see the first screenshots is the death-match and the second one is the actual (still incomplete) single player levels.
4. HYPERTENSION :
Now we finally came to the last recreation or even reincarnation of our beloved game Blood.
HYPERTENSION is based on the GPLed Hyper3dge which is was developed from the EDGE engine which was based on id tech 1.
HYPERTENSION is feature live-action videos with amateur actors, changing soundtrack based on events in the game, many new and old weapons and enemies, classic levels a brand new campaign and much more features !
While the game itself is not yet FOSS (this could be discussed) it will be out very soon and will have a native GNU/Linux client !
There is much to expect…
Links :
Blood
Blood Wiki
Blood: The Flesh Game
ZBlood
Transfusion
HYPERTENSION
Interview with TDGMods on Hypertension
Hm, well, those ain’t quite the kind of games that I enjoy too much to play.
Btw. could you contact the Unigine people and ask them where the Linux version of their “Heaven Benchmark” is? Or rather if it’s ever coming and if, when…
Tessellation is not a DirectX exclusive feature and so I’m wondering why there is no download for Linux yet.
They were already been contacted by phoronix.
They will release a GNU/Linux version in 1-2 months.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzYzMQ
Patience is vital 😉
I love the old DOS version of Blood. Blood 2, not so much. I recently played Blood with DOSBox, and it ran pretty well at the default resolution with super high sound quality. Would love to see a finished recreation of Blood!
Great post, glad to see that some of my fellow GNU/Linux gamers also like Blood. If only the source were released like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior and if only Hyperion Entertainment had ported Blood II: The Chosen as well as Shogo: Mobile Armour Division… Just a few points, as the assistant moderator of the Blood Wiki I have a few fact checks and additions.
The Flesh Game is not a 2D platform shooter but purely an adventure game, what you mean is the new project being worked on sporadically by Tamás Tóth. You can read more on our article that is linked to or see the development blog: http://fleshgame.blogspot.com/
Blood TC was a step down technologically, though very cool to play on my Fedora machine with PrBoom. The reason it moved to ZDoom and became ZBlood was because ZDoom is in many ways either equal or better than Build in terms of capability, being one of the most polished Doom source ports. So, despite the Doom name: ZDoom in basic equals Build.
Transfusion has a released beta with far better graphics than the version showed, on the Free Gamer link there is a video showing this. This year there have been attempts by us and the others on the Transfusion Forums to try and see about getting Transfusion back on track. Transfusion if you didn’t know, is what saved the organized Blood community after the death of the first real fan site PlanetBlood (which GameSpy just took down… damn….)
HYPERTENSION is a very ambitious project, which has generated some controversy among self-titled Blood purists who don’t like its… umm… “creative” approach to the Blood mythos (similar to the crowd who dislike Blood II due to its design changes to the original, though I personally love Blood and Blood II equally). I wish them well even if I don’t personally have a taste for some of their design ideas. They have been more than kind to our wiki.
You missed another fun and GNU/Linux friendly Blood fan game: Q3 BloodBath. Q3BB is a project that generated Blood and Blood II maps for the Quake 3 engine. These work fine in both Quake III plain, Quake III through ioquake3, and through OpenArena. They are most fun and there is an independent Caleb Quake III model circulating the Internet. It is not the best modeled thing in the world but worth using just to hear the bad man’s quips. Link: http://blood.wiki-site.com/index.php/Q3_BloodBath
Early this year I also made a little Blood mod for GNOME Robots 2.
http://blood.wiki-site.com/index.php/Image:Blood-Robots.png
These are not GNU/Linux related but there are also some interesting Blood and Blood II modifications. Bloodly Pulp Fiction, a new total conversion for Blood, was released this year. Work continues on Blood II: Resurrection, though in secret due to some rather unfortunate fan-spats, which is creating a Blood sequel for those first Blood purists I mentioned earlier. There are also some nice older mods, like B2K5 which can be found here: http://blood.wiki-site.com/index.php/List_of_Mods
These can be ran through GNU/Linux through such sadly inadequate and uncouth methods such as DosBox and WINE emulation (yes, I know that WINE is not an emulator…). For some, incomplete, help with that as well as installation on other systems see here: http://blood.wiki-site.com/index.php/Installation
Thanks you the link to us and keep up the great coverage of the expanding GNU/Linux gaming scene!
Hello Gideon.
Sorry for not approving your post earlier but it got to the SPAM section because of the multiply links inside your post, so I didn’t receive an email notification about it.
Thank you for your deep and detailed replay to this article.
Before working on this article I wasn’t involved in the Blood mods so I might made some mistakes.
I indeed thought that Zblood’s Zdoom engine is weaker then the BUILD engine by comparing Doom and Duke3D.
I liked Blood1 much much more then Blood2, it’s a whole different atmosphere – and there is a reason why Blood3 was never been made (Blood2 failed to deliver).
I also looked at the “Q3 BloodBath” project when I wrote this article, but I didn’t publish it because it wasn’t a stand alone game, it just modified the art of Quake3 to look like Blood.
About the other projects you mentioned – as long as they don’t have (or doesn’t intend to have) a native GNU/Linux clients I won’t write about them, if this will change I will add them to the list.
That’s also the reason why I didn’t write about Blood Resurrection, as long as a GNU/Linux client is not confirmed – there is no reason to write about it in this blog.
Thank you again for your post.
Hey everyone, just thought I’d slap my two cents in here if ya’ll don’t mind. 😉
The engine that Hypertension is using is based on a heavily modified id Tech 1 base engine, but it includes rendering code from Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3: Arena. A lot of the model header code comes from id Tech 2 rather than the Quake engine. This is why we’ve been able to retain backward compatibility with Transfusion’s material.
Anyways, that’s cool that the Blood Wiki has been talked about, truly a work of binary art. Gideon, there’s several other major media outlets that linked to the Hypertension Wiki article on your site through our press release by our publisher, but I never sent those to you.