The Trooper is an enemy in LameDuke. Along with the Drone, it is one of the most common enemies in LameDuke.
Description[]
The Trooper has low health, but is still a threat. It is armed with a pistol that it can fire rapidly, which allows it to hack away the player’s health in no time flat. It is also equipped with a Jetpack that it will use if the player either uses their own Jetpack or if the player lands on top of the Trooper.
Combat Analysis[]
| |||||||||||||||||||||
Troopers are extremely weak and serve as little more than cannon fodder. However, their pistol can be quite strong, making them deadlier than they look. Don’t forget that the Trooper has a jetpack and will use it to fly up to the player (such as in E1L6), so don’t be surprised if you see one suddenly pop up while you’re on a roof.
Anything stronger than the Pistol can kill them in one hit. Groups of Troopers can easily be dispatched with one rocket or Pipebomb. The Pipebomb’s large explosive range makes it better suited for a group of Troopers spread out than the RPG.
Data[]
| ||||||||||
Development history[]
See also: Duke Nukem 3D prototypes
The Trooper was likely based on the same enemy from Duke Nukem II. Numerous assets from Duke Nukem II were recreated during the development of Duke Nukem 3D, so the fact that they share a similar ray gun, helmet, and jetpack are all clues that the Duke Nukem II Trooper and the LameDuke Trooper are related.
Beta screenshots show that, no later than April 1995, the Trooper was updated to have an elongated helmet with a yellow visor and red accents on its suit.
  Updated Trooper sprites on O1, circa April 1995 |
  Updated Trooper sprite in front of the Red Light District club entrance on L6, circa April 1995 |
Concept art from later in the summer shows that the developers were trying to convert the Trooper into a humanoid reptile, likely so that it would be consistent with the other enemies.
Concept art for updated lizard trooper designs, with heads that would apparently fit inside the elongated helmets of the existing gray-and-red troopers
Richard "TerminX" Gobeille, who signed a non-disclosure agreement and was given privileged access to a cache of development files, has publicly shared sprites that the developers had actually created based on the concepts above.
  |
  |
A high-resolution 3D render of this model was also accidentally leaked on the back cover of the Duke Nukem 3D Screen Saver & Entertainment Pack.
Sometime around late August or early September, the "Predator Trooper" design begins to show up in beta screenshots. Even in the earliest screenshots, it is seen wearing green armor. The green armor is a significant detail because there is conflicting evidence as to how quickly the developers transitioned from the helmeted gray-and-red Trooper to the final version of the Predator Trooper (further discussed below).
Earliest known screenshot with the Predator Trooper design, circa late August or early September 1995. The corpse in the background is wearing green armor. This is between the club (left) and demolition building (right) on an early version of Red Light District.
There are two lines of evidence that the transition may have been slower than the available screenshots would suggest:
- The September 1995 GAME.CON file contains special code that causes the Trooper to behave more intelligently if it is given a green palette, similar to how giving it a red palette causes it to transform into the Assault Captain in the final game. This strongly implies that green was not the default palette and that there was a more basic version of the enemy which was colored differently.
- An iteration of Hotel Hell dated October 18, 1995 (as seen in this video) contains a couple lizard troopers that were accidentally assigned palette 24, which gives them gray-ish skin with blue and red armor. This is believed to be the palette used by the helmeted gray troopers from the May 1995 prototypes. The fact that the level designer would make this mistake may be evidence that the palette was still in-use as late as September or October, possibly being assigned automatically at runtime. After all, the EXE file automatically reassigns the Assault Trooper palettes to green in the final game, and this was likely being done to the helmeted gray troopers as early as April in order to change their armor to gray and red.
Although the predator design would ultimately replace the helmeted design, the relationship between the Predator Trooper and the previously existing gray-and-red Trooper is not so straightforward. The Predator Trooper in the final game has precisely identical indices in the ART/DEFS files as the Captain from LameDuke, with sprites facing the same directions, using similar poses, and even holding a similar gun at every matching index in the files. This is strong evidence that the Predator Trooper was originally intended to replace the Captain, and the Firefly Trooper design—which is clearly an iteration of the the Trooper's 3D model with identical poses—was likely intended to become the Trooper, coexisting alongside the more powerful Captain. However, the developers instead opted to delete the Trooper from the ART/DEFS files and delete the Captain from the GAME.CON file, and they merged the Captain's ART/DEFS with the Trooper's GAME.CON logic.
Summary of the known relationships between the LameDuke Trooper, LameDuke Captain, Assault Trooper, Assault Captain, and Firefly Trooper. Note that the August 1995 row should not be interpreted as describing a "build" of the game; to date, there is no evidence that the lankier lizard design was ever used in-game or that the two enemies were ever implemented simultaneously. Rather, it is merely meant to show that both were developed sometime in the month of August.
It is not known for certain why the developers merged the Trooper and Captain in this way, but evidence from notes in the margins of the Pig Cop's concept art, official 3D Realms commentary on the Snake Head design included in the Extras menu of the Xbox Live Arcade port, and third-party commentary from John Romero—who was a contemporary influence on 3D Realms—all suggest that the developers were globally aiming for a "scarier" aesthetic. At a time when tacky "Doom clones" were flooding the market, this was apparently a distinguishing feature of higher quality first-person shooters. Therefore, it is possible that the lankier Firefly design did not quite match the aesthetic that the developers felt would maximize the game's marketability.
Gallery[]
Sprites[]
From Trooper to Assault Trooper[]
.jpg "3(sketch).jpg (86 KB)")
| |||||||||||||