FAQ

Where are saved games, settings etc. stored?

RigelEngine stores all saved games, high score lists, and options/settings in a user-specific location depending on the operating system:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\lethal-guitar\RigelEngine
• Mac OS: todo
• Linux: todo

Inside that folder are two files, UserProfile.rigel and Options.json. The first one stores saved games and high score lists, as well as the game path (location of Duke 2 data files), whereas the 2nd one stores options/settings.

You can backup and restore these files as desired, and change the options file with a text editor. The profile file is stored in a binary format and can't be edited directly.

Why is the profile not an editable text file as well?

This is to make it a bit harder to "cheat", i.e. manipulating your saved games/high scores. It's by no means meant to be a 100% secure mechanism that would make this completely impossible, far from it. It's just so that a little bit of work is necessary before you can manipulate your game progress. I believe that cheating can take away the feeling of accomplishment you get from beating a game in an "honest" way, and RigelEngine already offers a quick saving feature to take the frustration out of difficult parts in the game.

That said, if you are still determined to edit your saved games and high scores: This is an open source project, so the file format being used can be found easily enough, and there are existing tools to edit files in that format ;)

My game pad/controller doesn't work, what can I do?

Tbd

There's a "missing DLL" error on Windows, what can I do?

Install the Visual Studio 2019 Redistributable.

⚠️ Don't download individual DLL files from any other website. These are not guaranteed to be the exact version needed for your version of Windows, can lead to other problems later on and contain viruses/malware. The only way to properly fix missing DLL issues is by installing the redistributable from the link above.

The game crashes on startup, what can I do?

Make sure your graphics card fulfills the requirements (OpenGL 3.0 or OpenGL ES 2.0 compatibility), and that your graphics drivers are up to date. See supported graphics cards for more information.

Is RigelEngine an emulator?

No, RigelEngine is native code. The original game's assembly code was used as basis to write a new version of the game from scratch. The end result is portable C++ code that runs natively on modern operating systems.

RigelEngine does include an emulator for the OPL2 (music chip found on AdLib/Soundblaster cards from the DOS era) in order to play back music and some sound effects, but that's the only part relying on emulation.

What's different from the original game?

See list of differences.

Could RigelEngine run Duke Nukem 1 as well?

No, Duke Nukem 1 uses a completely different engine, so it would have to be recreated separately. Supporting both of these games with a single engine would only complicate things.

Aside from that, there is already a (unrelated) recreation project for Duke 1: ReDuke

Could RigelEngine run Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure?

Also no. Cosmo and Duke 2 run on very similar engines, with the latter being an evolution of the former, but there are still many differences. Plus, all the menu code and game logic (player controls, how enemies behave etc.) would still need to be reverse-engineered and reimplemented separately.

As with Duke 1, there is already a (unrelated) recreation project for Cosmo: Cosmo-Engine