May 1997
| May 31, 1997 |
As you can see, I have added some links to people related to Prey that have finger accounts. Click on each to see it. Speaking of fingers, Scott Miller updated his with some Prey information. Click here to read it in full lenght.
| May 30, 1997 |
Loyal Bassett has been selected to join the Prey team as a programmer. He is replacing Mark Dochtermann, who left Apogee last fall. It looks like Loyal will be a general programmer for the project, and will come to Apogee in late June. Loyal worked for Microsoft making Internet Gaming Zone, and before that worked at Go-Go Studios and went to Texas A&M University.
Also, in today's update, this was was said about Preditor's status:
In other Prey news, William has nailed down the Preditor UI for our portal system, and it rocks. Imagine just being able to draw a "hole in space" anywhere you'd like! The metaphysical implications of editing in 4 dimensions is just beginning to hit us-I sense impending therapy will be needed for all our mappers.
| May 22, 1997 |
President of Apogee, Scott Miller, today updated his finger account with some information on Prey. Here are some excerpts from the plan related to Prey:
The Prey project is moving along very swiftly and with
amazing results. We have an amazingly talented, dedicated
and focused team, and they're all doing above-and-beyond
work. The UK version of PC Gamer arrived yesterday and
had a major news item on Duke Nukem Forever. There's a
paragraph about Prey in there, that reads:
"3D Realms are, of course, working on their next
generation Prey engine, but as Prey slips to late 1998, the
need for a stop-gap is obvious. [Speaking about Duke 4.]
We were granted a furtive glance at Prey on a recent visit
to Texas and it looks so good it should be worshipped as
a god. it uses coloured [that's how they spell it] lighting
to phenomenal effect and pixellation has been eradicated
almost as effectively as smallpox."
| May 21, 1997 |
| May 20, 1997 |
Time again for that Weekly Update from 3D Realms. Paul says the demo that is going to be shown at E3 to have four levels or environments. The kinematic characters, which I previously showed on this page, are also being worked on. The new level designer, Matt Wood, has created some environments in Prey and we now have four screenshots of his work. Click below to access the 640x480 pictures:
| Screenshot #1 | Screenshot #2 | Screenshot #3 | Screenshot #4 |
Employees have found a new place on IRC to hang out, it's the channel #SWarrior, after Shadow Warrior. To add to the list of Prey team members visiting IRC, Lee Jackson stopped by a few days ago to talk about his music scores and sound effects. He mentioned that the sound engine for Prey will be a 3rd party engine and it has not been chosen yet. Since Prey is a Win95 game, it will support any sound card that is supported by Win95, or has Win95 drivers. That should be good news for compatablitly.
I also have this tidbit from George Broussard:
<GeorgB3DR> We're THIS close to having kinematic characters in Prey engine ;) Oh man, it's gonna be cool. They work now, just gotta get them in the engine.
| May 13, 1997 |
Paul Schuytema made an update on the Prey Dev update page. He summarizes what happened at CGDC, including this on the Prey demo:
Of course, for us here on Prey, we were totally jazzed about the response to our Prey demo. A lot of the
expo-goers who saw the demo thought that we were running some sort of canned hi-res animation, rather than
real-time rendering-it was great to prove them wrong. I found myself hanging back in the crowd, reveling at all
the gawkers elbow to elbow in front of the monitor.
Paul also mentioned that we will be seeing some of the levels from Matt Wood soon. Joe Siegler has updated the Bios on Apogee's web site to include pictures of Prey team members: Allen Dilling, Scott McCabe, Tom Pytel, Michael Wallin, and Matthew Wood.
| May 11, 1997 |
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) will be held in Atlanta, GA - June 19-21. 3D Realms will be showing Prey off again here as they did at CGDC. This time, it looks like a playable demo of Prey will be available. This is not a public show, it is for press, developers, and game companies. Hopefully, someone will post an article on the event including the Prey demo shown.
I added about 17 new Prey Links today, including pages, interviews, and previews. I was surprised by the amount of new pages going up around the web. If you run a page, let me know, and I'll add it if it isn't there.
Intel has officially announced their Pentium II processor. It is basically a Pentium Pro (P6) with MMX and a higher clock speed. Future Pentium II motherboards will also feature a new bus for video cards called AGP. 3DFX and many other 3D and 2D card manufactures are looking into this technology. It looks like the computer of choice for Prey would be a Pentium II system with a next generation 3DFX AGP card. The Pentium II and all future processors work best in 32-Bit OS's like WinNT, but right now it looks like Prey will not be supported in NT, but this may change in the future.
I saw on Preystation that Boot Magazine has an article explaining the Portal Technology behind Prey.
In portal games, the world is made of connected convex polyhedrons with
polygons allowing visibility between the polyhedron cells. "The idea is that these
cells are stored in a graph structure such that, when traversed, they will sort
correctly," explains Joe Gilby. "If you're in a room with an open door into another
room (all different portals), the far rooms are drawn first but just the pieces that are
visable through the door and window are actually rendered. The cells subdivide the
world into pieces that quickly identify areas that are of interest, and the objects
which exist in those cells. Portal supports arbitrary sloping surfaces, and
six-degrees-of-freedom viewing"
One advantage of this approach is the flexibility of defining the portal cells. Current
BSP implementations require splitting polygons that straddle the extened plane of
other polygons, so the more complicated the scene, the more polygons you have to
deal with. Portals require splitting in order to maintain polyhedron convexity, but it's
local to the immediate neighborhood and can be avoided by level designers, given a
little training. This allows for more complicated settings. Also, the portal cell based
approach can avoid screwing affects such as characters and explosions piercing
through walls, due to the portal cell drawing order. In a BSP renderer, the physics
have to prevent objects in one leaf penetrating into another or clipping, because the
renderer will dutifully draw them in both.
"In portal, objects are confined to thier containing cell, unless you explicitly say
otherwise," says Gilby. "This makes the superpostitioning come out right. We can
also use portal cells to define open spaces containing an atmosphere medium, such
as flowering water, billowing smoke, and murky water."
"What the portal technology gives us, is the ability to break free from static
environment geometry-our enviroments can change geometry dynamically, during
game play, in a far more interesting manner than simply opening doors and moving
platforms that are found in most BSP-based engines. Also, our radiosity system lets
us really take advantage of our engines ability to display 16-bit textures"
| May 5, 1997 |
As I first reported March 6th, there is be a preview of Prey in the magazine, Computer Gaming World, June Edition. It is on page 78. Because CGW saw the game in the first week of March, it has changed much since then. Anyone like to scan the article in? On a related note, Elitegames.com, which I am apart of, is also featured in the same issue.
Matt Wood, the new level designer, has moved to Garland, Texas, and is now officially working on Prey. As of now, Prey has it's first full time mapper.
| May 4, 1997 |
I've put a little list together for all of you that are wondering if your 3D card will work with Prey. This will appear in the next version of the Prey FAQ also.
- [Chipset:]
- [Card Maker, Product Name]
3DFX Voodoo Rush:
Hercules, Stingray 128/3D
3DFX Voodoo Graphics:
Deltron, RealVision Flash 3D
Diamond, Monster 3D
Orchid, Righteous 3D
Redition Vérité 1000:
Canopus, Total3D
Creative Labs, 3D Blaster PCI
Intergraph, Intense 3D 100
miro, miroCRYSTAL VRX
Sierra, Screamin' 3D
Secondly, I have found a nice site that does into detail about every 3D card out there. Nice place to keep up with the cards and chipsets. Dimension3D.com
| May 3, 1997 |
Chris Fidler has started the first Prey Web Ring for all Prey web pages to be interconnected. He also created a new webpage on Prey. I updated the links page today adding a few new links.
In another attempt to give more attention to the character, Talon Brave, 3D Realms released an image to go along with the Prey logo saying, "A Talon Brave Game." No, this isn't a new sub-title or motto.
| May 1, 1997 |
Fingers,
CGDCApogee has joined the Fingers bandwagon. A number of Apogee employees now have finger access and can be seen at Apogee's Fingers Page. Here is an excerpt of Scott Miller's plan.
Mike, ask Romero what he thought of our Prey demo? I heard from our friends at CDGC that the Prey demo was one of the big buzz topics. Despite your contention that Prey is dead or going nowhere, it's in fact mostly done (engine-wise), and we're well into making the game itself. Who knows, Hipnotic might want to license it someday. ;)
At the Computer Games Developer Conference, Paul Schuytema represented Apogee and 3D Realms. He can be seen in the picture to the right with his Prey shirt. No, these shirts are not sold to the public.
| Copyright © 1997 Lon
Matero. All Rights Reserved. _ Prey is copyrighted by 3D Realms Entertainment. |
