August 1998

• Ritual two years old

I saw on Blue's News that Ritual/Hipnotic is now two years old.  This marks the day when the Prey team left 3D Realms to help form the company.  This also says that Prey has been in development for two years with the current Prey team.

• PreyPages Redesigned

The Prey Pages is online with a nice new look.  Also added is a random screenshot generator on the front page, pretty neat!

• Lee Jackson on IRC

This hasn't happened in a while. Someone from 3D Realms stopped by Undernet's #SWarrior channel and talked a bit about Prey.  Lee Jackson, Prey's Sound and Music Director, talked about the sound engine:

<Fnord3DR> I can say that it works, and works fast as h*ll according to Tom Pytel's testing.

<Fnord3DR> Also, I haven't seen anyone else use a music system that does what this one does, in quite the way it does it. If someone has, I missed it.

<Fnord3DR> LonMatero: PMR made it, but it works pretty much the way we spec'd it out. We told PMR what we wanted to do, and they said, "Okay. How's this?"

<NukeDukem> Will it sound better than Unreal's sound engine? :)

<Fnord3DR> NukeDukem: That's a toss-up. It might, but we haven't done a real A/B comparison with realtime gameplay.

<Fnord3DR> Toltec is built around some data and research done by a group of people from MIT, with expansions here and there.

• Prey Web Sites

John Dreese of The Preyground has announced that he is discontinuing his web page on Prey.  He has become busy with school so his time is limited, and the stealing of his page's name didn't have a good effect on him.  Good luck, John.

In other website news, Prey Portal has completed its redesign.  It looks like they have been busy incorporating many new features into the site like automatic finger news updates, news searcher, and new screenshots interface.  I think it is a well done job!

• Prey Sound Requirements

Here is a little overview of what you need to get sound in Prey:

DirectSound Compatible Sound Card

DirectSound3D Compatible Sound Card for 3D Sound

Non DirectSound3D Compatible Sound Card and Processor with MMX for 3D Sound

MMX is heavily used in the sound engine is highly recommended.

• Scott McCabe Interview

Universal Gaming has interviewed Prey Artist Scott McCabe.  He is asked a few questions about the artist side of the job and I think it is worth a look.

• Engine Article

PC Games has done a nice writeup on some of the features of the Prey engine, some good information here.  They say the engine is scalable to take advantage of Intel's future Katmai and IA-64 processors.