July 1998

• New 360 Screenshot

Sweezing something in on the last day of July, 3D Realms released a 2nd 360 degree screenshot of Prey.  This screenshot features a level created by Matt Wood.   This is our first look at a Tocara city, and I must add, it is impressive.   The screenshot requires Live Picture to view and it allows you to zoom in and out and move around.

• Universal Gaming Network Interview

Paul Schuytema was interviewed about his carrier and a little on Prey.  This is one of the better interviews I have seen in some time.  Paul says when asked about the 'Talon Brave Games:' "Right now, we have the story arc planned out through 4 unique Talon Brave adventures, the first being Prey."  Interesting.  Four games, novels, or movies planned out already.  Paul is also asked about the Prey OS and Preditor.

• KMFDM Speaks out on Prey

Joe Siegler at 3D Realms found some Q&A answers about the Prey music on KMFDM's website. The questions are by some fans and answered by the band.

Q: I was wondering if there is going to be a sountrack for Prey, or do we have to buy the game to hear the music?
A: That would be not in my control since i am only writing music, the people that develop, market and distribute prey may opt one way or another.

Q: Are the tracks on Prey to be instrumental?
A: There will be some vocals on "prey".

• Prey Development Update

I guess I spoke too soon about no Prey news, here is a large update from Paul Schuytema with a long overdue Prey Development Update:

Wow, I was just looking back over our Prey news and realized how damn long it's been since I penned an update for you good and patient folks. Yes, we're still alive and well here in Talon Brave country, and working our butts off on the game!

On the coding side of things, we made a huge decision-we decided to move Prey into DirectX territory to support multiple 3D cards. As you know, we'd been developing under Glide and we'd been tentatively planning to utilize OpenGL as our support API. As we evaluated the whole 3D accelerator question more fully, it became clear that Microsoft had made some very welcome course corrections in DirectX 6, making at a very attractive option. That, plus their support assistance and the fact that we only have to deal with one fully-implemented API and vendor (and that every 3D card out there has some sort of DirectX support) made the decision easy.

So, for the past few weeks since E3, we've been porting everything over. Tom did all the low level initialization coding and texture management and William is handling the rendering side of things. It was also a great opportunity to dive in and optimize the rendering pipeline so that it should be faster under DX6 than under Glide, and that's a good thing indeed.

Once William wraps up his end of things next week, he'll be jumping into Preditor once again to support a number of features requested by our GSEs.
Loyal has been working full-tilt to nail down our character LOD system, and he's done a commendable job. It's cool, because the character polygon reduction process takes into account the texture swatches that an artist has laid out, so that we keep excellent visual continuity on a reduced actor's surface. Also, since it's a Loyal thing, he's thrown in way too much control, like massive undo and the fact that you can texture an animated model while it's cycling through LOD levels (not useful at all, but tres cool in principle).

Tom has been "low level boy"-polishing his gem of a PreyOS at the lowest levels of networking and entity communication.

Tom is also handling the implementation of our sound and music system. For those of you who didn't get to hear about Prey at E3, we're using Power Micro Research's Toltec Audio Engine in Prey. PMR is a small firm based out of Austin and they came to us a while back to show us their 3D audio system. At that point, we'd been using Diamondware's Sound Toolkit, and Tom Tucker came by to show us Toltec. It was a 3D system, but we weren't sure whether or not we wanted to go that route-what we wanted was pure speed. As it turned out, their 3D sound system is the fastest sound API we've ever seen, and it delivers 3D on any Windows PC with MMX. Man, it's a sweet system, and we've had them do some custom coding for us so that it fits neatly into the PreyOS. Oh yes, working with PMR, we've got the Toltec system to handle fully interactive music... more on this later. Just use your imagination: KMFDM original music, but totally interactive... man, oh man!

On the content side of things, the GSEs are wrapping up their initial work-through of environments in chapters two and three and are getting ready to dive into chapter five. Allen and David have been cranking out the models, which means that between 2D textures and the plethora of Skinner texturing work to do, Scott and Steve have plenty to keep them off the streets at night.

Some big news here.  The Prey team has *finally* decided on their 3D API.  After being strong supporters of 3Dfx exclusivly for the past few years, they have switched over to Direct3D.  I agree with the decision since now we know just about every 3D Card out there will work with Prey, and that is very good news.

The 3rd party Audio Engine for Prey has finally been announced also. From Power Micro Research, it is called the Toltec Audio Engine.   Here are the major features of the engine:

• True 360 Degree Positional Audio
• Microsoft DirectSound Compatible
• Highly Optimized MMX Implementation
• Integrates Quickly to Sound Card Driver or Software Application
• Easily Accelerated with DSP
• Environmental Modeling / Room Acoustics
• Configurable to work over headphones or 2, 4, or 5 speakers
• Integrated support for head position tracking
• Matches processing to listener physiology

3D Sound is another thing the Prey team has been weary to support, but now it is in the game and done! Some more good news.

• What's happening with Prey?

3D Realms isn't saying much more about Prey after they gave everything out at E3. There have been a few interviews, but nothing new was said, simply all "no comments."  In the gaming community, there have been a great number of polls about which game you are looking forward to the most, which I don't consider news.  Maybe something new will come in the near future, lets prey :)

• Prey Team Intranet

In Paul Schuytema's .plan yesterday, he told us about a new way the Prey Team will be orgainizing their resources:

On the Prey front, Martinus gave me a great idea and I ran with it the past two days-we built a "PreyWeb"-an intranet just for the Prey team that handles all docs, from design docs, story docs, idea docs, the instruction docs for Preditor, Skinner and the PreyOS, as well as bug reports (us? bugs? never!). It should be a pretty cool resource and easier for me to maintain rather than the ten zillion files I've crammed into SourceSafe.