As the last sentence of the above excerpt illustrates, Duke Nukem Forever came to suffer a development process that simply could never complete itself because it always needed the newest latest and greatest renderer. There's also a very informative timeline. When a major game comes out, it is humorously suggested in many fan circles that Duke Nukem Forever will be switching to the renderer of that recently released game. Now that this problem seems to have been solved, 3DR have expanded their team considerably, from 22 to 31 members, marking what many hope to be the final stage of the development cycle. The principal technical reason given by Broussard for the extensive delays was the unstable tech base. Everything else, except Meqon, which is the physics engine, has been written from scratch by 3D Realms. George Broussard has stated several times that the only parts of the Unreal engine that are still part of their code base are UnrealScript, the networking code, and the level editor. The engine (now based on Unreal engine 2.0) is for the first time supposedly complete, and supporting such features as pixel shading, normal mapping and high dynamic range based lighting. Broussard estimates that around 95% of the previous level design work has since been scrapped. After hiring several new programmers, the team completely re-wrote the renderer and other game engine modules, beginning work on a new generation of game content. Ģ002 marked the start of what is widely considered to be the second project restart. However, in mid 2001 they cut themselves off entirely from Epic and went their own way. Originally utilizing id Software's Quake II engine, the 3D Realms team switched in 1998 to Epic's Unreal engine 1.0, forcing a revision of all previous work except for the game's textures, which were later replaced anyway.ģD Realms continued to receive updates from Epic for their newly licensed engine, and in 2000 they moved to the Unreal Engine 1.5 technology branch. The game has undergone at least one complete change to its game engine during the course of development.
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