Comment about the engine.

[3DProgrammer]

First of all, I just wanted to say congratulations to the 3D Realms and Human Head people. I’m sure the game will be a hit.

Now after playing the demo and looking at the engine it looks like you decided to keep it simple, expanding or modifying the engine just as necessary without doing anything that would take too much time to implement. I guess that’s the way you get products done with no delays.

Also it made me remember a comment that George Broussard made in an interview with 1up.com

1UP: So when you see what Human Head's doing with it now, does it really capture what you guys envisioned back then? What it's like comparing today's portals to 10 years ago's portals?

GB: It's pretty close; it's fundamentally the same stuff. We're all surprised that no one else really took that direction, because they're not really technically that hard to do. I know they got a lot of press from being like a whiz-bang cool thing back then, but technically, they just weren't too difficult to do, and there are some neat gameplay things you can do with it.

Now I feel that the comment was unfair. The technology today makes the whole basic portal rendering very easy. I’m sure the current Prey in the Doom 3 engine just renderer the portal’s content to a pbuffer or FBO. And in that way it’s as easy as George said, in fact the most complicated problem is make all the entities go through the portals correctly, but that’s it really.

This was very different to what William Scarboro had to do. He couldn’t the portal contents to a texture; he had to deal with a 16-bit depth buffer, clip planes that weren’t accelerated (so he probably had to use something like oblique frustum clipping that would bring several issues with precision in the z-buffer), no stencil buffer, and more stuff. I’m sure that’s why it was so complex and why it had to be rewritten. So that’s why I think it was an unfair comment, in fact if the same technology was used together with the lighting and shadowing of the Doom 3 engine then for example the lights from one side of the portal will affect the look of the other side of the portal making it more realistic (you can check that by using your lighter near a portal that leads somewhere else, you will see that the lighter’s light doesn’t affect the lighting of the other side of the portal).

Having that said, is there any chances that the source code of the old engine is released? I’m not talking about art and all other stuff, just the source code of the engine so programmers can get something out of the work made by William in those years.

[3DProgrammer]

Seems everybody at 3DR is too busy...

[Steve]

Having that said, is there any chances that the source code of the old engine is released? I’m not talking about art and all other stuff, just the source code of the engine so programmers can get something out of the work made by William in those years.

No. Never. It was hard to push for the Duke3D source code. 3D Realms will never release the source code for the old engine. Never.

[hell-angel]

Portals where allready working fully in the original version, so it is a fair comment.

[3DProgrammer]

Originally Posted by Steve

No. Never. It was hard to push for the Duke3D source code. 3D Realms will never release the source code for the old engine. Never.

If anything, the fact that they released the sourced of past projects says that there is a chance.

Originally Posted by hell-angel

Portals where allready working fully in the original version, so it is a fair comment.

I think you got my statement wrong. Yes I know that both in 97 and 98 versions of the engine they had portals working, but that doesn’t mean the work was easy. William Scarboro himself said in usenet that it was a really complex system. What was unfair was George Broussard’s comment saying that it wasn’t “technically that hard to do”. And also I would think it would be a shame to have the source code stored old server without being really used for anything.

PS: Thanks Joe and everybody else at 3DR for sharing some info about William Scarboro and his work in the last Apogee Legacy.

[Joe Siegler]

Originally Posted by 3DProgrammer

PS: Thanks Joe and everybody else at 3DR for sharing some info about William Scarboro and his work in the last Apogee Legacy.

You're welcome, but trying to butter me up won't get that old source released.

Seriously, I doubt you'll ever see "old Prey".

[Markus96]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

You're welcome, but trying to butter me up won't get that old source released.

Seriously, I doubt you'll ever see "old Prey".

I'll give you my charizardz and blastoise for it!

I'LL EVEN THROW IN MEW!

[3DProgrammer]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

You're welcome, but trying to butter me up won't get that old source released.

Don't worry, I'm old enough to know that.

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

Seriously, I doubt you'll ever see "old Prey".

That's too bad. All the technology it's soon to be 10 years old, and as I said my intention wasn't to get the art or concepts, just the engine source. I don't think it would be terribly hard to allocate a few minutes every now and then to release that stuff.

[hell-angel]

Originally Posted by 3DProgrammer

I think you got my statement wrong. Yes I know that both in 97 and 98 versions of the engine they had portals working, but that doesn’t mean the work was easy. William Scarboro himself said in usenet that it was a really complex system. What was unfair was George Broussard’s comment saying that it wasn’t “technically that hard to do”. And also I would think it would be a shame to have the source code stored old server without being really used for anything.

Well, the fact that it is complex doesn't make it difficult to create. A car engine is also complex. Still, very easy to create.

Originally Posted by 3DProgrammer

That's too bad. All the technology it's soon to be 10 years old, and as I said my intention wasn't to get the art or concepts, just the engine source. I don't think it would be terribly hard to allocate a few minutes every now and then to release that stuff.

The reason for has mostly the do with legal issues.
Also, if other companies read the source code they can create the same thing easier. Which means prey 2 will lose it's edge. (providing there will be a prey 2).

[Aegeri]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

You're welcome, but trying to butter me up won't get that old source released.

Seriously, I doubt you'll ever see "old Prey".

Wouldn't it be "Lameprey"

[brandon105]

wtf?!?

[ZuljinRaynor]

LCE of Prey comes with "Old Prey." You heard it here first.

[Nessus]

Why dont you believe them when they say it was fairly simple to create the portals both then and now? Haven't you ever seen the video of the portal technology running on an old 200mhz system? If you haven't you should check that out, it's very cool.

[Micki!]

I remember a quote from George (i think it was George, whoever it was, it was official) saying that the Portals really were not that hard to create, and that they were surprised to see all these years passing by, without any game companies even TRYING to make portals like this...

Only other project coming to mind from what i reckon, is that new game, from Lionhead...

[Drewcifer]

Actually, Serious Sam 1 had static portals (I haven't played 2).

[3DProgrammer]

Originally Posted by hell-angel

Well, the fact that it is complex doesn't make it difficult to create. A car engine is also complex. Still, very easy to create.

The engine was written from scratch from what I know. And no, there wasn't a much research into that kind of technology at the time so it would be like trying to do a really complex cutting-edge car engine from scratch, its complex and it’s not easy to create.

Originally Posted by hell-angel

The reason for has mostly the do with legal issues.

I don’t know, there would be legal issues if they used some commercial library for sound or whatever, but if that’s not it then 3DRealms would own the whole thing. If anything, I think they just don’t want to deal with people complaining about features that were in the original Pray and didn’t make it into the Prey that just went gold.

Originally Posted by hell-angel

Also, if other companies read the source code they can create the same thing easier. Which means prey 2 will lose it's edge. (providing there will be a prey 2).

Making portals is easy now, and has nothing to do with what you had to do in the past. It wouldn’t make any sense to approach portals now in the same way William Scarboro did at the time. FBO’s, stencil operations and accelerated clip planes makes everything much easier to implement.

Originally Posted by Nessus

Why dont you believe them when they say it was fairly simple to create the portals both then and now?

Yes I do believe that is it easy to implement, and if you read my posts I said that. And I don’t believe that it was easy to implement then because I’m a programmer myself, I have been doing graphics programming since late 97. I’m aware of the limitations at the time. And also because William Scarboro the lead engine programmer in the old Prey said it was really hard, here is a post from comp.graphics.algorithms

Been there, done that. I coded what was going to be the Prey engine for the game Prey from 3D Realms; there was an exodus of people from the team, including myself, and the engine has since been scrapped. I'm really not a big fan of portal engines anymore, especially where all rooms are relative (which is what I had) in the manner you propose. There are many ugly problems in maintaining such an engine: two rooms linked by more than one portal (which results in rendering a room twice, basically, and even though they won't overlap, all the culling and transforms are duplicated), graph maintenance with spatial discontinuities, collision detection through portals, handling sound where one sound can seem to be coming from many different locations, rendering characters moving across portals that the z-buffer won't handle correctly, etc. It wasn't fun. The effects were really awesome, though. In hindsight, portal tricks such as these should be used as tricks, not as an engine paradigm.
William Scarboro

Originally Posted by Nessus

Haven't you ever seen the video of the portal technology running on an old 200mhz system? If you haven't you should check that out, it's very cool.

I saw both videos in http://www.imhz.com/videos/.

[Danule]

didnt shadow warrior have something similar to these "portals" so you could actually have room over room in the BUILD engine and see from one floor to another?

[CrimsonHead]

It's been a long time since I've made Duke3d(same engine as SW) levels but if I remember right the way to do it would be to teleport the player in places in between floors like in elevator shafts, ect. Close, but not really the same thing as portals, with portals the two rooms behave like they are actually connected in a way it acts like a hallway between the two places.