"Prey" is coming

[Duoae]

Kristian Joensen said:
What do you mean by physical properties ?

As far as i can tell from the videos, Prey used portal technology to physically link different parts of the 3-dimensional space of the levels. (Hence the reason they called it a 4-Dimensional engine) Imagine, if you will, a sci-fi way of desrcribing it. It was like a rift in space, linking planet X with Earth, London, 43 Mildew terrace. There is nothing behind the "anomaly", but the rift is able to be seen from the front.

"Portals are holes in space - connecting different geometric areas"

ie. Not teleporters in the normal, classic sense.

Would you be able to duplicate all, some or none of the Prey E3 1998 Infinite Mhz interview ?

If the answers is some, then wich ones ?

I wouldn't be able to duplicate any of the E3 1998 effects.

However, as i already said, you can have a camera (like in HL2) for viewing stuff - and the display can easily be set to be one-sided and transparent on the reverse. It also can easily be set so that when you turn the "viewing pane" upside down that the view will be affected accordingly.

Creating "dynamic portals" is "easy" as well - as i said, you could combine the teleporting tech of Q3 or UT with the camera and view pane thingies and apply it to a dropable mine. But making a physical rip in space between the two is beyond (AFAIK) what BSP base engines can do - that's if i'm interpreting the 4-dimensional thing correctly and it wasn't just spin-talk. Looking at the videos, they produce something much smoother and dynamic than a teleporter, but i suppose that's what it might be. As i said, i'd need to look at code or be told either way which it is.

So i would say, yes. Prey tech is possible but maybe not in exactly the same way..... ie. no shooting through portals, or if there is, then it is a secondary calculation that takes position, direction and force into account when hitting the view plane and translates it to the portal's opposite number..... i think that may be less computationally expensive than having a 4-D physical rip in space.....

[lonestar]

Kristian Joensen said:
The Unreal Engine, ofcourse. DNF is still DNF, and I am sure Prey is still Prey.

there were also the quake2 engine, that's why i asked.

talking about story, typical duke gameplay elements, the characters, and what 3drealms wants to achieve in general with this game, i'm sure dnf hasn't been changed alot.

but it's still another experience to play it on the unreal than on 3drealms proprietary game engine. differences in movement, animations and graphics. and i'm sure, they made the decision to leave some maps behind to replace it with other levels, when they started over. reasons can be design aspects or the implementation of gameplay elements in a more apppropriate world. i'm sure, there were moments where they realised, it's better to doesn't make it the same way like we had done it before.

george said, they couldn't bring their ideas and visions to ingame-life, cause of unreal engine's limitations. they can now do things, which weren't possible before.

it would be really interesting to see, how it plays and looks, the good ol' dnf build. making a comparison between the final version of dnf and the old one.

[Kristian Joensen]

Have you guys seen the E3 demo of Prey from 1998(I am not talking about the IMHZ interview here) its really cool.

[Ronald McDonald]

You mean the trailer?

[Kristian Joensen]

Yes, you could call it that. If this version of the game is just 1% as cool as that, then the game development industry can shut down.

[lonestar]

it's obviously a trailer.

hm, shouldn't be too long anymore 'til the announcement.....

[Kristian Joensen]

I am really looking forward to this game. I can't wait till they annouce it and give us some info.

Kristian Joensen said:
I am really looking forward to this game. I can't wait till they annouce it and give us some info.

I wouldn't get my hopes up just yet.

[Lengis]

I'm looking forward to the game too. When this game was first announced, I was looking forward to it more than DNF. Hell, the main reason why they didn't make their own engine for DNF, was cuz they didn't want it to directly compete with Prey. Prey was supposed to be the big fish with the original, state of the art Portal Engine. DNF was using the cruddy Q2 engine, remember.

Today, I gotta admit, I'm less enthusiatic about it, but the D3 engine is a fantastic engine, and I'm sure the game will be great.

[szevvy]

I'm just hoping that the developers at 3d realms don't discover World of Warcraft, or we can kiss progress goodbye for a few years

[Gryph]

szevvy said:
I'm just hoping that the developers at 3d realms don't discover World of Warcraft, or we can kiss progress goodbye for a few years

They are already avid players. Well atleast George Broussard is.

szevvy said:
I'm just hoping that the developers at 3d realms don't discover World of Warcraft, or we can kiss progress goodbye for a few years

If Prey is being developed by a third party company like Human Head Studios, and 3D Realms is producing, 3D Realms won't hinder the development of it at all.

god I hope so

[Kristian Joensen]

Viper Knight said:

If Prey is being developed by a third party company like Human Head Studios, and 3D Realms is producing, 3D Realms won't hinder the development of it at all.

3D Realms helped Remedy with the game design, that is kinda important.

Kristian Joensen said:
3D Realms helped Remedy with the game design, that is kinda important.

No. It was very important. Max Payne would have probably been quite different without George & Scott's sage advice and input.

[Gabrobot]

I'd just like to point out that Doom 3 is actually not a BSP based engine. It's a portal based renderer and calculates visibility in real-time. (I got this info right from Brian Harris at id Software) From what I know of Doom 3 and Prey's portal technology I don't think Doom 3 works entirely like Prey, but it is real-time and implementing user created portals and so forth shouldn't require any major changes to the core engine. I think this may be one of the reasons why the Doom 3 engine was picked, because all the other major engines such as Quake 3, Unreal, Source, ect. are BSP based which wouldn't be capable of doing what Prey did with portals, as you've pointed out.

Besides portals, Doom 3's unified lighting makes it an excellent engine for heavily destructable enviroments. It also lets level designers render the level in real-time as they create it in the editor (the editor is incorporated into the engine)...this seems very much like Prey as well. I really think the Doom 3 engine is the perfect choice for Prey, and I can't wait to see what Prey's like now.

[Parkar]

Interesting.

[Gryph]

Indeed, that's one of the more interesting things I've read in a while.

[Duoae]

As far as i know, Doom 3 is still a BSP engine. It's just that the Vis and Rad functions are done in real-time. The actual geometry is pre-calculated. I hate to tell you, but a portal-based renderer is not a portal engine. It is a BSP engine which uses portal-type calculations/algorithms to tell the engine what to draw and when. The BSP "tree" is still there. Basically an upgraded Quake 3 engine.... which is what the Doom 3 engine is.

With traditional BSP based games, such old Doom or any Quake based game, raw maps would go through 4 compile stages: CSG (texturing), BSP (geometry), VIS (visibily sets), and RAD (lighting). While Id staff confirmed that the relatively quick CSG and BSP processes will still have to be run, the lengthy VIS and RAD processes will actually occur real time. The game engine itself is integrated into the devlepment cycle, rather then act as a disctinct entity as with Half-Life or Quake 3 mapping. This new methodology will give content developers much closer to real-time feedback in developing environments, allowing for shorter compile times and faster tweaking of major gaming aspects such as lighting and sound design.

[8IronBob]

Kristian Joensen said:

3D Realms helped Remedy with the game design, that is kinda important.

Yeah, but did 3DR help Arush and Sunstorm when it came to DN:MP? That's another big game that 3DR was trying to make big as a filler for DNF, or something. You would think that would've been big enough to get another company started with Prey, too, like that Human Head Studios. I mean, 3DR wants only top-notch games with their labels, and nothing less (like id Software did with RtCW and Raven's games, yeah right, Carmack's not the type of guy who wants as much quality as 3DR does). Well, hopefully things'll be great with that game, I'd love to see what it's gonna look like eventually...

[Crosma]

Lengis said:
You guys realize that the reason why it hasn't shown up in other games is because it's not that big of a deal anymore right?

No, it's because it's incredibly difficult to implement. If you're writing a typical shooter then it's a waste of development time.

[Lengis]

>>>>>>>If you're writing a typical shooter then it's a waste of development time.

Yes, it is. What significant advantage does portal tech offer to gameplay? It's more like a gimick than anything else.

[Joe Siegler]

Lengis said:
>>>>>>>If you're writing a typical shooter then it's a waste of development time.

Yes, it is. What significant advantage does portal tech offer to gameplay? It's more like a gimick than anything else.

Once again, as you haven't played any of this stuff, isn't it a bit out of your league for you to act like you're an expert on how it's implemented in any game?

[Lengis]

Joe3DR said:

Once again, as you haven't played any of this stuff, isn't it a bit out of your league for you to act like you're an expert on how it's implemented in any game?

I dono, it depends on how it's used. For a single player game, I can't imagine it being very usefull. It might be kinda neat in a multiplayer deathmatch type game (even the guy in that old e3 video said that), but those kinda died out after Quake 3. Deathmatch was good enough back then, but people want more out of their FPS these days.

[Damien_Azreal]

If you havn't tried it, don't knock it.

Just because it doesn't seem like a good idea to you, doesn't mean it won't kick all sorts of ass.

[Steve]

***** me. Prey is back...

[Kristian Joensen]

Yep and according to George it has been in development since late 2001. Plus, 3D Realms have a policy to not reveal games until about 6 months prior to release so except to see Prey soon.

[Steve]

Out of the blue for me. I didn't take much notice of the threads in other parts of the forum as it just looked like a load of bull crap. But, I was wrong. Prey!

[Iggy]

Steve said:
***** me. Prey is back...

Hell no.

[Kristian Joensen]

Yes it is, this is the official Prey forum you are posting in.

[Steve]

Kristian Joensen said:
this is the official Prey forum you are posting in.

I gathered that. Nothing escapes you

[Kristian Joensen]

I was replying to Iggy.

[Iggy]

Kristian Joensen said:
I was replying to Iggy.

Kristian, the first part of Steve's post.

[Kristian Joensen]

Ahh, I understand know