can some of the board users bring me up to speed?

[CarloForever]

Im curious really, its been such a long time since I first read about DNF in, I think it was PC Gamer, or maybe another.

It was the same day I got Quake II and couldnt install it on my windows 98 machine because it wouldnt work on 98 out of the box!!
Not sure what year that was? Anyways, I have seen and heard pieces and bits over the time between now and then and almost forgotten about DNF. I was talking about Duke the other day and it occured to me to look at DNF and see what was going on these days?

Whats the current standing then? Do we know anything now at all? Game engine, screens, technologys ect ect.
Im not going to ask when its due, i remeber that much!!

Well id appreciate any info that I have missed in the years. I miss the old Dukester!!

[Ivan]

They are still developing it and no media was released on it after that 2001 video, that I'm aware of.

Sorry but I'm not the best person to update you on the situation, there are some pretty good DNF Nerds in here.

[Emultra]

*Waits for FireFly to make his entry*

[CarloForever]

OK thanks for the replies.

Hmm is Firefly enterning the thread a good or bad thing? He knows a lot about the current state of play?

[Ras]

The main thing to know is that 3DR wrote their own renderer, so we really have no way of knowing how it looks, other than George saying it will be competitive. I think they wrote this renderer in late 2002/early 2003, and at that point they basically started the game over. So, the timeline dates from there, and George says he thinks they are finally on track and making progress. Certain elements are pre-alpha, certain are beta.

[Ivan]

CarloForever said:
OK thanks for the replies.

Hmm is Firefly enterning the thread a good or bad thing? He knows a lot about the current state of play?

Good thing.

He knows too much for his own good.

[JayBiggS]

There's lots of info around, the best way I've found is to look at all the posts by George Broussard(sp). He has some tidbits in his posts about the game. Or just wait for another one of these fine folks to fill you in.

[Kristian Joensen]

DNF uses the Unreal Engine 2 but they have replaced the following subsystems: rendering, animation, lighting, visibilty, AI, Sound and Physics. They have written alot of their own highlevel physics code and are using the Meqon physics engine for the lowlevel stuff, the only things remaing from the Unreal Engine is the leveleditor(UnrealED), Unrealscript(heavily modified) and file and memory management.

The game is so late becuase of the fact that there where way too few people on them team especially programmers. This resulted in them beeing unable to finish the engine. Eventually they restarted in 2002 and hired alot more people.

This is when they replaced the above mentioned susbsystems and by November 2002 the new renderer was done, the content work on the current iteration was started in January 2003.

They have so far got 8 GB's data, when released it will probably be around 6-8 GB's.

The renderer will provide competetive graphics and is fully DirectX 9 compatable and supports pixels shaders, vertex shaders, normal mapping, bump mapping, HDR, per-pixel lighting and probably stencil shadows.

Support for shader model 3.0 is in and the engine is finished for the first time in the projects history and things are going well.

[Suppressor]

Some parts of the game have reached beta stadium, and 3D Realms is looking for a new leveldesigner (maybe for Duke4). George showed some new screenies on a parking lot, but we havn´t and won´t see them...
The will release mor data (images, movies etc...) when they are done... so this is it...

[Cerberus_e]

the game will have pipebombs, freezer, shrinker, and the battlelord "would be a popular choice to bring back"

the game will not be free-roaming like GTA. because linearity is what fits for a game like DNF

CarloForever said:
Hmm is Firefly enterning the thread a good or bad thing?

I'd pay attention if I were you, he's dangerous
well, in fact he's a good debater and knows a lot of George's quotes (George = the big boss of it all, together with Scott ).
but kristian joensen is his twin, and he replied already

I'm surprised quake 2 doesn't work on your win98 system, it does on mine

[Kristian Joensen]

Suppressor said:
Some parts of the game have reached beta stadium, and 3D Realms is looking for a new leveldesigner (maybe for Duke4). George showed some new screenies on a parking lot, but we havn´t and won´t see them...
The will release mor data (images, movies etc...) when they are done... so this is it...

No not exactly they aren't looking for level designer but a game designer.

[FireFly]

Yes, Kristian said most of it.

Content-wise they're fairly advanced. In relation to a post talking about alpha status George said a few months ago that work had started on all but two levels, and indicated that others were in "pretty advanced states", "so it mostly balances out". I think "balances out" in this case means that the levels are overall, at or near alpha, but obviously the game hasn't hit alpha yet because not all levels have passed that 'alpha point'.

We know that 15 enemies are ingame, presumably with beta quality skins and animation (we know they're skinned), and that they're working on more. As for which enemies are returning, George said the ragdoll Octobrain was still in, so I'd say Octobrains are confirmed. Also, very recently George showed some DNF screenshots to a Shacker when they met, and he mentioned that there were "a bunch of police-like SWAT dudes", which is interesting.

All the planned weapons are in and up to beta quality, but there's a few whacky weapon ideas they're still considering including.

Hundreds of props have been done, and the team has been outsourcing modelling work to Liquid Entertainment, in particular for creating "500k-1m poly models" to generate normal maps. I think this indicates that the characters won't quite be up to the standard shown in UE3 powered games like Gears of War, which uses models with tens of millions of polygons for the normal maps.

As Kristian said, techwise they're very solid, and the engine's been engine's been locked since early 2003. Physics-wise they're also looking good, having switched to Meqon's physics system. Meqon was recently bought by AGEIA but George recently confirmed that this won't affect DNF and in an earlier statement he confirmed they are very far along with the physics implementation.

"We're just now hearing about this, too. On the surface I'm not too happy about it as we were getting to a very very stable point with our physics and nearing a point of being tech complete, and just working on polish".

So, it's looking very good.

[Kristian Joensen]

What 10s of millions of polys ? Where did you hear that number I heard a number more like 1-2 million polies. Are you sure you aren't confusing character models with an entire scene ?

If you are referring to an entire scene then that number seam familiar to me.

[Kristian Joensen]

Ohh, btw Firefly you are not 100% accurate with the weapons only about 99% But here it is from George's mouth:

"Yes. In, with animations, sound pass, and final textures. We'll probably add a couple more as we go, and there are some whacky ideas we want to explore, but all the base guns are in and we could ship with what we have."

[SyntaxN]

I think this indicates that the characters won't quite be up to the standard shown in UE3 powered games like Gears of War, which uses models with tens of millions of polygons for the normal maps.

I think that´s something interesting, it looks like you don´t need uber-high poly models to creat great ingame details...
Bungie also uses normalmaps for their Halo 2 models, but they never created highpoly models for generating a normalmap, they just built lowpoly models and "painted" the normalmaps on them
imo it´s not necessary to make models with millions of poyls when you can only use a small percentage of them ingame

[CarloForever]

WOW. Thanks for all the answers.

Sounds really interesting, its a shame theres no media available yet. From the sound of things though they must be nearing the point when screenshots might be released I guess.

Maybe from the sound of everything it could come in 2006, although im not even going to speculate really given the infamous WID status.

Sounds like a lot of effort has gone into the game at least, im sure people will love it as the market is crying out ofr the return of the Duke!!!

Does anyone know about the voice and speech? Will they still be a little offensive or is it going to be sterilised for kids kind of language.

I think Duke should really be saying Eat Shit and Die No political correctness with this dude!

[FireFly]

Kristian Joensen said:
What 10s of millions of polys ? Where did you hear that number I heard a number more like 1-2 million polies. Are you sure you aren't confusing character models with an entire scene ?

If you are referring to an entire scene then that number seam familiar to me.

Well, I'm actually basing that largely off what Cliffy said in an audio interview I listened to. Transcription:

"I was reading an interview in Film and Videa Magazine a couple of months ago with some, uh Hollywood effects guy, and he was talking about you know, how game artists are having a hard time evolving because they're used to making 300 polygon characters and they don't know how to make a 3 million polygon one. And I'm like yeah that's because our guys are making them with 20 million, *****!"

http://ww.ggl.com/media.php

It's at the very end, if you want to listen.

That's probably the maximum though, although I'm sure the average is more than 1 or 2 million polygons. For example:

"We saw goblinlike creatures rendered in amazing detail, one of which was a gigantic, heavyset humanoid creature with long teeth that was composed of some 6 million polygons, then reduced to a version consisting of a comparatively meager 6,500 polygons that looked almost as good, thanks to the normal-mapped textures."

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/03...s_6092217.html

CarloForever said:
Does anyone know about the voice and speech? Will they still be a little offensive or is it going to be sterilised for kids kind of language.

I don't think it will be sterilised. They're going for an M rated game.

[EmperorZorn]

All we know for sure is that Duke will be in that game >_>;
Anything else can and will change if its for the sake of the gameplay.

[Neptune]

can some of the board users bring me up to speed?

Sure thing.

/presses moch 5 turbo boost button.

Ok, you are now up to speed.

Still no new (as in screen shot or vid) info.

[hell-angel]

Ivan said:

Good thing.

He knows too much for his own good.

I have heard rumours that the CIA is chasing firefly, because they are afraid he knows to much about the area 51 stuff.

[KaiserSoze]

2006 should be a good year. (finally)

[chitown]

CarloForever said:
can some of the board users bring me up to speed?

It's coming, very soon.

[KaiserSoze]

chitown said:

It's coming, very soon.

i personally think they're at a state where they can probably show off alot of the game.

damn, we are so close. the closest we've ever been.

bring on the duke!

[hell-angel]

KaiserSoze said:

i personally think they're at a state where they can probably show off alot of the game.

Well, with most of the levels done (without the fillers I suppose) of course they can show off a lot of the game, now only if they where willing to.