The Prey website

[Fat John]

Look closely at what's there already, and refresh to see a different animation each time. Ilovebees anyone?

Also look at the ads

[ADM]

There's two different flash animations playing:

http://www.prey.com/prey-opt-5a-kid.swf

and

http://www.prey.com/prey-opt-5a.swf

[Fat John]

They may want us to search for clues as all the mysteriously named links lead to a search engine. I don't have the energy for that, but I've boxed some interesting words below.

[Ronald McDonald]

Different animation?

All I see is some portal being opened and some schoolgirl with ponytails and red lit-up eyes appearing shortly and screeming something with an echo behind it.

Over and over.....

EDIT:

I see now, so this "Bird-Of-Prey"- thingie is the new logo?

[Bludd]

I also only see that anim, but if you follow the links ADM posted, you should be able to see both.

[Fat John]

Bored...

[Fat John]

numero deux:

[Doppelgofer]

looks scary....

i want it

edit: check out the source of the site...you get this in the meta description:

<meta name="description" content="0100100001101001011001000110100101101110
0110011100100000011101000110100001101001011011
1001100111011100110010000001101001011011100010
0000011101000110100001100101001000000111001101
1011110111010101110010011000110110010100100000
0110001101101111011001000110010100100000011010
0101110011001000000111001101101111001000000011
0010001100000111010001101000001000000110001101
1001010110111001110100011101010111001001111001
0010111000100000010010010110011000100000011110
0101101111011101010010011101110010011001010010
0000011011000110111101101111011010110110100101
1011100110011100100000011001100110111101110010
0010000001101101011011110111001001100101001000
0001101001011011100110011001101111001110100010
0000010100000100001100100000010001110110000101
1011010110010101110010001011100010000001001010
0111010101101110011001010010000001101001011100
1101110011011101010110010100101110001000000101
0111011011110111001001101100011001000111011101
1010010110010001100101001000000110010001100101
01100010011101010111010000101110" />

anyone know binary?

looks like we have ourselves the new 'littlechiquita' and 'ilovebees'

[Doppelgofer]

translated:

Hiding things in the source code is so 20th century. If youre looking for more info: PC Gamer. June issue. Worldwide debut.

omg i've actually find something out for the first time in my life...i feel special

looks like more info in the next pcgamer

[Fat John]

http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/Pl...ry_To_Text.asp

[Doppelgofer]

why am i up at 2 in the morning, half naked translating binary code?

[Mediocre, Man.]

This is soooo fecking awesome. GOOOOO 3drealms!

[KaiserSoze]

when you hit the prey site, it'll end with either: coming-soon.html or comingsoon.html.

i think this is the trigger for which flash animation you get. the kid or the logo.

also did a search for talequeh and it's a city in oklahoma.

definately lots of hidden stuff here. let's see what we can find.

[Duoae]

Yes! It's finally here... OMG! I going to go crazy!!! Why did i have to go to sleep last night?!!! WHY!!!!!! Damn you dirty apes! It was earth after all!!!!

Searching commences.....

[Duoae]

I found out what "Joanie Loves Tchotchkes" means.

Apparently, that phrase is from a smartmoney article.

Tchotchkes is the stuff that companies send customers to say, "Hey, we're thinking of you, [fill in name]...Happy Holidays" — the subtext of which is "We sent you and thousands of other people a [fill in item] so that you'll keep buying our widgets."

THANKS 3DR! WE'RE THINKING OF YOU TOO!!

[yossa]

I have extracted the bitmaps used in the flash files:



I can only assume that the boy's/girls's face is cut out from an actual screenshot. Dare I say - plastic

Though I am anticipating the moment 3DR and HH prove me wrong - I know they know most of us aren't actually fond of things looking like plastic in games (except for plastic things of course! ).

[Duoae]

Okay, moved this.

Also found (i think) about bergmanator.

Bergmanator seems to be a nickname of someone in texas. I found their website... i don't know if it's a skitting name or something, but it's not a common thing to be saying. Although i don't know exactly what it refers to.

Another interesting thing about this nickname is that the only place i found it no longer exists anymore and it was hosted on http://www.bravenet.com/... Talon Brave anyone? Seems like 3DR pulled a lot of "local" folklore/character into this.....

Anyone here from or around Texas?

[EDIT]

Been looking at the songs listed on the right side of the page....

Running Man is a song by Fancy. Look the lyrics up. IMO they are in keeping with the ideas behing Prey.

Humpty-Hump a song by rap artist "Shock G". I read the lyrics, but i don't see any link. TBH i'm slightly scared by those "packets".

Cha Cha. Well, this one is quite interesting. Apart from being a song/music, this is also used quite a lot with prey.

From someone who did Predator "Castes":

Predators have a total of Seven Descriptions of Life

4. Cha
"Honored prey" They must be capable of sending us to the Deity.

Cha is also referenced with predators (not just the ficticious film and comic ones) stalking their prey.

And finally another interesting one and the only ticked song:

Macarena
The actor Vincent Ventresca played a part in a TV film (pilot) and series called Prey - about evolved humans in our midst, trying to kill us all in a survival of the fittest type thing.

There's also a place called Sierra de la Macarena.

“In Colombia, the Sierra de la Macarena, an obscure geological anomaly covered with a living evolutionary laboratory”

“Why is the Sierra de la Macarena so important? The Macarena is the convergence point of six major ecological and geological forces, each exerting its own unique pressure on the local flora and fauna. The end result is a high rate of mutation. The Sierra de la Macarena has been called a biological hothouse.”

Very interesting......

Biologically enhanced or evolved humans? Hunters? I hope this site continues to get better as the weeks and months go on.....

[Kev_Hectic]

yossa said:
I have extracted the bitmaps used in the flash files:



I can only assume that the boy's/girls's face is cut out from an actual screenshot. Dare I say - plastic

Her head looks more like it's made out of plasticine, to me.

But I'm going to wait for some real screenshots before making any judgement on the graphics.

[Ronald McDonald]

Oh please gawd...NO PLASTIC PLZ

[Doppelgofer]

can't believe some of you are moaning already

[KaiserSoze]

Duoae-your investigation skills are excellent man! Awesome job on those possible clues.

[Fat John]

http://www.bravenet.com/global/about.php

It all started back in 1997

It's been a great 8 years

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

Hmm...

[yossa]

Doppelgofer said:
can't believe some of you are moaning already

Well - I really love the concept of Prey as presented in the old videos. I like the environments, colours, variety, of course I love the concept of dynamic portals (hopefully restored in this version).

I DON'T like plastic looking games. I don't believe 3DR & HH would pull such thing off - that is I don't want to believe it. I think that after FarCry and especially Doom 3 the message from the gamers about this matter was clear enough. It's not moaning, just judging what we have right now.

[X-Vector]

My sentiments exactly, yossa - except that I don't share your faith that Human Head/3DR can or will change anything about that specific visual characteristic of the DooM III engine (if that is indeed the technology the game is built on).

[Ivan]

That obviously is a clue so we search in the source code of the page, which is already done. Unless it means something else..

[motionblur]

yossa said:
I DON'T like plastic looking games. I don't believe 3DR & HH would pull such thing off - that is I don't want to believe it. I think that after FarCry and especially Doom 3 the message from the gamers about this matter was clear enough. It's not moaning, just judging what we have right now.

Woah --- easy there. Not all gamers think like that. I liked the look of Doom³. And even if the graphics look rather 'plastic' ATM - the next generations of graphics cards will be available sooner or later and then Things will start looking better.
But personally I don't really mind that right now. And I will wait for the final product before I complain.

[Rider]

motionblur said:
And I will wait for the final product before I complain.

indeed, me too!

I think, regardless of the graphics, that Prey is going to ROCK!

[Soilwork]

Anything 3DR is involved in always kicks ass, screw the naysayers, I BELIEVE!

[FireFly]

motionblur said:
Woah --- easy there. Not all gamers think like that. I liked the look of Doom³. And even if the graphics look rather 'plastic' ATM - the next generations of graphics cards will be available sooner or later and then Things will start looking better.
But personally I don't really mind that right now. And I will wait for the final product before I complain.

It's not question of future graphics technology. We have everything we need now to create realistic skin. Just take a look at HL2.

In fact, it's theoretically possible to replicate CGI quality rendering on current hardware. Shaders were the last major technological leap, and now we have them anything is possible as far as visual quality goes.

We're not seeing realistically envisaged characters because developers don't see this as important. Nobody besides Valve have done anything to advance the quality of lip synching, most facial animation looks plain awful. Having said that, look at the quality of the NPCs in the released DNF media.

http://www.duke4.de/pic.php/gfx/scre.../e32001-31.jpg

So there's still reason to hope.

[Crosma]

FireFly said:
In fact, it's theoretically possible to replicate CGI quality rendering on current hardware.

Not until consumer hardware supports realistic reflection, refraction, radiosity and photon lighting it's not. Heck, we can't even push enough polygons in real-time yet.

[Kristian Joensen]

He, did say "theoretically" not practicly.

[Rider]

FireFly said:
http://www.duke4.de/pic.php/gfx/scre.../e32001-31.jpg

So there's still reason to hope.

After examining that shot for a bit I went OMG!

That is some sweet facial detailing right there. I never noticed before due to the half-assed quality of the recorded Video.

Imagine that at 1024x768 Full screen, no pixals!!!

but this isn't the DNF forum...

[Parkar]

ehh, thats from the video. Its not any more detailed then the video.

[FireFly]

Kristian Joensen said:
He, did say "theoretically" not practicly.

Right, I'm talking about offline rendering here, and I'm just going by what Carmack is saying.

It's particularly significant because those are the only features that are necessary with temporary buffering to actually implement anything. You can decompose Pixar Renderman shaders into multi-passes. It doesn't mean that they can run in real time, but the fact that they can be calculated on a graphics card has a wide range of implications on what you want to do for the graphics pipeline. It's going to impact both real-time rendering and off-line rendering. There is going to be an interesting convergence.

You might use 50 or 100 potential instructions in some really complex gaming shader; but if the engine is architected right, you would be able to use the exact same engine, media creation, and framework and architect the whole thing to do TV-quality or eventually even movie-quality rendering that might use thousands of instructions and render ridiculous resolutions. The ability to use the same tools for that entire spectrum is going to be a little different from what we have now.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/doom-3/527455p2.html

[KaiserSoze]

could the monkey blurb on the teaser site tie in with http://www.liquiddevelopment.com ?

"Monkeys Do Not Make Good Pets" found that on the site.

of course we already know liquid development helped human head/3dr with producing some characters for prey.

[FireFly]

The site header is "Telequah Communications". Tahlequah is apparently the Cherokee national capital.

Western Cherokee set up its government in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The Cherokee National Capital was built.

http://members.aol.com/tuckermice/cherokee.html http://www.okdar.org/tahlequah/

The "smallest monkey" text refers to the Tarsier.

[IHerman]

If it's spelled different, why should it even be related?

Am I missing something?

[jkerr]

Tom Hall (Project Leader) quit and founded Ion Storm to lead Anachronox, and now at MonkeyStone.
Jim Dose (Tools Programmer) quit and joined Ritual and now at id to work on the next Doom.
Mark Dochtermann (Net Programmer) quit and joined Ritual and founded MumboJumbo.
Part time members (worked mostly on Duke and Shadow Warrior):
Chuck Jones (Artist) quit and joined Valve.

This could be the answers to the monkey references and MumboJumbo.

[FireFly]

Because Talon Brave is an American Indian, and many of the clues on that site are related to tribes.

All the hits for Telequah relate to Tahlequah.

[Doppelgofer]

Fat John said:
http://www.bravenet.com/global/about.php

Hmm...

bravenet is a proper service for website tools...i used to use it

it could be a long shot that 3drealms have asked them to put that on the site but i doubt it