Duke Nukem Forever Development Update

This update on the game's progress comes from George Broussard's .plan file:

We're about where we wanted to be after the switch. The mappers are all 100% up to speed now and can do anything and everything with the editor. There is nothing in Unreal that they don't know how to do, and they've done some new things that make people go 'Whoa!' when they walk by their desks. The guys are all working on "real" levels now.

Textures and models have been continuing as if the switch never happened. Actually we seem to be able to have higher res textures under Unreal and still run fine, so you can expect that. We also know a few tricks to speed up Unreal and/or the maps to make it run acceptably on a P200 64 megs. I think 90% of the bog people are reporting are map abuse or texture usage related. These are things that are easy to control.

The programmers have been busy as well. We added a significant low level piece of tech I will talk about later, as well as basic stuff like the USE key. We also enhanced the Unreal keyframe, moving object system A LOT and now we seem to have nearly unlimited freedom. It's great to walk up to a switch, USE it and see something happen. Something very complex at that. Also reworked the resource system so we don't have to recompile a 10 minute file every time we add a piece of art. Very hand for fast updating of data. In short, the foundation is there, and we're ready for the new and "fun" stuff. The programmers will be moving to AI, guns, and game play type things ASAP.

Keith is prototyping his "back of the truck" map we showed at E3. This is mainly to test out the new object system and get any last little things that would keep that type of map from working.

At this point, we are really in full production mode again on the game. We expect to have gun and guys walking around any day like we never switched engines.

The progress from here should be exponential, as we just drop in new data, and the programmers focus on gameplay more than tech additions.

Don't be surprised if we're silent for awhile. We plan to just keep working hard on the game and keep our mouths shut about what we are doing.

Posted by Joe Siegler on August 4, 1998 at 1:00 PM | Permalink
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