Day 3 of 1up's Prey Coverage

It's Wednesday, the third day of the week, which means that it's time for Day 3 of 1up's week of Prey coverage.

Today's article is entitled "Use Your Illusion". The focus of this article is on various aspects of the game's technology. Based on the Doom 3 engine, Prey makes several improvements over Doom 3's tech, some of which are detailed in the article. There's a lot said about the famed "Portal Technology" in Prey, even going back to giving some props to the late original Prey programmer, William Scarboro; showing how the concept is now vs its original incarnation.

Here's some tidbits from the full article for you to check out:

"Our target minimum spec machine at the moment is a 2GHz P4, 384MB RAM, and a DirectX 9 graphics card, and the game will scale to trade off quality for [playability on] lower-end systems quite well. For the extremely high resolution and quality settings, however, you'll need the usual monster." (To said monster-owning crowd, yes, Prey will proudly support dual-core setups and more.)

"It's [Prey's Tech] allowed us to use compressed normal maps even at high settings that look as good as the uncompressed normal maps," says McArthur. "Because of this, our medium-quality settings will look like Doom 3's high-quality textures, and our high-quality normal maps can have twice the resolution. It's been a huge gain for us."

Couple gravity with juggling orientations and you get another of Prey's curious gameplay variants: wall walking. "Wall walking is the ability to walk on marked surfaces within the game regardless of their orientation," explains McArthur. "We use curved surfaces to great extent, allowing you to travel in directions that would normally require an elevator or ladder, as well as spaces you'd simply be moving through in another game.

You'll want to check this out not only for the article on the game's tech, but for the fact that there are some new screenshots as well. You can check those out over here.

Posted by Joe Siegler on February 1, 2006 at 1:39 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Prey