Prerelease:Prey (2006)/1998

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Prey (2006).

To do: A lot more is still yet to be added here, namely images.

Prey would continue development into 1998 but by October, it would all fall apart. Prey is restarted yet again.

January 1998

January 16th

Prey Development Update

Sorry that we've been rather quiet over the last few weeks. We've been spending the time since the holidays polishing up the pre-Christmas rough edges and plotting our course from here to the end of the project.

We've just finished testing and documenting the PreyOS. It's a very powerful tool that lets us go in and work with the fundamental components of the game at run time. It's proving to be very helpful for our modelers to tweak and adjust the performance of their models right there in the game. The PreyOS is also giving us our first "final code" taste of the true extensibility of the Prey engine. I think users out there will rejoice over the total (and almost ludicrous-thanks to Tom) "tweakability" of the game.

William has been holed up for the last few weeks in another major Preditor abstraction rewrite. This latest approach will facilitate all the features we'll need in Prey and well beyond. His main goal was to make things as scaleable as possible over the next few years of evolving technology. Matt and John are salivating-hounding William at every moment to get their paws on the new tool.

David started up here on the 5th, and he's already fully up to speed. Yesterday, he had the opportunity to see the first of his work migrate into the game. Allen and David have moved into a new office just west of the main Prey "pit." I think they like their new digs, but of course, everybody had to move their desks one over (since Allen had the choice window/corner area). Now everyone is in place except Martinus-we have a desk and a PC waiting for him. He should roll into town any time now.

Until soon,

Paul Schuytema
Project leader

January 28th

The Adrenaline Vault would publish an article called "The Light at the End of the Tunnel: An Interview with Prey Producer Paul Schuytema", featuring an interview with Schuytema.

February 1998

February 6th

Prey Development Update

Since we've all been sharing the same core developer's hours for the last month, things have really been energized. So many threads of the game are coming together right now. Progress is almost at a blur. I'm lucky that I get in early in the morning so that I have an hour or two of quiet work before the energy gets feverish.

I received a crackling, staticy call from Martinus the other day-he was standing outside of the U.S. consulate in Frankfort, Germany, with his newly-stamped visa in hand. Finally, after months of work, he is on his way! Martinus has been working with us for several months now on the design side of the game, via conference calls from Munich. His imprint is already felt on the design of Prey. In a few days, he'll be able to dive into the trenches with John and Matt, learning the intricacies of the newest and badest Preditor yet.

Martinus will have the unique privilege of being the first Prey team member to show up for work with a real desk, real monitor and real computer ready to go. I guess if you're trapped in visa-hell long enough, we will get everything in place for you. The only downside is that Martinus won't have that feeling of pleasure and elation when he gets to trade his folding table in for a snazzy desk, his 13" monitor in for a 21-17 dual monitor setup. Pity.

As an interesting aside, we thought we would give you a chance to check out Martinus' Quake map that first attracted our attention. Martinus cautions you, though, with these words of hesitation: "Please remember that this map is absolutely out-dated (done over a year ago), especially the architecture and the texturing. It is because this map was made when the maps for Quake had to be within the 8 MB heap size."

Speaking of Preditor, William and Tom have nailed down a major Preditor breakthrough. The first phase was William's "abstraction rewrite." William is the master of arcane, abstract structures, and he prefers to work from a "top of the mount" conceptual foundation, and then code to match his abstractions. For Preditor, this meant abstracting the type of things that you are doing: creating geometry, manipulating the structure of the geometry, transforming the geometry and changing the attributes of the geometric faces. With these "modes" firmly conceptualized, it's amazing what you can create. The first thing is to throw away the notion that geometry is just geometry as we think of it normally (cubes,, triangles, etc.). It can be nearly anything from a cube to a fractalized mesh ground surface to a portal to structures way crazier than that.

With this foundation in place, William and Tom have coded the most insanely versatile system to control geometry interactively. I won't describe the system here (man, do I want to!), but I will tell you that it allows you to visualize, then create, as simple as that. Can you imagine it (within the constructs outlined above)? If so, then you can create it. Matt and John had the new functionality for less than 2 hours before they were showing me things that I have never, ever seen before. Man will this be cool!

Finally, I hope you enjoy our new web look. I think Joe and Brian did one helluva job. Be sure to check out the newly updated information about our Prey tools as well. Have a great weekend, play great games and remember, pick up a book once in a while--it's still a viable entertainment medium.

Until soon... Cheers,

-Paul
project leader, Prey

• 

  Prey OS logo.

• 

  Screenshot of Prey OS.

• 

  Preditor logo.

• 

  Screenhot of Preditor.

• 

  Skinner logo.

• 

  Screenshot of Skinner

February 9th

Prey Development Update

Last week, when we released this new look to our web site, the Prey Screenshots page was replaced. All the old ones were dumped, and Paul Schuytema picked the "best of the existing" screenshots that were out there, plus mixed a few new ones in there, too. Make sure to check out our Prey Screenshots page for all the latest.

February 17th

Scott Miller is interviewed by PC Gaming World (who later become GameSpot UK).

Duke & Prey

What's so special about Prey?

It'll have the best 3D technology seen when it's released. It'll have the richest universe and an engrossing story that takes the player on a long journey throughout the game, with many key changes taking place. It'll introduce new avenues of gameplay, a bold new method of AI, and basically new standards. Other than that, it's pretty much like every other 3D action game!

Miller is then asked about questions about both Prey and Duke Nukem Forever. When asked about who is composing music of the game, Miller states the Lee Jackson will have some involvement, but KMFDM will primary handle the music, including the theme song. When asked about the kind of humour the game will have, he says: "Prey is a very serious game, but will have it's share of humor--a different kind of humour--too. Prey will access other key emotions, such as sadness, terror and relief!"

Miller would also have an interview with videogamedesign.com, but this one appears to have been lost.

February 19th

3D Reams announces the birth of John Anderson's son Kyle.

John Anderson's a Daddy!

News Flash! Prey mapper John Anderson (alias Johnny Ewok) just gave me a call to announce the arrival of the latest member of the Prey team: Kyle Anderson, born this afternoon at 3:11. Vital stats: 20 inches long, weighing in at 7 pounds, fourteen ounces. Mother and tyke are doing fine. Congratulations John!!

February 28th

Voodoo Power publishes an interview with William Scorboro.

Dave: First off, thanks for taking some time from your busy schedual [sic] to answer these questions.
Thanks for having me.

Russ: What was your first computer?
Well, my first game system was an Atari 2600 clone from Sears; My first "computer", if you can call it that, was a Commodore 128;

Russ: What was your first computer game
The first Atari game was "Combat", pretty fun. First x86 game was . . . Might and Magic, I think. I enjoyed that series, because they didn't limit your abilities; well, actually, in M&MII;, all stats maxxed out at 255, meaning they stored them in an unsigned byte; I had to laugh at that. Still much better than the official D&D; stuff.

Russ: Why did you get into computers?
I saw programming as a way to express myself artistically through science, and I didn't have to have a PhD to be successful; I couldn't take any more school; college beat me down, or I beat myself down; I started programming at 21, later than most.

Dave: How long has prey been in development?
Since November '96 with the current incarnation of the Prey team.

Dave: Prey still has some time 'till it's release, but can you give us an estimate as to when we can expect to see it in stores?
when it's done :-)

Dave: Can you tell us about Prey's portals.
Well, portals are basically invisible geometry which serve as clipping regions for the geometry seen through them; Prey's portals allow displacement, meaning you can create funky 4D effects, like walking out of a door in one room and entering the same room on the other side, etc. The rest you'll have to wait for.

Dave: What types of hardware acceleration will Prey include? (3D, MMX)
3D only; we haven't found a use for MMX;

Dave: What about native hardware support via Glide, ect?
yes, there will be native 3Dfx support via Glide, and we will write an OpenGL version; there isn't much rendering code compared to the game, support systems, Preditor, etc., so I'm not too worried about it.

Russ: What do you think of Glide vs. Direct 3D vs. open Gl? Does any of these three have something the other can't or at least have the ability to do it as well?
Well, Glide only works with Voodoo technology; it is very straightforward, so native Voodoo suuport is relatively simple; My experience with Direct3D and OpenGL is minimal, and both are coming out with new versions (GL 1.2 and DX6) before Prey ships, so I'm not going to screw with either until that time.

Dave: Will Prey use any of the Voodoo 2's features such as SLI or dual textures?
Well, yes, since we'll have a Glide version, we'll take full advantage of Voodoo2.

Dave: Have you had a chance to play Prey on a Voodoo 2?
A Voodoo2 version won't be up for a month or so. But when it is, it will be fully optimized for Glide.

Jeremiah: What kind of advatages/disadvatages does AGP have?
You can get those dad-blasted textures down to the card faster. :-)

Russ: What would be your ulitmate 3D accelerator card... Where you could have whatever you wanted?
Oh, something where you feed it a triangle database and it can do one-cycle ray tracing.

Russ: Would you say that hardware acceleration for gaming is starting to become a necessity?
Absolutely, and the prices are dropping every few months, since the competition is fierce; that's a good thing for game-playing folk.

Russ: What type of benefits does hardware acceleration offer?
Hey, I don't have to write rasterization code and spend months tweaking assembly code that draws a texture span. I'm not an assembly guy. Tons more polys :-) Higher resolution. Filtering (mipmapping, dithering, bilinear, trilinear, antialiasing); The special effects available via various alpha tricks are cool.

Russ: What opportunities does the Voodoo 2 and other new chips that are coming out offer you
well, there is a push from 3Dfx towards multi-pass rendering, meaning you draw a poly with one state(say base texture), then the lightmap(like QuakeII), then bump maps, etc. Everyone I know seems to like this paradigm, and the APIs (GL,Direct thingy) are going to have multitexture support; Voodoo2 gives more polys, plus two TMUs (texture mapping units), meaning the texture and the lightmap can be rendered in parallel.

Russ: Does bump-mapping have any future in future versions of Prey or games that will use Prey technology?
We strive to be on the cutting edge of technology; however, it's imperative to design scalable technology for games now because the time between a 3D accelerator company's technology leaps is shorter than the development cycle of a game; one can spend time just constantly writing new tech and never getting a game out; I had that problem, but I've shifted my focus to the game, while thinking of how to abstract an engine that will be scalable.

Russ: Are there any potential problems with hardware acceleration?
The disparity in quality between the various cards comes to mind, and we have to be aware of our market and who's buying what card; if alot of people are buying some suck-card, there's more pressure on us to support it. But things are looking pretty good given 3Dfx's deserved popularity and reputation.

Dave: What will be Prey's max resolution?
probably 800x600.

Dave: How many weapons will Prey have? What can you tell us abou these?
I WILL PERSONALLY INSURE THAT THE WEAPONS IN PREY ARE GOD-LIKE.

Dave: What will distigish Prey from other games such as Unreal, Half-life and SiN?
The engines for those games (Quake, Unreal) use BSP trees, if I'm not mistaken; Prey uses portals, as if you haven't heard, for its hidden surface removal, so the dynamism in the engine will be much higher; just ask yourself: if you had a modular engine with no need for fixed geometry, what could you do? Although portals were originally conceived for hidden surface removal, they add immensely to gameplay.

Jeremiah: Level editors/builders are becoming more important these days as it adds to replay value. What can you tell us about te one in Prey?
You mean PREDITOR? It's extra-dope; it's scalable to future geometry; the interface is quite different than the four-view WorldCraft model; everything is done in 3D, in the engine; I really don't care for Windows programming, though.

Lithium: What can you tell us about Prey's scripting/addon coding language?
DLLs. We're writing a C++ class library, basically; we may have some scripty way of interfacing to it; this is work in progress.

Russ: What would be your ideal but fairly "realistic" system be?
A) Like to make a game on
B) Like to make a game for
My answer to this question will be out of date tomorrow, so I'll pass.

Lithium: Will the dopefish make it to Prey's waters?
No.

Russ: I remember playing Outrun at the arcades as a young kid, and thinking "Wooo... How fast are the graphics on this, this game is going to be around for a while." Do you have any similar recollections?
Sure, I mean, I was a video game youth. Pac-man, Heavy Barrel, Discs of Tron, Dragon's Layer, etc. . . the days when I had respect for five bucks. LOL!

Dave: Anything you would like to say in conclusion?
damnit, I can't remember that universal greeting from Transformers:The Movie; ". . . weep ninni bom", or something; oh well, see ya. :-)

March 1998

March 3rd

Prey Development Update

Busy time here on the Prey ranch. First off, we've got to welcome Martinus to the fold.

He arrived on a rainy day three Mondays ago. It seems as if it's raining and the traffic is at a standstill whenever we have new folks flying into town. Martinus spent the first week running all of those annoying errands that we force new residents to endure: getting furniture, getting transportation (he selected a bike at Toys R Us), getting an SSN, utilities, house wares and all that jazz. He spent last week just getting up to speed with Preditor, and he's refining his Preditor skills this week. In a few days, I'll hit him with his first two level assignments, and he'll be off and running.

It's very exciting to have the entire team in place right now (and everyone finally has a real desk-no more folding tables for anyone!). I've been spending the last few weeks filling out countless spreadsheets with all of the myriad of tasks ahead of us as we rumble towards E3 and beyond. Sometimes my brain begins to ache when I try to get my mind around Prey and its seemingly endless list of development tasks, but I also get this wave of calm as well, like we've got the chaotic beast under control (for the moment, at least).

When I left last night, Tom and William were merging their code bases together-I didn't hear much yelling or screaming, so I'm assuming that things were weaving together nicely. If they're both alive this morning, then I'll know for sure. Tom, William and Loyal have their own threads to pursue for the moment, but every few weeks between now and the end of April they are scheduled to weave their code together, and I'll keep you posted as that happens. William's current realm is the engine, collision and Preditor; Tom's is network, sound, entities, messaging and the game itself and Loyal is still wrestling with the massive beast that is our character system (I think he's winning the war).

Content-wise, we're nailing down the stuff we want golden for E3 early this month (to get it into the coders' hands as quickly as possible), then we'll do some design refinement and blast ahead at the remainder of the game content (there's plenty there to keep the boys off the street-trust me).

KMFDM is working on our music as we speak-we should get the first DAT of their work in a week or two. Their first two tasks are the Prey theme song and to lay down some potential level play music so we can see if they are on the right groove. Sascha and I have talked a few times over the last week, and I'm confident that they share our rather twisted wavelength-I can't wait to hear their first stuff.

Until soon, cheers!

Paul, project leader

March 9th

Welcome Martinus

We'd like to welcome Martin Goedtke to 3D Realms! Martin's actually been with us for a little while now, but he's finally made it to our web site. There's a skeleton web bio page for Martin that is online, and it has his picture. (We hope to have his full bio online in a couple of days) Martin is the final member of the Prey Team, and he joins us from Munich, Germany! Martin is going to be doing level work on Prey, and now that he's here, the entire team is jazzed about finally being a complete unit!

March 22nd

Scott Miller would update his .plan file, providing a small update to Prey. He discusses the difficulty of finding a voice actor for Talon Brave.

Brief Prey Update: It is proving to be difficult to find the right person to act the voice of Talon Brave, the star character of Prey. After months and months of listening to audition tapes, the right person--the one that makes everyone here say "that's him!", still eludes us. Luckily, we started the search early and there's plenty of time left.

April 1998

April 11th

April 11, 1998

The May/June 1998 issue of PC Games (not PC Gamer) magazine has a column by "Blade" entitled, "Quake-Killers Don't Exist."

There are a few points I disagree with in this column, but the one I'll comment on here is the statement that Prey "loiters on the vaporware list." The writer failed to do due diligence before leaping to this conclusion. If he would have contacted us, he would have discovered that Prey was conceived as a game with gigantic goals, to push most 3D shooter standards to new heights. This doesn't happen by making a game in 12 to 18 months, a typical development period for PC games. When you're striving for something truly special, different and epic, it takes more time than an average or even above average game.

We are not bothered that Prey is taking an extraordinary amount of time to be developed. Gamers should be encouraged that we're doing our best with this game and diving into uncharted territories of gameplay and content. On top of everything else, we've never indicated when the game would be released, so how can it be vaporware? Does every game that takes over two years to create automatically get on this writer's vaporware list? Are the coming Star Wars movies long overdue vaporfilm? They may be, but I'll be first in line just the same.

April 20th

Prey Development Update

This is one of those rare Mondays that just crackles with excitement-a lot will be converging together this week, on both the tech and the content side of things. It's either that of the four cups of coffee that have my heart beating this morning.

Last week, Loyal gave us our first taste of the new Skinner. Loyal has been spending quite a lot of time converting his hybrid MFC program to a pure PreyOS tool. Now, our artists can texture the characters right in any game environment they'd like, and actually see the game's dynamic lights effect the character as they work. We're really working towards a WYSIWYG paradigm with our tools, and its coming together quite nicely.

After much discussion, we rearranged the desks in the main Prey "pit"-now, virtually all of the content creators are facing west, in line with the spinning of the Earth. We're hoping that this will cut down on their "developer vertigo."

John's father, when he had some time on his hands a few months back, emailed me and asked if he could reproduce our Prey logo for John. I said sure, but I had no idea what he was up to. Last week, John brought in the masterpiece-a gigantic sculpture of our logo, done in welded steel, wood and plaster. Very cool indeed. I'm going to try to talk John's dad into doing another one for our office.

Last week, Ken Brown, executive editor of Computer Gaming World, stopped in for a visit. He was in town on another story (covering a non-action game from the Dallas area... imagine that?), and just stopped by for an off-the-record visit. I showed him Preditor in action, and I think he liked what he saw.

I just got off the phone with Sascha of KMFDM. He and Tim Skold will be burning a CD and a DAT tape for us tonight. A few weeks ago, they sent us their first CD, which explored some rough ideas for the Prey theme. Even though the music is still in the rough state, I'm pretty excited about the kick-ass tunes and level-play music we'll have for Prey.

Until soon... cheers,

Paul

April 22nd

Prey Development Update Update [sic]

Two days ago, Paul Schuytema did a Prey update talking about a really cool sculpture John Anderson's dad had done. Here is that text again:

John's father, when he had some time on his hands a few months back, emailed me and asked if he could reproduce our Prey logo for John. I said sure, but I had no idea what he was up to. Last week, John brought in the masterpiece-a gigantic sculpture of our logo, done in welded steel, wood and plaster. Very cool indeed.

We now have some pictures of the sculpture to show you, as well as an explanation from John's dad about how it was all put together:

"The Prey logo sculptures were created by Chuck Anderson of Petaluma California. The cost for materials was $200 to create 2 identical pieces and required a month of planning and work. The finished piece is 24 inches wide, 28 inches tall and weighs approximately 20 pounds. The talon was created by welding together wire rods to create a wire frame (very similar to creating a wire frame model in a computer). It was then covered with a plaster bandage type of material then a softer wall putty was applied. This was sanded and sculpted into the desired shape and details where added. After 20 plus coats of paint the talon was complete."

You can click on any of these thumbnail images for a larger version.

• 

  John Anderson & his dad holding the sculpture

• 

  Closeup of the Sculpture

• 

  Diagram of the Talon construction

May 1998

May 1st

Prey Development Update

In my last update, I told you that we were expecting some new KMFDM material. Well, it came (4 theme tracks), and boy, does it rock! The whole team, in shifts, filed into my office, we closed the door, cranked up my stereo and let it rip. By the end of the CDR, our jaws were hanging open-this is some of the best stuff I've ever heard from KMFDM (that's what Sascha promised us, and it looks like they're delivering).

While it'll be some time before you can hear their tunes (though those of you "lucky" enough to brave the mayhem of E3 will get a short aural peek), I thought I'd fill you in a bit on how they're working on the music.

Our approach is simple-build the body of music out of a small collection of recognizable themes. KMFDM and I have been working together on designing the various Prey themes. Of course, there will be the main game theme, plus themes to represent each of the species of the Trocara (as well as the Keepers), and some other themes to represent other key characters in the game.

I put together some emotional descriptions of the various themes (like, how are you supposed to feel when you hear the Keeper's theme, for example), plus relevant backstories. From there, the band has been working on different approaches-one great idea that Sascha and Tim had was to attribute a certain beat speed to each of the Trocaran species. The latest CDR that they sent has rough versions of four themes, and it was cool to close our eyes and listen-we could really visualize the Trocaran species through their music.

We then put together our comments and thoughts on the themes to sent back to them for revision. Right now, they've gathered together (some members of the band live overseas) in Seattle for a month of studio work, laying down tracks for us and for their next album.

I'll keep you posted...

-Paul

May 15th

3D Realms would release a 360 degrees screenshot called preyhouse.ivr. This is the thumbnail of the image, and not the original file. The image itself is currently lost.

Prey Development Update - Interactive Screenshots!

Today we launch a new type of screenshot. 360 degree screenshots. And they're interactive, too! You can now look at a shot in our game in 360 degrees. Plus, you're not stuck with that one little "portion" of whatever room the shot happens to be taken in. You can spin around to see the entire room! Furthermore, you can zoom in and out of these shots, as well as look up and down.

The first of these shots is from Prey. We intend on doing more in these series of shots, as well as expanding this to having shots of our other games in development. Click on the thumbnail image below to be taken directly to the page for these new screenshots.

If you have some feedback on these shots, we'd like to hear from you.

Joe Siegler

May 28th

An extensive trailer is shown at E3.

Infinite MHz would conduct another interview with Schuytema.

June 1998

Computer Gaming World would feature a single page preview of Prey in Issue #167, on Page 102. Included was a small interview with Schuytema.

"BRAVE GUNNER Talon Brave surveys the city outside the immense Trocaran mothership. His body is composed of 1.000 polygons."

"FEMME FATALE Talon readies himself as a female warrior prepares to charge through a portal transmitter."

CGW: What is the storyline in Prey?

Schuytema: Talon Brave is the central character. He is a modernera Apache who lives on a small reservation in northeastern Arizona. He has real depth, a real back-story, and real problems that he’s facing. We’re going to great lengths to research Native American culture, mythology, language, and traditions to make Talon believable.

Talon is abducted and ends up on a Trocaran mothership. The Trocara are three diverse alien species who use the same mothership.

This ship is gigantic in scale and has some design similarities to Larry Niven’s Ringworld. It’s not as large as the ringworld, but it’s about four times the diameter of Earth.

Each of the species gets a third of this ship, and this third contains not only interior space, but atmosphere-holding exterior areas roughly equal to the surface area of Earth. In addition to the three species, there is also a fourth, rather mysterious group called the Keepers. They “live between the cracks” of the Trocara, and part of the adventure is to discover their role in the universe.

CGW: What will the Prey engine be able to do that you can’t do with the Quake II engine?

Schuytema: Our Portal Technology yields capabilities that just aren’t present in the Qll engine. We deal with all of our geometry real-time, meaning that everything has the potential to be interactive — every wall, every floor, every polyhedron. Our portals can be dynamic, meaning that these “rips in space" can do just about anything you can imagine. Because we use portals to break our world into manageable chunks, our GSEs (game space engineers) can burn far more polygons on detail areas if they choose.

There’s also Preditor, our content-modeling tool — it allows our GSEs to create insane interactivity. The cool thing is, we’re giving it away with the game.

CGW: What will the system requirements be? What 3D APIs do you plan to support?

Schuytema: We’re not committing to specs yet, but Prey will be a very scalable game, able to run on a wide range of systems. If you’ve got a robust Pentium with a quality 3D accelerator, you’ll run the game just fine.

As for 3D APIs, we will do a native 3Dfx version, as well as an OpenGL version. We may directly support a few other cards, depending on what shakes out in the card market over the next few months.

Developer: 3D Realms • Publisher: GT Interactive
Target Release Date: Q1 99 • Engine: Prey
Synopsis: You play Talon Brave, a modern-era Apache from Arizona, who is abducted by aliens and has to fight his way back to Earth.

July 1998

July 23th

Schuyream would update his .plan file.^{Source Needed}

On the Prey front, Martinus gave me a great idea and I ran with it the past two days-we built a "PreyWeb"-an intranet just for the Prey team that handles all docs, from design docs, story docs, idea docs, the instruction docs for Preditor, Skinner and the PreyOS, as well as bug reports (us? bugs? never!). It should be a pretty cool resource and easier for me to maintain rather than the ten zillion files I've crammed into SourceSafe.

July 26th (Verify)

Prey Development Update

Wow, I was just looking back over our Prey news and realized how damn long it's been since I penned an update for you good and patient folks. Yes, we're still alive and well here in Talon Brave country, and working our butts off on the game!

On the coding side of things, we made a huge decision-we decided to move Prey into DirectX territory to support multiple 3D cards. As you know, we'd been developing under Glide and we'd been tentatively planning to utilize OpenGL as our support API. As we evaluated the whole 3D accelerator question more fully, it became clear that Microsoft had made some very welcome course corrections in DirectX 6, making at a very attractive option. That, plus their support assistance and the fact that we only have to deal with one fully-implemented API and vendor (and that every 3D card out there has some sort of DirectX support) made the decision easy.

So, for the past few weeks since E3, we've been porting everything over. Tom did all the low level initialization coding and texture management and William is handling the rendering side of things. It was also a great opportunity to dive in and optimize the rendering pipeline so that it should be faster under DX6 than under Glide, and that's a good thing indeed.

Once William wraps up his end of things next week, he'll be jumping into Preditor once again to support a number of features requested by our GSEs. Loyal has been working full-tilt to nail down our character LOD system, and he's done a commendable job. It's cool, because the character polygon reduction process takes into account the texture swatches that an artist has laid out, so that we keep excellent visual continuity on a reduced actor's surface. Also, since it's a Loyal thing, he's thrown in way too much control, like massive undo and the fact that you can texture an animated model while it's cycling through LOD levels (not useful at all, but tres cool in principle).

Tom has been "low level boy"-polishing his gem of a PreyOS at the lowest levels of networking and entity communication.

Tom is also handling the implementation of our sound and music system. For those of you who didn't get to hear about Prey at E3, we're using Power Micro Research's Toltec Audio Engine in Prey. PMR is a small firm based out of Austin and they came to us a while back to show us their 3D audio system. At that point, we'd been using Diamondware's Sound Toolkit, and Tom Tucker came by to show us Toltec. It was a 3D system, but we weren't sure whether or not we wanted to go that route-what we wanted was pure speed. As it turned out, their 3D sound system is the fastest sound API we've ever seen, and it delivers 3D on any Windows PC with MMX. Man, it's a sweet system, and we've had them do some custom coding for us so that it fits neatly into the PreyOS. Oh yes, working with PMR, we've got the Toltec system to handle fully interactive music... more on this later. Just use your imagination: KMFDM original music, but totally interactive... man, oh man!

On the content side of things, the GSEs are wrapping up their initial work-through of environments in chapters two and three and are getting ready to dive into chapter five. Allen and David have been cranking out the models, which means that between 2D textures and the plethora of Skinner texturing work to do, Scott and Steve have plenty to keep them off the streets at night.

July 31st

3D Realms would release another 360 degrees screenshot called 360shot2.ivr. Like the previous one, this is the thumbnail of the image, and not the original file. The image itself is also currently lost.

October 1998

October 13th

It would be announced that Paul Schuytema and William Scarboro had left 3D Realms. George Broussard would update his .plan file with the news three times.

In an effort to appease all the press that are contacting us, I have a brief statement. We will not go into details as they are nobody's business but our's [sic] and the parties involved.

Paul Schuytema is no longer with us at 3D Realms on the Prey project. We felt a change was needed on the game.

William Scarboro has left by mutual decision.

The partings were amicable and we wish them both well in future endeavors.

People come and go in this industry all the time. Prey's release date is, as always, "when it's done".

Stephen "Blue" Heaslip of Blue's News would send Broussard an email, to which he responded back with:

Paul is no longer with us or Prey. We felt a change was needed on the project, and we'll leave it at that. People come and go in this industry all the time and games still get done. Prey's release date is, as always, "when it's done".

The Adrenaline Vault would publish an article with an email exchange from Broussard regarding the game's status.

Following [sic] is a brief e-mail from George Broussard of 3D Realms in response to questions about the status of Prey:

AVault: What is going to happen next? A new producer?

Broussard: Someone will be brought in. We have leads. I will continue to focus on Duke Nukem Forever and lend assistance to Prey in the short term until a new project lead is brought in.

AVault: What about a new lead programmer? People are going to be skeptical that one can be brought in at this stage and work with the already established code base.

Broussard: Skepticism is fine. There were three coders onPrey [sic], not just one. If we can work with the Quake 2 and Unreal code-bases with programmersthat have never seen them, someone else can work with Prey's.

AVault: Who remains, and how focused are they on the project?

Broussard: Everyone else remains, and we are going forward with a plan to finish Prey.

AVault: Is Prey in danger of being cancelled or re-conceived into another project?

Broussard: No.

AVault: How could this happen to the project at this point in its development? Were the reasons for the departures personal or professional?

Broussard: Scott [Miller] and I evaluated where Prey was and where it was going. We made decisions based on that evaluation. All reasons were professional, and based on how happy we were with where the game was at this moment.

Though 3D Realms declined to comment on-the-record regarding apostponement [sic], specific personnel changes, or the status of the project, Miller did state, "This is not big news or a shocking setback for us," and claimed the project is becoming more and more ambitious. Broussard agreed, writing, "This is justsomething [sic] that needed to happen and we will move forward. Game fans can take faith in the fact that we are doing what is right for the project."

November 1998

November 19th

Broussard announces through a .plan update that Ion Storm's Corrinne Yu has been hired to lead development of a new game engine.

New Member of the Realm

3D Realms has hired a new programmer to work here. It's someone that should be familiar to the 3D gaming scene. Her name is Corrinne Yu. Here's a news update from George Broussard's .plan file...

Exciting news! 3D graphics programming guru Corrinne Yu (Former Director of Technology at Ion Storm) will be joining us soon to lead up development on our new next generation graphics engine. Look for a press release on www.3drealms.com tomorrow some time. We are VERY excited about the future.

Look back here tomorrow for a full press release on this matter.

November 20th

A press release about Yu joining is released.

Corrinne Yu joins 3D Realms as Lead Technology Programmer

GARLAND, TX - 3D Realms is excited to announce that Corrinne Yu has joined the company to lead the development of future 3D engine technology. Prey and Duke Nukem 5 (tentative title) will be the first games to use this technology.

Ms. Yu previously worked at Zombie as Systems Lead Programmer, and more recently worked a year at Ion Storm as Director of Technology rewriting and greatly enhancing the Quake 2 engine to meet the needs of Anachronox design goals, as well as being an aid to the graphics programmers of Daikatana.

"Corrinne is one of the industry's top 3D engine coders, with an exceptionally strong math and engineering background," asserted George Broussard, partner at 3D Realms and project leader for Duke Nukem Forever. "She's exactly the person we want to be leading our new technology development group, and we expect that it won't be long before she's properly recognized and rewarded for her skills and dedication as being one of the best in our industry."

"Several key points attracted me to 3D Realms," said Yu. "Obviously the success of the Duke Nukem franchise and Prey's goal of being a groundbreaking game, but definitely the freedom to develop a new and innovative 3D engine that will allow 3D Realms' talented designers to really strut their stuff."

"Corrinne is definitely one of the most innovative, experienced, and educated graphics engine writers in the industry," said Joey Liaw, who worked at Ion Storm as the Lead Programmer on Anachronox until recently leaving for college. "Her talent lies in being able to focus all of her resources into 3D engine programming: extensive knowledge of mathematics and physics, many years of leading development teams, high standards in coding perfection, and good gaming sense and taste."

3D Realms is starting a new technology development group that will focus solely on 3D engine development with the goal of providing this technology for internally developed games, and for licensing to interested third-party developers.

Said Broussard, "We think engine development requires its own dedicated team to do correctly, and that's the commitment we're making. We're very excited to have Corrinne on board to help us accomplish that goal."

December 1998

Like last year Joe Siegler posts a final 1998 news update on the eve of the new year, stating people should look forward to 3D Realms' upcoming games, Prey among them.

References

To do: Incorporate/reference this information below into article.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20000818050200/http://headline.gamespot.com/news/98_11/20_pc_ion/index.html
• https://trademarks.justia.com/754/16/tommy-hawk-75416105.html
• Appearance of some people on the Daily Dementia
  • Part 2 of interview with Scott Miller where he discusses various things, Prey included (the first part is mostly about Duke Nukem Forever and other stuff not really relevant to Prey).
  • Paul Schuytema interview with The Daily Dementia.
• Matt Wood interview from March 16th.
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/236603/prey-designers-journal
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/233341/prey-interview
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/230846/prey-screenshots
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/233825/more-on-dx6-prey
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/231708/people
• https://www.bluesnews.com/s/230524/plans
• https://web.archive.org/web/19991001080027/http://www.3dportal.com/features/interview/god/interview.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/19980517061721/http://apogee1.com:80/catalog/prey/news.html
• https://duke4ever.altervista.org/prey/textdocs/19971998preyupd.html (NOTE: Some of the information here is inaccurate/incorrect, such as wrong dates and images. Please find addition sources for stuff stated here.)
• Lon Matero's Prey news archive.
  • January
  • February
  • March
  • April
  • May
  • June
  • July
  • August
• Developer journals.
  • #2, A Texture Is Worth a Thousand Words
  • #3, The Numbers Game
  • #4, We Are The Hivemind!
  • #5, Preditor or Prey?
  • Scrapped journal, The road to hell is paved with demo CDs..
  • #6, Forward... Into the Past!
• https://web.archive.org/web/19991023082718/http://www.avault.com/articles/paulguest.asp
• Design documents (don't add everything from here, summarized what is said and make note of anything interesting).
  • teamidea.htm - Ideas from July-September 1998. Last updated on September 16th.
  • ninety8A.htm - Ideas from Late 1998, however really only stuff from September 30th.

3D Realms News Posts Note: These are not all of the news post, mostly missing the Prey Development Updates.

• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/01/prey_duke_nukem.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/03/when_its_done_1.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/06/the_e3d_realms_4.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/06/the_e3d_realms_3.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/06/the_e3d_realms_1.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/06/3d_realms_makes.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/07/more_e3_comment.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/08/pc_games_spooge.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/08/cnn-gines.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/08/quake_ii_killer.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/09/3d_realms_at_ec.html
• http://legacy.3drealms.com/news/1998/11/3d_realms_makes_1.html