Chris "Kiwidog" Hargrove is co-programmer for Duke Nukem Forever, along with Nick Shaffner. Chris joined 3D Realms in September 1997, from Raven Software, where he worked on Mageslayer and Take No Prisoners.

What is your favorite part of programming games?

Hard to tell... I'd probably say just the "magic" aspect of it. The fact that you can turn a black screen into an interactive piece of art just by typing in some text is very cool to me.

In your .plan updates you have talked of Cannibal, the skinning tool you've been writing. Can you briefly tell us what's so "rockful" about Cannibal?

I won't testify to the "rockful-ness" of it; I leave that to people like Brian :)

Seriously, I won't glorify my own tools. But the other guys seem to like it. At first it was only a skinning tool, and that was all it was planned for originally... I actually had most of the "skinning" stuff done back in December, about when they started using the first version. The current version does quite a bit more than skinning though, and every now and then more pieces are added as features demand them.

In the beginning it was basically like a 3dfx version of texpaint, with a few more odds and ends. It's gotten a lot bigger since then. Recently Nick described it as "rapidly becoming the cornerstone tool of this whole project". Kinda cool in a way, but not exactly what I'd planned for. :) I would explain more, but that would be giving away too much of how our characters work too early.

Any chance of seeing Cannibal screenshots sometime soon? :)

As soon as The Powers That Be (tm) give the go-ahead... maybe after E3 sometime, but that's not my decision to make.

What changes have you and Nick made to the Quake 2 entity system?

Effectively everything. A lot of old Quake 2 game logic code still exists, but it's all legacy code that we're phasing out as time goes on. All our new game logic is written with an entirely separate entity system written from scratch with Duke in mind. It's in its early stage of usage, but is already proving very beneficial.

For all of us non-technical people, what exactly is the entity system? :)

It's the way we control and interact with the entities/actors in the game, whether they be monsters, other characters, your player character, even weapons and items. It's hard to be more specific without bringing up technical details, but in a nutshell, the entity system allows us to mix and match pieces of game logic at will.

From what we've heard so far, direct modem play won't make it into Duke 4, as with Quake 2. Any chance of adding it in?

It's not on the list, no. It might be later, but I'm skeptical. The fact is internet play is more of a multiplayer factor these days then direct modem to modem play is. And even if we did add modem to modem, that still wouldn't cover the inherent client/server imbalance that exists with it... one guy will always have the advantage over the other. If you really want modem to modem play, it's not completely out of the question, you just have to muck with Win95 a bit to pull it off. I believe a few websites out there have already covered how to do this. As for us putting it in natively, I can't say for certain this early... don't bet on it though.

Will there be multiplayer co-op modes?

Yes, as far as I can tell. Co-op has always been on our list to my knowledge.

Do you have any idea as to what the polygon count/max polygons will be?

Not sure yet; we're still toying with the numbers.

What is your favorite Caffeine-Saturated Beverage?

Mountain Dew, no question (assuming you're talking about sodas... coffee would win hands down otherwise, even though I've cut back on that a bit lately).

Are you trying to make the gameplay similar to Duke 3D, as opposed to Quake 2 (e.g. quick turning, high jumping)?

Those elements are still in tweaking, and likely will be for some time. I'd imagine yes though, at least with the jumpheight factor.

Can you tell us what you're working on now, or is it too cool to give away?

You already know the answer to that. :)