Monday, January 31, 2000

Message Board Postings
Saw on Dukeworld that George Broussard and Charlie Wiederhold have been posting a bit lately to the 3D Realms Bulletin Board. Information revealed includes animated taunts will most likely be in the game, DM levels will be unique and interesting, Duke 4 will use bots based on Unreal's bots, and Duke will have a few "moves" beyond the normal jumping and ducking.

Saturday, January 29, 2000

George Broussard Interview
Saw on Blue's News that Planet Duke, the newest GameSpy Network site, has interviewed George Broussard. Here's one of the Q&A's:

Will the Jetpack be back? Will it work in DukeMatch?

We're still undecided on the jetpack. It's clearly a "Duke" item. In fact, it's programmed now, but we're not sure about it's use yet. It will probably be limited to DeathMatch because it's too easy to break maps in single play. Beyond that are framerate concerns. In Build (Duke 3D engine) you could fly really high and look down and it wasn't that slow, but these days, polygons are everything. We'll have to somehow deal with the possibilities of getting high and completely wrecking your framerate.

Thursday, January 6, 2000

DNF World Now Radiated
DNF World has been replaced with Radiated, which sports a new design but retains the focus on Duke Nukem Forever. Also, I never mentioned that Dukeland recently received an impressive redesign.

Tuesday, January 4, 2000

No Dual Weapons
Unreal Universe spotted a post by Scott Miller on the 3D Realms Bulletin Board on the topic of using more than one weapon at once in Duke Nukem Forever, with the reply that it won't happen, as doing so would add too many polygons:

The idea was that some weapons would require two hands, like an RPG, and therefore you could only carry one at a time. But the single-handed (usually weaker) weapons could be mixed and matched anyway the player wanted. The player could also hold a single-handed weapon plus an inventory item.

Anyway, this is obviously an idea with complications, but it's also one that fits Duke's image and would have opened up many cool possibilities. Since we will not be seeing this in DNF, hopefully another shooter will use this idea in the future.

Yeah one that can throw away all the additional poly's on guns ;) With this engine we cannot. When cards get a lot faster, or people choose to reduce the detail on the guns, you may see this feature. Until then, it's better to have another guy on the screen.

Duke 4 E3 Status
Also from Unreal Universe is word that Scott Miller posted to the 3D Realms Bulletin Board with his thoughts on the possibility of Duke 4 being shown at E3 this year:

Keep in mind that when a game is shown at E3, it generally (but not always) means the game has lost about two weeks of development time because the priorities of having an E3 demo that is nicely polished are different priorities than normal development work on the game. Most often, several "hacks" (the developers version of duct tape) are written to make the game work in a limited but presentable way, and these hacks then must be redone properly after E3.

Plus, about a full week is lost attending the event.

I think we'll only go to E3 if what we have in place at that time is already good enough for a solid presentation, without wasting time hacking together a demo.

Timothy Weisser Bio Online
Timothy Weisser's Bio is now online. Weisser was hired late last year as the third programmer on the Duke Nukem Forever team.