Prerelease:Prey (2006)/1999

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

While Corrinne Yu would continue work on a new engine for Prey, much of the team would be moved on to other projects, like Duke Nukem Forever or would leave the company. Updates about Prey also began drying up, mainly reduced to brief mentions in interviews.

To do: Try to scrape as many updates and mentions as possible of Prey from this year. Scarboro probably said other things of interest in the Google Groups discussion he was in.

January 1999

January 11th

A bio page for Corrinne Yu is published.

Photo of Yu from her Bio page.

January 12th

Yu's bio page is updated slightly.

March 1999

March 8th

6. Considering all the games we saw in 1998, which impressed you the most?

Half-Life had a lot of ideas we were doing for Prey, such as power/health stations, scripted characters and events that take place around the player, and a lot more. That game really raised the bar, and I think most 3D shooters will have a tough time jumping that bar until DN4 takes it raises it several more notches again. ; )

March 18th

Yu updates her .plan discussing work on the engine she has done. She reveals that no code from William Scarboro's previous engine is being used in her's.

03-18-1999

I recently sent off a batch of email responses. It may take up to 2 months + for me to respond to email you send me. I do like hearing from "most" of you. :) Coded several cool new 3D engine "things" (not telling ya ;p yet ), and spent the last couple of days to make all of them go "very fast". (Some of them were very sloow when I first put them up.) And coded several "givens." Onto coding more "givens" and more "new things." The new 3DR engine I am coding does not use and is not based on Prey code. It does not use portal nor BSP for visibility. It uses CCP. What it stands for, I am not telling yet. ;p Though the letters really do stand for something. (Hint : they are mathematical terms.) The code, or rather system, I am building now is more useful, less hackful, and more innovative/creative than what I could do hacking (and losing :( ) pieces here and there into Q2. Am not going to show new engine for E3. All of you should check out and concentrate on Duke Nukem Forever, which is going to be a very fun game at E3! Almost the entire company is working on DNF, except for Tom helping me out. DNF would be very fun. There would not be a word of info on the new engine, not a picture of screenshot of the "new game", until DNF is near shrink wrap. :)

March 25th

On a Google Groups conversation about portal-based engines, William Scarboro discusses his experience with developing Prey's engine.

Been there, done that. I coded what was going to be the Prey engine for the game Prey from 3D Realms; there was an exodus of people from the team, including myself, and the engine has since been scrapped. I'm really not a big fan of portal engines anymore, especially where all rooms are relative (which is what I had) in the manner you propose. There are many ugly problems in maintaining such an engine: two rooms linked by more than one portal (which results in rendering a room twice, basically, and even though they won't overlap, all the culling and transforms are duplicated), graph maintenance with spatial discontinuities, collision detection through portals, handling sound where one sound can seem to be coming from many different locations, rendering characters moving across portals that the z-buffer won't handle correctly, etc. It wasn't fun. The effects were really awesome, though.

In hindsight, portal tricks such as these should be used as tricks, not as an engine paradigm.

March 27th

Hugh: How are Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) and Prey developing and when can we expect them?

Scott: DNF is proceeding full speed ahead and looking great. Prey's engine tech is being greatly rewritten and enhanced currently.

April 1999

Broussard updates his .plan to address rumors and speculation about Duke Nukem Forever and Prey.

I'll make this brief because we're busy working and don't have time for silly rumor distractions.

FACT: GT has not "dropped, cancelled, pulled support, or poo-poo'ed" any part of Prey. They have always been supportive of our products.

FACT: Prey has had it's problems, but this is not news to anyone. We're designing a new engine (announced late last year when we hired Corrinne Yu). We parted ways with two key Prey developers last November (lead coder and project leader). These moves were made because we weren't happy with the tech in Prey. This is all old news. While new tech is being developed all content developers in the company are busy on Duke Nukem Forever. We didn't think this was such big news, but apparently we should have called 60 Minutes? ; )

NOTE TO OUR FANS: We'll update everyone on Prey when the time is right. But, if anyone is anticipating Prey anytime soon, you shouldn't be. We thought it was obvious that this game was a long way off, since we're creating a new engine. We probably should have been a little more clear about that and we apologize. Meanwhile, our sleeves are rolled up and we're all busy making one of the coolest games you've ever seen (DNF).

COMMUNITY NOTE: Seems to me that today's rumors were fairly inaccurate and something to take into account in the future. It'd sure be nice if "respectable" web sites would email us for clarification FIRST before posting wild claims from known rumor sites.

Jason "loonyboi" Bergman (http://www.loonygames.com)
Billy "wicked" Wilson (http://www.voodooextreme.com)
David Laprad (http://www.avault.com)
Jason Bates (http://pc.ign.com/)

Kudos to kick ass web guys above for emailing us about the facts BEFORE posting anything. Responsible journalism at it's finest.

We're going back to work now.

July 1999

3D-Unlimited has an interview with Steve Hornback.

Q9. Have you worked on any previous projects at 3D Realms/Apogee? Or contributed to other projects at other companies?

A. Well, as I stated previously, I've worked on "Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure", "Duke Nukem II", "Rise of the Triad", "Duke Nukem 3D" and "Duke Nukem Atomic", "Shadow Warrior", "Prey"(currently on hold), and "Duke Nukem Forever" I've also worked on a few other games, but just a few pieces of art. I also created 3D Realms logo.

September 1999

I wouldn't be surprised to see Software go away in DNF. It's a real hassle to add things that look cool in hardware then have to deal with the software version ramifications of that. We had decided to go hardware only way back in the early days with Prey, so it woulnd't be outside the realm of possibility that we go hardware with Duke.

October 1999

[3DU]. You guys have Corrinne Yu on the team, who is very skilled at engine development, what is her current position?

[SM]. She is creating a new engine to be used on future games.

November 1999

Scott Miller partakes in an interview with RPOV Interviews. Prey is discussed briefly.

stonewall: You have said in the past that you had learned that a company can't be involved in making too many games at once. Was having 3 major titles coming up simply too much and Prey was the natural choice to put on the shelf due to the large amount of time and effort needed to create an engine from scratch? Once DNF and Max Payne are released will 3D Realms resume work on Prey?

Scott: It's absolutely true that more is not always better, and that making two games is often not as productive as just focusing on one game. That's a big part of why we put Prey on hold, and relocated the Prey developers to DNF. Even with all the hype and anticipation for Prey, let's face it, Duke is our bread-and-butter franchise and the most important thing for us to do is make sure DNF is developed to exceed players' expectation. That takes the focus and talent of the entire company. Remedy is developing Max Payne (with our design and financial assistance), so it's not in the same boat as Prey. They're company is entirely focused on their single game.

stonewall: What FPS games have made you stand up and take notice over the last year?

Scott: Half-Life without question impressed everyone at 3DR. But maybe not as much as most game players because most of the good ideas in H-L we had in the Prey design already (such as the health stations) or we have them in DNF in some form. H-L is a finely polished, well executed game (at least until it became an arcade jumpfest on the alien world) and the scripted events added a lot of life to the experience. Also, Unreal Tournament looks like a grand slam winner, though I've only played the demo.

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/19990224125545/http://3drealms.com/revise/index.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20000226173313/http://3drealms.3dportal.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000492.html
• Quote from Vice President of Marketing at GT Interactive Tony Kee in a GameWEEK interview.

Prey is in heavy re-design. It has gone through several transformations over the last couple of years. 3D Realms, the game's developer, has chosen to focus the bulk of its resources on Duke Nukem Forever. As any good developer knows, it takes total focus from everyone involved to create a blockbuster like Duke Nukem Forever, and trying to do an equally impressive production like Prey at the same time is not realistic. They have a small team of talented programmers doing Prey R&D; on what may end up being the the PC genre's next great engine. The title of the game will most likely change as well. 3D Realm's is a seasoned, highly successful developer, and I think their strategy is a correct one.