[Kristian Joensen]

At last it is here, the thread where I will be gathetring all the George Broussard quotes I can find in one place with a bit of commentary from me as to how I interpret the quotes and their significance.

At first I will be copying a post I did a while back on the 3D Realms forums about the DNF engine I will then be adding various quotes with regards to that subject as I find them. The commentary will be added later. This is thread is a constant work in progress and the release date is as always When It's Done
In this case probably coinciding with the release of the game since then everything will be known about the game itself.

Engine

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>>WRONG! DNF is a highly modified Unreal engine.

Sorry, but it's a heavily modified UT engine. We've even pulled some stuff from the Warfare codebase, and continue to do so as it makes sense for our schedule.

- George Broussard, May 16th, 2001.

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3dr writing their own engine or using someone elses?

About 60/40 at this point, or more towards writing our own stuff.

- George Broussard, March 12th, 2002.

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People shouldn't make assumptions about what engine we're using or not using. It would be a mistake at this point. The 1999 shots are indeed...the poo.

- George Broussard, May 8th, 2002

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We're not UT level tech. We're using some of the ut2k3 stuff. Static Meshes are nice. We've written a tremendous amount of our on rendering code over the last year. I don't really think we will even be recognized as an Unreal engine game at this point.

- George Broussard, Jaunary 7th, 2003.

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DNF will make massive use of pixel shaders.

- George Broussard, Ferburary 8th, 2003.

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Unreal. But we basically rewrote 100% of the rendering and it's all different now. The game won't look like U2 or UT2k3 or Splinter Cell. We still use the backbone of the Unreal engine (editor, scripting language, etc), but all the visuals are redone. Hopefully it's worth it

- George Broussard, April 17th, 2003.

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Water is supremely trivial to do. Bumpmapping + cubic environemt maps = cool water. Every card down to a GF3 can do them. From what I've seen, technically, the HL2 engine doesn't look to me any more advanced than Unreal 2. But they have far better content, and cool tools for the emotion stuff and things like that. But technically? There isn't anything I've seen in HL2 that couldn't be rendered with the current Unreal engine. This isn't a slam of HL2 at all. But it is a reality check for wildy out of control speculation. There was a recent Jurassic Park demo that had the same basic water as HL2 (reflection the world and models around it). Technically, it isn't that hard to do. Most people just don't bother.

- George Broussard, May 11th, 2003.

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so uhmm, is it done yet?
Engine is. The damed game is the problem

- George Broussard, May 15th, 2003.

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The reason for the recent setback of 2 years was incorporation of some new features of the unreal warfare engine?
Not really. We re-wrote the rendering 100%. That'll do it.

- George Broussard, September 21st, 2003.

[Kristian Joensen]

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Our rendering engine has virtually nothing to do with Unreal anymore. It's all ours and not really comparable in any way.

- George Broussard, September 26th, 2003.

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No, our engine has pretty much been locked a few months minus final optimizations. We're extremely happy with things.

- George Broussard, October 5th, 2003

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It's true this time. I promise Besides, the guys would all kill me if we changed engines again, or severely altered tech. I've run that horse as far as it will go

- George Broussard, October 5th, 2003.

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woah . . . can we ask if you are still using the UNREAL engine ?
Yeah, but just the overall structure. Editor, scripting language, networking etc. We've completely gutted and written our own AI system, rendering, particles, skeletal animation and more so it won't look/feel like an Unreal game at all I don't think. In hindsight, I don't think licensing an engine was a smart move for us. We're pretty uncompromising in what we want to do, so we don't like having limitations. What killed us was not having the programming staff to do what we wanted to do effectively and not recognizing that for a long time. Chalk that up to inexperience.

- George Broussard, January 7th, 2004.

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Yes, in hindsight, writing our own engine would have been the way to go, but that wasn't an option once we were so deep into things. We basically stepped back in early 2002, said "This just isn't going to work or be what we want" and spent most of 2002 re-writing things to get us where we needed to be, once and for all. Most of 2003 was spent on content creation and hring new people. Once we were able to make progress, content creation bottlenecks emerged that needed to be dealt with. So, it's been an interesting journey, but one I do not recommend be repeated, by anyone, ever Haha...

- George Broussard, January 7nd, 2004.

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Done, mostly optimized, ready for prime time. There isn't a single engine feature holding up production. We could ship now if we had all the content done.

- George Broussard, January 14th, 2004.

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It's a full DX9 engine.

- George Broussard, January 14th, 2004.

[Kristian Joensen]

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No reason to freeze, as we have time to trickle in features until the game ships. But it's complete enough now that we could ship with no excuses and be happy. But just like in Duke 3D, when that engine was done, we still added small features like slopes and went back and retrofit the levels. We will still add things to the engine, as we can, where they make sense, and most importantly - where they won't delay us. We will add things if they are cool and don't impact things, but we will not add features that will cause big delays or mass reworking of exisiting content.
Also you guys (and make note of this), should not get overly excited. My talking does not mean you will see the game "soon". Don't read anything into my statements.

- George Broussard, January 17th, 2004.

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think 1) we're sufficiently advanced so as to not look dated when we ship and 2) we will continnue to add features until we ship. But they are all fluff features. We have enough to ship now, and that's a great thing for development because we can make the game with no excuse like "We need X to do Y". We don't really have any unknowns right now. We just have a lot of work to do.

- George Broussard, February 17th, 2004.

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There are very few rendering/core engine bugs. The recent past has been spent just on optimizations and squeezeing every millisecond we can out of things.

- George Broussard, March 22nd, 2004.

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Everything is different. Our visibility, rendering, everything. You could bring in raw geometry, but there's no guarantee it would ever run, as any level made in Unreal may be apples to oranges to what you would do, or how you would do it with out stuff.

- George Broussard, April 13th, 2004.

Comment:

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Also, 3DR can take advantage of the matinee code present in the Unreal Engine, to allow for entirely scripted movies.
No, we broke off from Unreal's code in 2001 or so. We never merged in any of that stuff, and we went our own way.

- George Broussard, April 13th, 2004.

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If you already support 2.0 then 3.0 is easy to support. It's nice that 3.0 is here to develop on, but most developers aren't even using 2.0 at the moment, so the 3.0 stuff is likely here too early.
DNF has a full HLSL pipe and we can pretty much support any rendering mode or feature that cards can do.

- George Broussard, May 12th, 2004.

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We have nothing to do with Unreal, 2k3/4 rendering and we've 100% written our own rendering, lighting and visibility for DNF. Apples and Oranges. We will be visually competitive.

- George Broussard, May 14th, 2004.

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I can virtually assure you we will ship on this tech base and this engine and have no intent of ever upgrading tech again

- George Broussard, July 29th, 2004.

[Kristian Joensen]

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I have over heard rumors about you guys starting over in 2002. If you are still using the Unreal engine like I assume you guys are would the technology of unreal being improved all the time. Is there a chance the game may look like the Unreal III Technology engine.?
Unreal Engine III looks like Doom 3 with higher res textures and features like HDR rendering. But the main thing that's impressing people is simple the poly counts on models and the resolution of the textures. That's what I'd expect, shipping after Doom 3.

- George Broussard, August 15th, 2004.

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I guess I need to clear up some confusion. We are not using the Doom 3 engine for Duke Nukem Forever.

- George Broussard, September 9th, 2004.

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Here how it works. You have a physcis engine that does things low level, basic things, like move objects in the world, handle constraints, ragdolls, and all of that. On top of that you build a lots of high level gameplay code that allows you to do things with physics objects. That's where most of the development time goes.

So when incorporating a new physics engine, all the high level game code stays and just needs to have the new physics function calls replace the old physics calls.

So within a couple of weeks we had most of the gameplay back up and running, but now we could move 200 boxes in the world at a time, instead of 10-20.

The integration will end up being about a month of one persons time, simply to hook up the new Meqon function calls to a couple hundred high level gameplay functions we had to deal with physics objects.

Basically it's like having a car, and you do something like replace one system in it like and engine, or the air conditioner, or something. The rest of the car stays in place and you just deal with hooking up the new piece to the old car.

This isn't a radical engine change like changing renderers where you have to create new content for the visuals

- George Broussard, September 27th, 2004.

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Does DNF use pixil shaders, and if so, hard core or mildly?
Hardcore.

- George Broussard, October 6th, 2004.

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IMO, Karma was first gen. Havok was second gen. Meqon is third gen. It's way way faster than Karma ever was, and it does more, and it's cleaner to use. I know Havok is working on next gen stuff now, but it's not available yet.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

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A while ago, GB said all physics engines were basically the same. Did this change with the new generation of physics engines?
At the time they were. That is no longer the case.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

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Has the improvements in the physics engines "changed" DNF content?
It will allow us to do more with physics and we will do what we can to make things cool.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

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Rather than another switch, why not just build yer own damn physics engine?
Physics engines are one of the hardest things to write, so it's best left to a middleware solution.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

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I thought the DNF engine was done. Why are you guys messing with it now?
The rendering has been done a long time. The physics we had have been in for 3 years. We had a ton of physics gameplay code on top of Karma. All we did was replace the low level stuff with Meqon and re-hook it up to our high level stuff.

Why did we do it? Because Karma was too slow to do anything we were trying to do. I don't feel it was a shippable solution, and in fact very few game shipped with it, doing much more than ragdoll.

This is a *very* good thing for the game.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

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George whilst we are on the subject of Pixel Shaders. Are you taking advantage for HDR rendering at all in PS2-3.0?
Yes.

- George Broussard, October 8th, 2004.

[Kristian Joensen]

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How does it work when you have already designed a charactor.... can you just implement ragdoll physics on the charactor easily? Though George said it would only take a month to redo it in the whole game.... hmmm.... either they are not that far yet or else it's really easy
Setting up ragdoll is easy. Just import the skeleton into the ragdoll tool and setup some constraints. It's more work than it sounds, but it isn't a significant issue at all.

- George Broussard, October 14th, 2004

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Don't under estimate our tech or visuals. We shot pretty high on all counts.

- George Brussard, December 20th, 2004.

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They are using a Extremely modified version of the Unreal 1 Engine.
Not really true.I think we split off around Unreal 2 level tech and wrote our own rendering, and a lot of other things.

- George Broussard, February 12h, 2005.

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Duke is modeled.

There are mirrors and you can see yourslef in them.

How could we not carry that over from Duke 3D?

- George Broussard, February 24th, 2005.

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Why not use the DNF engine that's been worked on for the last decade as opposed to the one Carmack & company put together? Surely after that long in development, the DNF engine can compete w/the Doom 3 engine can't it?
Prey was started in late 2001. At that time the Doom 3 engine was the clear leader, so it was the obvious choice. We've re-written DNF many times and it was in no shape to be used in late 2001.

Yes, visually, I feel we can compete today. But we're not starting a new project today.

- George Broussard, April 28th, 2005.

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will the mirror function like an actual mirror , such as in older games that have them, or will it be one of those fuzzy, lower quality "camera" mirrors as seen in Max Payne 2, SWAT 4 and other recent games?
We can, and do, do both. Real reflections, and render target reflections for monitors/cameras or that kind of thing. It's all just pixels.

- George Broussard, May 5th, 2005.

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Very late 2002. The rendering was up and running and we knew it would all work.

As for why we didn't grab Doom 3 in 2001 with Prey? Maybe we should have, but we had tons of gameplay code that would have been a nightmare to port over. We maintained all that through our engine upgrade.

Also Doom 3 as an engine was still a long way from being done as a shippable engine in 2001. It was a while before things stabilized and were prety solid, as is always the case with engines in development.

Ahh....hindsight

- George Broussard, May 28th, 2005.

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George can you tell me once and for all that you restarted code wise in early 2002 and contentwise late 2002/early 2003 ?
Pretty much had a new renderer by Nov 2002. The content redirection coincided with the tech change and we went forward once we knew things were stable and going to work on the tech end. So accounting for end of year slow down and Xmas vacations, you can assume a pretty much fresh start from 2003 forward.

- George Broussard, June 30th, 2005.

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Deferred rendering for teh win.

- George Broussard, July 12th, 2005.

[Kristian Joensen]

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We get updates near weekly from Meqon and are usually many, many small versions past whatever the public release is. They are always working with Kyle on bugs and features and improving things.

- George Broussard, July 24th, 2005.

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We're just now hearing about this, too. On the surface I'm not too happy about it as we were getting to a very very stable point with our physics and nearing a point of being tech complete, and just working on polish.

We'll see what happens, but we're certainly not interested in the prospects of moving to a new SDK - again.

- George Broussard, September 2nd, 2005.

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The Meqon physics sale hopefully did not affect development nor is it forseen to be an issue at all?
It should not. We've talked to them and Ageia and things seem good.

- George Broussard, September 24th, 2005.

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Per pixel motion blurring can be done on current low to mid range pc video cards. It's not something that's only possible on the 360, or anything.

- George Broussard, October 22th, 2005.

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Will you switch to Unreal 3 engine for DNF?

No. Its a fantastic looking engine, but we want to finish on what we have.

Will you use Normal Mapping?

Yes.

Have you had trouble regarding Dynamic Lights with Unreal 2's renderer?

Our rendering is 100% different than Unreal 2. We wrote our own.

Will it the lighting system be as good as Doom 3's?

Yes.

- George Broussard, October 24th, 2005.

Question:

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Seriously, though. What version of the Unreal Engine is DNF going to be using? Unreal Engine 2.5 or 3.0?
Neither. We broke off many moons ago. About all we use from Unreal now is the editor, networking and Unreal Script.

- George Broussard, November 15th, 2005.

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Depth of field is fairly trivial in games, with modern tech.

- George Broussard, November 22th, 2005.

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Actually per pixel motion blur makes a huge difference playing a game, making things look more real and generally smoothing things out. Depth of Field and other little effects can be used all over in different effects ways. These all enhance visual immersion.

- George Broussard, December 10th, 2005.

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We all know that DNF will be a First Person Shooter. BUT will we be able to Duke's feet? Lets say I point my view to the ground, am I able to see 2 feets there?

I do not remember many games where that has been possible. I can see some problems in this, as the deformation of scales, this has to be taken account if we would be able to see Duke's feet. Still, this is tiny tidbit that would be nice to know.
Yes.

There are considerable issues doing this properly without hacks for your gun penetrating the world (because it's actually in the world now and not pasted on screen). You can usually spot hacks going on when you walk up to a wall and see how the gun shadow is often a little "off", vs where it should be.

What happens when you look down and duck? You have a gun in your hand now and when you duck it goes down, and your leg is there. So how do you handle issues like that, so you don't have massive amounts of polygon clipping?

It's a good bit of work to do it well and solve most of the issues, and make things "feel" right, once you put the camers in the player's head, vs just being a free floating camera in the world with a gun drawn on screen.

But yes, Duke's had it since the restart in early 2003, and it all works really well.

- George Broussard, February 5th, 2006.

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This is the only way I ever seeing it becoming mainstream. When you can count on 75% of your market having accelerated physics, then you could easily go that way exclusively, and drive hardware, and forget about software physics on the main cpu. It will be hard to get to that point, and I think it will take bundling with other hardware.

I want it all to happen, and work, but it's an extremely hard road.

We will likely support hardware physics in DNF, but it's going to be on a wait and see basis and until there are substantial numbers of units shipped and purchased, I can't see that changing for any developer.

- George Broussard, February 26th, 2006.

[Kristian Joensen]

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If you are tech complete for a year, and the game is still not done; so by the time it ships
it's more then a year tech complete. By that time, aren't graphics/tech out-dated ?
Don't worry. When I say tech complete, I mean we could ship if all the content were done.
It's fairly easy to add and update shaders and we do so all the time.
The graphics guys are ahead and always have time to add in bells and whistles.
Many things like per pixel blur, depth of field etc, have zero impact on game content and drop in, in a few days.

- George Broussard, March 30th, 2006.

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So are those things in ? Second of all haven't you been tech complete since 2004 ? That would be make 2 not 1 year. Not that it real matters that much.
Yeah, those things are in and have been for a while. And yes, we've been fundamentally tech complete for longer than a year. But this is a case where you just say things without thinking and then people pick the details apart in print later.

- George Broussard, March 30th, 2006.

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When I noticed Andy Hanson had left, I was, shall we say, concerned about who was going to be handling the graphics engine. I know there are other guys (John Pollard?) but still...
By the time I left at the end of April, I had spent the last couple of years on animation systems, artist and asset tools, facial expressions and other basic mesh systems. I hadn't really worked on the graphics stuff for a couple years.

- Andy Hanson, August 30th, 2006.

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Physics and animation systems are virtually finished and shippable. It's simply maintenance and polish from here on out. We haven't needed to make substantial changes to those systems in months. The changes we have made, were made without great effort.

- George Broussard, August 31st, 2006.

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We started with the Quake engine, but within six or so months we switched to the Unreal engine. However, I’m reminded of the story about the man who claimed to own the axe that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. The man said, “Yeah, it’s the same axe alright, but the head and handle have both been replaced a few times over the last 200 years of use.” The same applies with the Unreal engine we licensed so long ago.

- Scott Miller, March 20th, 2007.

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Multi-core support is in and quite nice. We all run Core Duo 6600's and 7950/8800, ati 1900 level cards.

Multi-core is the future and the game is pretty much going to require it. You really have to, to make a game competitive with modern consoles, or beyond. One cpu isn't enough anymore.

64 bit will come, but is lower priorty. Vista/64 bit isn't a priority for us at the moment.

- George Broussard, April 19th, 2007.

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It's a modified version of Unreal, about the time of Unreal 2

- George Broussard, December 18th, 2007.

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Unreal. I believe we branched off somewhere around the Unreal 2 time when they added static meshes. Since then we've redone the rendering 100% and it's a fully modern engine.

- George Broussard, December 19th, 2007

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Bodies and pieces stay, but there is a queue of how many of each stick around. Most of the time you won't notice some going away. We try to get rid of them based on how long since you last saw them, or just based on how many are in a scene. If you are shotgunning 5 pig cops in a room and limbs are flying, you aren't likely to notice some going away, in battle, and you tend to focus on the residual carnage that's left once the battle is over.

- George Broussard, January 26th, 2008

[Kristian Joensen]

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It's a multicore engine. Graphic detail is a large part of why.

- George Broussard, April 29th, 2008.

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That crate can't be in game. Too low res and no ambient occlusion.

- George Broussard, June 5th, 2008.

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It has undergone several complete overhauls, with the most recent version reportedly using the same id Software engine that powered Prey and Doom 3. (Those reports were initially denied, but have since resurfaced.)"
False.

It's amazing how they just print stuff, or how saying something enough times in internet forums makes something fact

- George Broussard, June 7th, 2008.

[Kristian Joensen]

Status

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2) DNF start date: We started with a full team in Dec 1997 after getting Quake 2. Before that 95% of us were finishing Shadow Warrior and playing with Quake 1 in "spare time" - ala for the PC Gamer cover. So that puts DNF at a little over 2.5 years in development. We're late beacause we switched engines and have added a shitload of tech/features to Unreal. It takes its toll. But now were in the game making process and the game makes visible progress weekly.

- George Broussard, October 11th, 2000

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The biggest setback was in waiting nearly a year for Unreal code to stop changing and stabilize (basically with the release of UT). Up until then we were in patch hell every time a new Unreal code release happened (about every 3 months).

- George Broussard, October 11th, 2000.

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Brandon has been working on a little project the last couple of days that will be of interest to mod authors.

DNF will support UnrealEd 2 as it's primary editor. We plan to make the switch in a couple of days and Brandon already has UE2 loading DNF maps.

UE2 is in C++ and not basic, so it's more stable and a little faster. We also no longer have to distribute clunky/confusing Visual Basic runtime libraries.

It will also be much easier to add new features to UE2 as it is better written and in the natural language of the game (ie not Basic).

Some features we get from moving to UE2:

- New vertex manipulation tool. - Brush clipping. - Tools to remove backfacing textures. - Drawn interpolation paths. - Freeform polygon drawing tool w/ extrusion. (From next Epic game)

This is a good thing and gets us up to date with the state of the art of Epic's editing tools.

Thank Brandon for working on this from midnight till 8am Saturday night :-)

- George Broussard, January 17th, 2001.

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"What's taking so long?": Lots of things. We had too few programmers early on. Some tech took too long to do. We switched engines. We started over a time or two. And a bunch of other stuff.

- George Broussard, January 13th, 2003.

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We didn't get Quake 2 code till Dec 97/Jan 98. We made the mistake of mocking some stuff up in Quake 1 (like a user mod) for PC Gamer. In hindsight that was unfair to PC Gamer, and to the fans, and lesson learned.

- George Broussard, May 29th, 2003.

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Hmmm...probably not getting key tech features done in time, and since we were unwilling to have an average looking game (projecting to when we could potentially ship), we re-did major chunck of the engine, which caused content to get redone. In short, we never had a solid tech base to build on, so it was the equivalent of trying to build a house without a solid foundation/structure.

- George Broussard, January 1st, 2004.

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Yeah. We basically spent 4 years trying to get to a solid tech base that we could make the game with, for varying reasons. Learned a lot of valuable lessons about licensing tech, as well as what's needed to alter it, when you're ambitions go beyond the tech that you licensed. So scrap a lot of time and work to a learning process.

But we've been on solid track and a solid engine for a while now and are just cranking on the game and content.

- George Broussard, July 14th, 2004.

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A lot more than this happened, but this is all I saw as I bumped into people as I was looking over flow for a couple of levels and working with Keith and Brian. Allen put up a couple of npc scripted animations in his level. Charlie was messing with blooms on particles. Kyle did some optimizations that made some levels run faster and is about to merge in some new Meqon physics code. Joe sent around some renders of a new character he was working on. Rob checked in some dismemberment code that we're playing with. Charlie and Scott were playing some deathmatch and making notes. Some of us watched Survivor and were glad to see the blonde chick go home.

- George Broussard, March 11th, 2005.

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Was it announcing too early, deciding to use a 3rd party 3d engine, choosing wrong tech, not employing enough developers, over-ambition or whatever?

Actually it was a combination of every one of those things. I think we chose a fine engine (both times), but we didn't really have the technical skills to modify them fast enough, or enough people, so things slipped. It was inexperience.

- George Broussard, March 27th, 2005.

[Kristian Joensen]

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Have you completed at least 70% of the models?

This is hard to say, as a model can be anything from a prop (like a chair, microwave, etc) to the tons and tons of models that go into the levels as architecture to flesh out a level.

A ton is done. We have hundreds of props that you can place in the world, and the artists just continue to pump stuff out.

Are the majority of your models textured?

We complete them as they go in, so the ones that are done, are in.

Have all the weapons been programmed in and are usable in-game right now?

Yes. In, with animations, sound pass, and final textures. We'll probably add a couple more as we go, and there are some whacky ideas we want to explore, but all the base guns are in and we could ship with what we have.

Approximately how many types of enemies are there?

15 or so, and working on more.

- George Broussard, May 21st, 2005.

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considering there are levels they haven't even started work on yet. Alpha requires that all levels be in-game and nearing completion.

I think there are two levels we haven't started yet. And some others are in pretty advanced states, so it mostly balances out. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

- George Broussard, June 26th, 2005.

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Ok, this is what they?ve written in the small box about DNF:

-Gamestar hasn?t seen DNF, just the desktop icon on the presentation-PC
-some walls in the studio are covered with posters, some weapons from DNF can be seen on them but George turned them around so they can?t photograph them
-they?re working hard on DNF, IN THE NEAR FUTURE they want to build an alpha version where you can walk through the whole game, without enemies and weapons^^
-circa 30 people are working on it atm
-he promised screens, videos etc... for the future and we will see this stuff possibly this year!
That?s all
my thoughts on this: GS has possibly understand something wrong with the alpha version^^

I think they likely misunderstood some casual comments in the hallway, between Prey showings.

I'm not going to comment too much on where we are or where we are going, but I've said in the past that a lot of the enemies are done and in, and all of the guns are in (most to beta levels). But there's more to a game than 10 guns and 20 bad guys. We're working on some of those parts now.

- George Broussard, June 30th, 2005.

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But why did they think you where gonna make a version without enemies and weapons ? That doesn't make sense knowing that you have already made enemies and weapons.

Because things happen when you take conversations from memory and things are flying all over the place. He probably heard something like "we're hooking up all the levels so we can run through them real fast with no guns or guys". All that means is that you lock your geometry and get a chance to stand back and look at it ant think "this is what we want to ship...let's get this all working and cool, and then see about adjustments to lenght, fun or whatever. But this is what we intend to make, barring any serious issues".

- George Broussard, June 30th, 2005.

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................. .................. .................. .................. since how much years???

About 2.5 years since we threw everything out content wise and went forward with a new engine and plan.

Forget everything prior to 2003. It's lost gone, and doesn't even count.

- George Broussard, June 30th, 2005.

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The only thing I can figure is that this is a case of a desire for too much perfection.

That's not it at all. We certainly have very high standards, but the bottom line is that we had some issues and made some big mistakes and that cost us a few years of wasted development. We started fresh in very late 02 (really early 03) and have been on a pretty good pace since then. We are making progress and driving towards something.

This reallly is a case of just screwing up in a cosmic way early on, then just deciding to try to do it right

- George Broussard, September 8th, 2005.

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Could you possible give us an idea how far along the following parts of the game are in terms of pre-alpha, alpha, beta...etc?
The enemies, non playable characters(NPCs), weapons, music/sound effects, levels and multiplayer.

Varying stages from beta to pre-alpha.

- George Broussard, September 24th, 2005.

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We really didn't use Quake 1. When we were finishing Shadow Warrior a couple of guys were playing with Quake 1, while we were waiting for Quake 2 code (late 97/early 98). We didn't really start even hiring people for DNF until late 97, after we shipped Shadow Warrior, and into early 98. We then prototyped some stuff in Quake 2 from Jan 98 until about E3 or so. Then we moved to Unreal 1. The rest is history, long and painful as it's been at times

- George Broussard, November 2nd, 2005.

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I think it'll be out when pigs fly. But it's definitely going well now. Things are together; we're in full production. We're basically just pulling all the pieces together and making the game out of it. There's a lot that's finished. All the guns are finished. Most of the creatures are finished. And as I said, we're just basically pulling it all together and trying to make it fun. We've kind of got all these disassociated elements that make up a game, and you put them together and things happen. And then you just tweak it and polish it until it's fun, and that's kind of the phase we're in now, just trying to make something that is really fun to play and interesting.

- George Broussard, January 31st, 2006.

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Is the development still working well? We all need a simple "yes" to calm us down.

"Yes".

- George Broussard, March 14th, 2006.

[Kristian Joensen]

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>>> With a project so bloated and mishandled it is damn near impossible to not point the finger at those managing. To actually accuse employees <<<

It should be pretty obvious by what I said that it WAS management's fault, as management does the hiring. We (management) should have hired more people with more concrete game development experience. There are many other problems, too, so I do not want to give the impression that under-experienced employees was the only one.

- Scott Miller, October 24th, 2006.

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To be clear, not everyone we hired in the past were "noobs". But, in general, we hired too many people with no or too little experience in the past. Now we're hiring a far greater percentage of people with 5-10 years experience, and the results are dramatic, exciting and confidence building in the project.

It's probably best to have a good mix of experience levels, but in the past we were too far below industry average, I think.

- Scott Miller, October 24th, 2006.

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Anything I say now is going to be like 'Yeah, I'll belive it when I see it,' So there's really nothing I can say now that's going to appease anyone or convince anyone or anything like that. We are absolutely the first to admit that this project is an industry joke at this time. There's no doubt about it. We're kind of a victim of our past success. Because we were so successful in the past, in a way it kind of gave us too much time to make he prefect game. But in the last year internally we've done a lot of new things, brought in a lot of new experienced people, and refocused the project. From an outsiders point of view, even though I'm inside the company, I can say that there's a light at the end of the tunnel finally. I'm not going to give any sort of release date or anything, but this thing is moving quickly forward. Obviously, no game is worth any sort of wait like this, but this games going to make people happy for sure.

- Scott Miller, early-mid 2007.

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First, we fully admit we’re screwed up the development of DNF, and it’s now an industry joke. I laugh (and cry) when I think about it, too. Our fault is that we set the bar too high, and we tried too hard to make the game to beat all games. In the last 18 months we’ve taken a much more realistic look at the project, we’ve hired a truckload of experienced help, and I personally believe we are now on the right track…finally.

- Scott Miller, March 20th, 2007.

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>>> I'm also incredibly impressed that over this time 3D Realms has never been in debt or layed anybody off. <<<

(Sorry for the bad quoting method, I did not find a quote-the-highlighted-text button, and HTML is not my expertise.)

We've released people, and people have left us, to be sure, but we've never had a lay-off, as Raph said.

Also, we've been a key factor in several other major releases, including Max Payne, several third-party Duke titles on the consoles, and Prey. These have all greatly solidified 3DR's financial stability. In fact, I recently accounted for the retail sales of all franchises/brands that 3DR had a hand in starting, and it amounted to over one billion dollars (say this Dr. Evil style ).

With DNF, we can afford to take our time. That, in and of itself, may be part of the problem, though...we've been under no pressure to release, and therefore we haven't. This problem is fully appreciated now (and has been for over a year), and DNF is on a much faster track to completion than in previous years.

- Scott Miller, June 6th, 2007.

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Where do your main priorities right now in development? Are you focusing on anything in particular? (finishing characters/environments etc…)

Well, we’re doing a lot of polishing of set pieces, environments, and characters.

- T. Ray Isaac, Art Director, January 28th, 2008.

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We only let jason play a small section of one level. rest assured there are large ooutdoor open areas and much much more to come. this is but a small taste.

- George Broussard, June 5th, 2008.

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You're looking at it from a scientific angle, only analyzing a few seconds of gameplay. Most people look at it as confirmation that the game they want to play is alive, breathing, and coming...

There is so much more to show, it's silly. And it still won't be enough for lots of people, and that's ok.

- George Broussard, June 6th, 2008.

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Never fear, there are bright, daylight levels, as well. I'd say all times of day and mood are represented at some point. There is a mixture of corridor crawls, and larger more open areas (indoor and out).

- George Broussard, June 6th, 2008.

[Kristian Joensen]

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That EDF supply crate is one of the worst crates in the history of crates. But otherwise... /throws confetti!

Been replaced for quite a while now. That footage is 6 months old and lots of things are updated or tweaked/different now.

- George Broussard, June 6th, 2008.

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oh yeah, the points thing that pops up definitly needs to go

Programmer art and temp, which is why footage was never really intended to be shown, and why we're not quite doing "official" releases of in game stuff. It's in progress but about to have another polish pass.

- George Broussard, June 6th, 2008.

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We do polish passes on things all the time. It just depends what the focus is. Some people are polishing and others are building new things, and it all changes all the time. There are times when we lock down for 3-4 weeks and virtually everyone works on polish as a core goal, too.

- George Broussard, June 6th, 2008.

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Development is swimming along nicely. Seriously nicely.

- Scott Miller, June 26th, 2008.

[Kristian Joensen]

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It’s going really well. There are several hours of fairly polished game to play. We’re actively testing parts of the game and getting feedback from play testers and things are coming together. It’s fun, it’s in focus, we know what bits are fun and which are not, and it’s just a matter of time now. I’ve probably never been as happy or excited about the game as I am these days.

- George Broussard, August 25th, 2008.

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Senior designers are presenting a new DNF map to myself and Hook now. Should be cool.

- George Broussard, Septermber 23rd, 2008.

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We here fully agree. It's disgraceful. We have tried to be far too ambitious with the sequel while being constantly undermanned as a studio, and we clearly bit off a hunk of meat we couldn't chew.

That said, we've turned the corner, have screwed our heads on straight, hired more people, and we think we're finally making a game that is doable in today's market.

The joke of the game industry looks like it will finally reach its punchline. We're not saying when, yet. But we're on track to finish the game in a reasonable and predictable period.

- Scott Miller, September 26th, 2008.

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http://twitpic.com/kj7g - The guys are recording some motion capture. They suckered an artist into the suit.

- George Broussard, November 7nd, 2008.

[Kristian Joensen]

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http://twitpic.com/pjhi - Just went through a bunch of handwritten notes. Goodbye clutter. Hello tidy todo lists.

- George Broussard, December 2nd, 2008.

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http://twitpic.com/ppqh - Tweaking the enemy/creature sound system with Eric & Dave. Proper sounds make combat 5x better.

- George Broussard, December 2nd, 2008.

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Game developers often say "Cutting is shipping". We begin this year with a vengeance and a chainsaw.

- George Broussard, January 12th, 2009.

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Worked on menu design and layout with Pete and Layne for a couple of hours.

- George Broussard, January 12th, 2009.

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Packing up to go visit our publisher and show them the game and cool sh!t to get them hyped and excited. Cold and rainy day to fly.

- George Broussard, January 26th, 2009.

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Dallas is icy. Hopefully we don't crash. If so expect a slight delay on the game.

- George Broussard, January 28th, 2009.

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Looking at item interface on screen again. We're trying to finalize some core systems and polish them up.

- George Broussard, February 9th, 2009.

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A peek inside our task database at some resolved issues. http://twitpic.com/1fuju

- George Broussard, February 11th, 2009.

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Working on hud impact and hit effects today. Been in a while but need polish and attention. These things really contribute to the "feel".

- George Broussard, February 13th, 2009.

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Putting in some new main menu sound effects. Beefy sounding.

- George Broussard, February 13th, 2009.

[Kristian Joensen]

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Closing out a milestone this week. 71 more tasks to do and we started with probably 800-900. Been a good push. Next one starts Monday.

- George Broussard, April 13th, 2009.

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Heading home. Got some music for the game and commented. Have a couple more things to close out tomorrow for milestone. 24 is on!!!

- George Broussard, April 14th, 2009.

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Bought a 128gig external SSD drive and am copying the game down to it now. I have one in my Macbook Air and love it. They are great.

- George Broussard, April 17th, 2009.