Hi Ken,did you ever regret about your choice to leave active 3d engine programming
to return to college?Was't a better choice to continue researching for improving your
3d engine and find some other smart programmers like you to support you at engine
tools creation.What college had to offer to a programmer like you?
Awesoken at
I'm not going to say that returning to college was a bad choice. You only live life once, and there is no guarantee that things would have gone as well for me if I had stayed with 3D Realms. Since returning to college, I believe that life in the software industry has only gotten worse. There's too much competition - everyone wants to do it now.
I never stopped researching 3D engines. I wrote new 3D demos in college and I still do it today. I don't feel that college has really slowed me down. And BTW, I do work with other talented programmers. You already know about JonoF... as this is his site. I also do a lot of collaboration with Tom Dobrowolski.
3dEngineProgrammer at
I wonder why didn't you add Windows + OpenGL support to your engine,back
then to 1997 when you left 3drealms.The addition of 3d models and lightmaps,i
think that would definetely made your engine compete the Quake 2 engine.
3d realms wouldn't have to licence the Quake 2 engine as they did.
I as a programmer if i had the bacic structure of the engine completed as you had,
i would keep adding features to the engine that would made my engine look modern.
(Only if you think that Quake3 is just an engine with full OpenGL support (meaning the
shaders) and Doom3 it's just Quake3 mixed with the nVidia Geforce 1 demos.)
After the hardware rendering had ruled i don't think there is engine rendering features
one brilliant programmer that can add,another can't find the way to implement.
To me all is having your own basic engine structure and keep up with technology.
Anonymous at
Awesoken said
there is no guarantee that things would have gone as well for me if I had stayed with 3D Realms.
Come to think of it, it's almost 10 years passed!
And they still have not released anything reasonable in Duke Nukem Forever direction...
In my humble opinion, their main mistake is that they always tried to use the ready engine instead of thinking out something their own - 1st they wanted to use Q1 engine, then Unreal, and then...
I wonder, if they have programmers among their staff?
Or do their team consists only of game designers and artists?
Or 10 years aren't enough to develop your own "in-house" engine?
I beleive that if they continue doing things in that way, then we'll soon see an
(un)official release of Duke Nukem Forever and the credits will be as follows:
Programming, Game Design, Engine, Tools, Network, Art, Music, etc, etc, etc by ....
Ken Silverman! :))) :D
Anonymous at
Have you not heard of the Disaster that was Prey?
GothOtaku at
Anonymous said
Have you not heard of the Disaster that was Prey?
Hey, they're finally going to release it after 10+ years. It looked amazing back in '97, let's see if they were able to keep the quality up.
Maximus at
The Prey engine does look pretty sweet. My understanding is that its NOW a tweaked version of the Doom 3 engine. By tweaked I means it uses some pretty funky portal technology (like those in UNREAL), has HUGE maps and improved the physics engine (have you seen the video where the player lands on a little planet? 6D physics!!! This has been done before in Serious Sam but I don't think they used it for anything).
The old Prey engine was pretty hot as well. It was built upon a portal system rather then bsp. This is similar to how Ken made the build engine, allowing for TONS of flexibiltity within the surfaces. I think the original Prey engine was one of the first to display mirrors as well as true 32bit colouring... I think.
Either way I think Kens spirit is still alive in 3DRealms. Wonderring the halls and comming up with funky ideas for 3d engines. ALA VOXAP