old...PREYNEWS...archives...

September 1998 news:

Wednesday  9-30-98    

DESIGN MEETING [6:05 p.m.]

A great design meeting this afternoon--it was good to get back into the "small scale brainstorm" groove again! I've posted the flow of today's meeting, accessible via the Ideas banner link. I'll let you know when we have the next session.

JASON HALL VISIT [10:35 a.m.]

Yesterday, I had a chance to sit in on a rather involved demo of the LithTech engine from Jason Hall, CEO of Monolith. From an engine standpoint, it's pretty damn impressive stuff. Here are some interesting factoids:

• DX6 is a good thing, because it really does give you a broad range of cards to support. But they made their renderer modular, so you can toss in another API (like Glide or OpenGL). We're on that path--we just need to stick to it.
• Their engine is damn fast! It's a BSP/PVS-based engine, but it's fast as hell and vis time is negligible (about 3 minutes for a level). Plus, they can do HUGE outdoor areas.
• They've got some cool environment mapping effects, like maps on the metal of guns, and a variation that projects moving cloud "shadows" over the terrain.
• They have very solid cinematic controls built into the editor.
• Their dynamic geometry is still very limited--not much beyond doors and platforms.
• Jason showed off a demo room that had 200 1,000 poly animated characters in it--sure, it chugged a bit when all of them were on the screen at once, but not as much as you'd think--their LOD system, plus the speed of their engine, really makes swarming possible.
• A lot of the features that Jason touted when he explained why LithTech is better than Unreal are approaches that we already have in Prey.
• Jason was passionate about their decision to rip out their scripting language and hard code everything--he firmly believes that interpreted scripts, when used to control a lot of the game logic, are a very bad thing.
• In their Skinner-like tool, he showed off one cool feature that we must have--at a given "T" in an animation cycle, he could insert a message (like "play appropriate footstep sound").
• While they do have lightmaps, they must be of a pretty granular resolution, and light maps were not what was providing colored lighting to the environment--that might have been gouroud shading. He turned off lightmaps and the colored lighting remained, just the soft environmental shadows vanished.
• Their actor system doesn't appear to be bone-based. George asked a question and Jason didn't know what George meant by "bones"--of course, he then quickly said "sure, we've got bones," but what he showed us doesn't seem to point in that direction. It looks like their models are made up of poly "chunks" (which he called "nodes"). Things like the torso, thigh, head, calf, foot, etc. are each their own chunk, which is allowed to z-clip into the other chunks. It looks like their animations are made up of frames which describe the transformations of these chunks--of course, it's all interpolated, so it runs very smoothly. Jason said that the model was made up of these "parts" so that mocap would plug in better, but I also think that it has something to do with LOD as well (the chunks are discretely LODed). To calculate 500 levels of LOD for a 1,000 poly character took less than 1 second.

ENTITIES

If you haven't yet had a chance to look at Matt and John's entity/message work, check it out. As I expected, they took my examples and just crushed them with coolness. The two most important things I learned were these:

• I didn't know that order made a difference--putting entities in the right order really helps out the stability
• We need to be able to, via some method (groups, a container entity or via a script), "gather" a bunch of entities and map objects together into a single unit. The test is simple: take Matt's gun and be able to copy and paste it into any room, or even 2 into the same room. We'll still probably have to hand-associate any control logic (like the input XLATs that control the object), but that makes sense and isn't much of a problem.

Tuesday  9-29-98    

STUPENDOUS GAMEPLAY ARCHITECTURING [9:55 a.m.]

Tomorrow (Wednesday), at 3:30, we'll commence our new series of design brainstorm sessions, much in the same vein as we did late last year. Attendance is optional, but if you aren't there, you lose your right to bitch.

COOL PLACE

I'm not sure if any of you are into vintage aircraft, but if you are, here's a place to go: Cavanaugh's Flight Museum at the Addison Airport. I took Emmery there this weekend and the place is simply astounding--more planes than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and they're all up-close. What's so cool is that all of them are flight-ready. Seeing a P51 up close was really amazing (I had no idea just how big that plane was). Also, if you're interested, I've got a demo of MicroProse's European Air War on CD--you can fly a P51 or Focke-Wolf 190.

Friday  9-25-98    

MISC [3:35 p.m.]

S3 stopped by today to talk about Savage 3D and drop off a few cards. On Unreal, it's about as fast as a single Voodoo 2, but it sells for $88 (2D and 3D). They showed off a room using their own texture compression approach (that MSoft has licesned for DX6) that bosted 200MB of texture art in a single room! It was pretty damn impressive.

I'm off to meet with LBE late this afternoon over in Richardson about Prey Arcade.

It looks like the bonus agreements are ready to go--expect that to get all wrapped up sometime next week.

OUR LAST MEETING

Three cheers for Allen for organizing our Wednesday meeting (remember Scott, you're on for October 21). It was a great meeting and a good afternoon of racing afterwards. So Scot and David ended up being the only ones to actually win the real races--we all know that we could have taken them down with a few more laps and the right car! Pics will be posted soon.

Wednesday  9-23-98    

DEMOGRAPHICS, ANYONE? [9:21 p.m.]

As you guys know, I was off at a demographics and research symposium yesterday, sponsored by Gamespot (though I had no idea it'd be a 7 hour affair! At least they had coffee and munchies!). I did learn some very interesting things. Gamespot has a research department that probably does the most advanced demographic research in the industry which focuses on avid gamers (though most aren't "expert" gamers, and that's important--about 10% are "expert"). Here are some "factoids" that pertain to our lot in the world:

Users:

• About 40% of the gamers already have Pentium 2 machines
• About 75% still use Win95, and 21% have already upgraded to Win98 (the other few percentage points are spread between WinNT, DOS, Mac, Unix, Win3.1, etc.)
• Most users have at least 64MB of RAM
• About 65% already have 3D accelerators
• Of those who have accelerators, about 30% know they have 3DFX chips (almost 40% don't know their chip type--that's spooky)
• About 21% of gamers have home-based LAN networks (very surprising)
• Here's an interesting factoid: of all respondents of the survey, over 35% have purchased something from Amazon.com in the last 30 days!

Other factoids:

• In the "title track" research, Prey was the only game in the top 25 action games (they rated 75 action games) that doesn't yet have an advertising campaign under way yet.
• Prey ranked #7 in the "I plan to buy this game" category--again, without the help of any advertising.
• Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, is in the top 10 of most-anticipated console games (all console platforms)
• The number one PC game in ALL categories (most known about, highest "affinity" rating and highest "plan to buy" rating) is Age of Empires II
• In the top 25 publishers (which players thing make the best games), 3 game developers "crept in":id, 3D Realms and Cavedog.
• The #1 game genre is strategy (no doubt RTS), followed closely by action.
• Most on-line game players don't really care if a game supports more than 8 players per game (but this changes at the "expert" player level)
• Most gamers still prefer single player gaming
• The two most common multiplayer gaming complaints: poor performance (lag) and buggy Internet play.
• Most players wonder "What ever happened to all the cool stuff in the game box?" Where are the cool manuals, maps, reference cards, etc?

MEETING TODAY

Don't forget that our meeting is today, at 2 p.m. Allen will be running the show this time. Also, I'd like to sit down with the coders for a quick pow-wow at about 1:30 this afternoon.

Monday  9-21-98    

WEDNESDAY MEETING [12:25 p.m.]

We'll have our bi-weekly design brainstorm this Wednesday at 2 p.m. We'll meet in the conference room for the "cerebral" part of the pow-wow. Allen and are are going to work up the agenda of design topics later today. At about 3:30, we'll head out to the "off site" portion of the meeting.

Friday  9-18-98    

VODKA CURRENCY? [9:10 a.m.]

I just saw on the news this morning that, in Russia, prices have increased 45% just since the beginning of September. In order to latch onto something of value, Russians are taking all of their savings out of the bank and waiting in lines for hours and hours just to buy as much vodka as they can, The thinking is that vodka will hold its value far better than their currency... after all, it'll always be in demand. Strange though... by then end of the month, their nation's economy could be based on vodka (as an aside, on Russian official said that during the communist rule, a full 30% of the government's cash income came from the state-run liquor business). Makes me thirsty for a Stolly and cranberry juice...

COOL CATALOG

I got a cool catalog in my office if you want to check it out--it's from a company called "Lilliput" and they import European and Japanese toys, mostly metal and mostly retro, but all cool stuff.

ENTITY EDITOR

The entity editor is up in o:\user\schuytema\ented ,if you want to check it out (there's also a sample entity file). It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's got variable functions now, plus Tom's suggestion of optionally appending the room name to a variable name to make it unique. I'll be putting up another version later today that should fix the "find animation" problem and combine the entire message builder (7 different windows) into 1 form that dynamically modifies itself.

WEEKLY UPDATES

Don't forget to get me you weekly updates via task manager (John-kudos for getting yours to me on Thursday!). Some of you have been chronically negligent about the updates--you know who you are. Again, I implore you to jump through this hoop, since I have made it a requirement, and not an option. It really helps me to keep track of things on this end. Also, Tom, be sure to get me your new "daily log" task today.

Thursday  9-17-98    

HISTORY DEVICE [8:07 p.m.]

We've unearthed(sic) a piece of humanoid technology, and have managed to get it dusted off and sort-of working. It appears to be some type of history recording device...

BTW, you may need these two fonts: Lucinda Console and Haettenschweiler (if you're seeing Time Roman, that is). Just left click to view, right click to get the font files.

ANY IDEAS? [2:05 p.m.]

I'm going to start putting together the 7th installment of the Prey developer's journal for Gamecenter over the next week. I've got some ideas for column topics, but I'd like to see if any of you have any thoughts for a cool column. Tom, you haven't yet contributed... any ideas from your cubby-hole in the Prey world?

FROM SCOTT

Scott Miller stopped by to brainstorm a bit this morning, and one thing that we talked about struck me as something very important--we need to make sure that our weapons (ranged, mystical and melee) all feel like they are really effecting their target. Not just in terms of damage done and some cool spawned sprite effect or particle stream, but a real sense that our actions with a weapon are effecting serious results on the foe. Like having a chainsaw go into a dude and come out the other side. Like having a shoulder snap when a shot hits there. Like having blood leak out from a wound when a character falls dead on the floor... real visual and aural feedback that tells us that we've done serious harm to an enemy.

Wenesday  9-16-98    

WISHLIST [1:45 p.m.]

Check out this very interesting link that Martin forwarded to me:

http://software.simplenet.com/cgi-bin/miva?prey/wishlist.mv

PREYWEB UPDATE [10:25 a.m.]

A few new things to check out on PreyWeb:

-I've moved the old news off to an archive page which you can access at the bottom of this month's news

-New drawings from Allen in the images section

-The team ideas section has been updated with some new brainstorms

-I've put the "Coder Notes" section on line. For now, I'll use it to provide, in easily digestible form, just what the coders have been working on

-I've also created a new section which we'll use to track our milestones. It'll give you a good and quick overview of where we're (and where we're heading) at on any given week.

-Scott and I are working on a cool "side web" to document things with images and photos, since we've got those nifty new cameras (see below). We should have a prototype up and running in a few days (or maybe even hours!).

Note: please be sure to get me your ideas, thoughts and news (even cool personal news). I really want this to be a place to share information, but sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get anything from you guys. Get me stuff in any way that's easy for you, and I'll take it from there-PCS

DIGITAL CAMERAS

If you guys aren't yet aware, we have 2 very nice Nikon digital cameras available for use by the Prey team. You can come check them out from me. If you have any questions on how to use these bad boys, just ask Scott or myself.

ENTITIES AND MESSAGES

Yesterday, I started getting the GSEs up to speed on the concepts of advanced messaging--we should be seeing some cool stuff from them over the next few weeks. Also, the entity editor will be ready for GSE abuse some time later today.

TASK MANAGER

Be sure to check your task manager later today--I've updated tasks. Also, not all of you have been keeping up with the status reports--now, more than ever, I'd like you guys to follow through with the reports. It'll help me track what you've been working on, plus it will give me the info I need to keep the whole team informed as to where we're at. Also, when you do a status report, please be sure to check the date of the report when you send it--I'm getting some reports tagged as June.

DESIGN BRAINSTORMING

Here is the up-to-date list of design subjects that we'll be brainstorming over the next few weeks (in full and partial team meetings). I've only heard back from one of you with an addition to this list, so let me know if there's anything else that you're interested in exploring.

-inventory/powerups

-specific level environments/situations/puzzles, etc.

-review the behavior of the damage system

-interactive kiosks and the like

-vehicle control

-translations/understanding alien dialog, etc.

-confidence meter (just what are the "triggers"?)

-melee weapons

-multiplayer game variations

-general AI behaviors (a review and re-evaluation)

-specific behavior explorations of enemies that we haven't yet explored

-specific cinematic scripting and storyboarding

-planning out player "sub missions" and goals for levels and partial levels

NEXT WHOLE-TEAM MEETING

The next whole-team, bi-weekly meeting will be next Wednesday. It's one of our off-site meetings. Allen is in charge of the off-site portion of things, and I haven't yet heard what he has in mind or what time we're having the meeting. I'll fill you in as soon as I hear from him.

BE SURE TO READ...

Stop by and borrow that latest Game Developer magazine from me--I want you all to read the "post mortem" on Shogo--it rings very true to some of the frustrations and problems and hurdles we've been dealing with on Prey. It really doesn't offer up any "A ha!, we should be doing this..." type of insights, but it is comforting to read about another developer struggling with the same problems that we are.

MATT'S HEATH ICON

Nearly everyone who has commented on Matt's health icons (below) has really liked #10.

Tuesday  9-8-98    

HEALTH ICONS [11:15 a.m.]

Matt put together some iconographic possibilities for identifying health stations. Let me know what you guys think of the various icons--a few of these are definitely in the right direction (remember, these are "pan-Trocaran" and not just one species):

SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS

Here are a few links from Martin concerning realism and other factors which can add to or detract from a game's intensity:

http://www.gamers.com/columns/calbear/

http://www.gamers.com/columns/thresh/editorials/editorial5.asp

http://www.gamers.com/columns/thresh/editorials/editorial6.asp

Of course, the question is: what factors really comprise an intense gameplay experience? Martin feels that two things really contribute to a feeling of intensity in an action game: throwing a situation at the player that needs to be "reacted to" immediately (as opposed to being thought about and then reacted to--in short, getting rid of that time gap between stimulus and response), and putting the player in a situation which requires him to "multi-task" his thoughts (forcing him to deal with more than one thing at a time really increases the intensity--just look at almost any RTS game).

Any thoughts?

PHYSICS

Tom did some good "brain work" this weekend, and thought-through a way to do "general purpose" physics that will be far easier to implement than he first thought--plus, he can get something in rapidly, and then add "increased fidelity" later. To paraphrase Martha Stewart, that's a damn good thing.

KEEPER SS

If you haven't yet done so, check out David's Keeper SS model and animations--he hit on the perfect blend of "Gestapo + Star Wars droid" in that enemy--and it's totally creepy. Great job, David!

Friday  9-4-98    

MONDAY [5:30 p.m.]

Don't forget that Monday is Labor Day--that means don't... labor, that is. Spend some time in the blistering heat, drinking Sangria and getting your mind detached from all things that might bring it down... and if possible, engage in copious sex--it does wonders for the creative mind. Cheers!

BONUS AGREEMENTS

I just got an update from George--agreements are in place. As soon as Scott gets back from ECTS, we'll sit down and go over the numbers one last time, then we're good to go.

TIMELINE

Just to keep you up to date, William will serve as our "hourglass" over the next few weeks as we take Prey into the realm of "game land." First off, William will get Preditor into DX6 with all the current bells and whistles (but much more stable, he promises). Once Preditor is in DX6, William will spend a solid month on new feature implementation (don't worry--we'll touch base to make sure we've got things properly prioritized before he starts). He'll deliver weekly versions, which we'll hammer away on, hunting for bugs, etc. When the month of Preditor work is done, Tom and Loyal will have a host of game goodies (including a tweakable "proto AI") on-line and we can all sink our teeth into the lusty meat of real game work... hot damn!!!

NEXT WEEK

Two quick things--next week, we'll have our "on site" brainstorm meeting on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Also, I'll plan to start working with the GSEs on messages and entities, etc. on Wednesday (that gives me Tuesday to get a few more entities into the editor).

Wenesday  9-2-98    

COOL "INSIDER INFORMATON" [10:10 a.m.]

I just reveived an email from Brian Rodway (formely of SCI)--remember, he and Christian are trying to find a publisher (they're close) for "Headhunter," their 3rd person action game using PreyTech (imagine Prince of Persia 3D meets Highlander). I just sent them off the new engine tape, to help them land THQ as a publisher... for a few weeks, Brian and Christian have been doing contact work for Microsoft, getting stuff set up for ECTS, and they've had the chance to really get a long look at virtually every new and significant ECTS demo. Here's what he had to say:

"Wow, what can I say? Nothing even comes near to what you guys are achieving with Prey. Can't wait to get my hands on it!"

CODE UPDATE

Loyal and Tom are putting together the final, real general actor class and interaction physics. Loyal is also working on getting LOD into the DX6 Prey. Skinner is cool and golden for quite a while, since any stuff that needs to be done to the actors to get them into DX6 is done during actor load time into the shell.

William is nearly done with the map conversions... it looks like converting the lightmaps isn't such a great idea since building a lightmap archive isn't done yet--that means thousands of lightmap files, lots of crashes, and hundreds of megs of storage space eaten up (remember, even a <1K lightmap file takes at least 16K of hard drive space). As soon as William nails down the conversion, then he's off to get Preditor into DX6, plus getting things like dynamic lights and skyboxes back in.

I should have a damn solid DX6 shell, with a Talon entity, collision, paths and triggers by today.

August 1998 news:

Monday  8-31-98    

LAST WEEK'S MEETINGS [11:00 a.m.]

Last week, I sat down with John, of LBE and Jim, of Rogue, to pow-wow about PreyArcade. Rogue seems very interested, especially since we're not looking at a straight port of the game, but rather a fresh "arcade episode." LBE is getting ready to sit down and talk with us about the business side of things soon.

The director of Sega's multiplayer gaming division stopped by last Friday--his main goal, unbeknownst to me, was to scope out Prey as a possible early-release title for their Dreamcast system. One thing that really got him psyched was the possibility of including some Preditor variant on the console CD. All he said when he left was "I want to play that game!"

'PUTERS

Kevin is going to help Matt and John get set up with their new Katmai 450s on Tuesday. In the near future, all of you who have 266s will be upgraded to P350s with 100 MHz buses (just a motherboard and processor upgrade)... ah, so very fast...mmmmm

IF THIS!

Tom handed me a shell this morning that has a nice conditional command, allowing us to do if/then/else control flow on our messages and scripts--right now the compare is simply numerical, but we can do all the cool stuff like greater than, less than, etc.

In a few days, we should have enough of the Prey entities back on-line (both E3 and new) in the new shell to start diving into some entity and messaging training for the GSEs...cool!

Wednesday  8-26-98    

PREY_QUAKE [10:17 a.m.]

If any of you haven't yet seen John's Prey_Quake demo, you MUST check it out! John has created one of those "oh fuck" moments in gaming that we simply must re-create in the Prey engine. Talking with John, he has also made me realize how absolutely essential it is to level design and content creation that we get some sort of rudimentary, tweakable, dumb-as-nails AI in ASAFP. Killer job John!!!

ENTITIES

As soon as Tom gets the E3 entities back in, and expands the "control" entities as needed, he and Loyal will need to dive head-first into getting these three entities on line ASAP:

• the next evolutionary step in the Talon player entity
• a generic two-handed gun entity (any two-handed gun model, a few projectile options, tweakable performance, etc.)
• a generic "enemy" entity--not a player character but one with multiple animations (pains, deaths, attacks, walk, run, etc.), tweakable health, the ability to be controlled by paths or dumb-ass AI

INTEL SYSTEMS

Andy Marris of Intel will be here today to upgrade processors. The three new Prey systems will go to: Matt, John and Allen. It'll probably take a few days for Kevin to get those systems up and running and ready to disburse.

MISC. PREY_STUFF

I'll be heading off to a meeting at Rogue tomorrow morning with LBE about PreyArcade. Things are still just in the talking and thinking stage, but LBE knows that any PreyArcade initiative will require them to get an outside developer to handle things, since PreyArcade can't even cause a hiccup in our internal development. LBE is pretty jazzed on Prey, for a multitude of reasons, and they've got Intel behind then, attempting to push their arcade initiative forward. If this goes forward, then PreyArcade will be set in the Prey universe, centered around the Trocaran arena battles for seed worlds. LBE has already talked with GT about the possibility of releasing the PreyArcade game later as a high-end Prey episode/expansion pack. Once again, only in the brainstorming phase now, but I'll keep you posted.

Also, a dude named Paul something-or-another from Sega is stopping by on Friday--I'll be giving him a Prey demo and fielding his questions about Sega possibly using PreyTech in a future title.

As you guys know, I've put together a new Prey tape and Lee and I will do the music and audio today. I'm sending a few copies off to "Perfect World Programs" -- remember Christian and Brian of SCI? This is their new company and they're close to nailing a deal for Headhunter, their action game that's "Prince of Persia meets Highlander in 3D"--of course, they still want to utilize PreyTech.

MEETING

Remember, we're having our off-site monthly version of our bi-weekly brainstorm meeting today. Let's plan on taking off from here at 3 p.m. (we might have to wait until 3:30 -- depends on how Andy is doing with Prey upgrades). Remember, the goal of this meeting is to have fun and get ourselves back into alignment with the coolness that is Prey and this "long strange trip" that we're on. Remember, we'll need drivers (I can fit one passenger in my convertable--1st come, first served).

Monday  8-24-98    

SHELL [10:20 a.m.]

As of this moment, our DX6 shell loads rooms, portals and textures!!! Tom assures me that they can have actors back in today, so we're damn close to being where we need to be. I'll keep you posted.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I was just digging through some old files about Prey (Nov. '96), and thought these two earlier tidbits concerning Prey's main character might be of interest:

Name: Ravin Brave

Meaning:

Ravin—insatiable appetite, the act or practice of preying, from Middle English

Brave—courage, Native America warrior, to challenge, to dare

**************************

Character thoughts:

• name: Justice Black Claw

initial situation/background: down and out security guard on a space station. Not in a high level position—drinks too much, has allowed himself to get into loner "I feel sorry for myself" rut—his wife has sued for divorce and has moved off to the European colonies with their two children—happened 8 months into a 24 month tour of duty—8 months ago. Now, he has no plans but to hang through the remaining 8 months and just head back to Earth and ditch his whole service contract. He received several citations during OCS, but couldn’t hack the test because he just didn’t take it seriously enough to prepare—as a consolation, he was "allowed" to enlist in the security corps. It was a failure in his life that turned him inwards and into depression. He just couldn’t easy grasp the fact that the failure had been his own fault.

Friday  8-21-98    

PREYWEB UPDATE [6:10 p.m.]

Scott did a new PreyWeb banner--much cleaner and easier to navigate. Next week, I'll get the Coder Notes section on line to keep us all more informed about the coding issues and concerns with Prey.

MILESTONE UPDATE

Since the coders are in a situation that requires a lot of parts to fall together that are reliant upon a lot of other parts, it doesn't look like everything I needed to see will be online today, but it looks like we should have a shell up and running by Monday. Next week, the coders will be in crunch mode to wrap up anything else that needs to be nailed down in order to call Milestone 11 complete. Finally, I was expecting to see all the GSEs in at some point today to review their chapter 5 work--I'll do that as soon as all three are in on Monday.

Thursday  8-20-98    

MILESTONE 11 [9:40 p.m.]

As you guys know, tomorrow is the Milestone 11 deadline. The number one goal is to see Prey environments in a DX6 shell--entities will come on line ASAFP after that. I'll also be checking in on the level work on Chapter 5 as well as the latest modeling and texturing work.

SEGA COMING?

We might have a short visit next Friday by a Sega producer who wants to check out PreyTech for a possible future license--Rick Raymo sent him our way. I'll keep you posted if his visit is indeed a go.

INTEL COMING

Next Wednesday, Andy Marris will be here (about 1 p.m.) from Intel to upgrade the latest DeSchuettes development systems to Katmai processors. We-re getting one more load of development systems from Intel--they should be here tomorrow. George and I are deciding on the folks most in need of a technology upgrade.

PATH CRAZINESS [8:18 p.m.]

I think all of you have probably stopped by to see all my path zaniness over the last few days. Here's what I've been able to do with our E3-level entity system:

• 2 axis robot with magnetic arm (pick up and drop box)
• Drivable (sort of) car
• Martin's "step platforms"
• 2 axis controllable gun that shoots out missiles (and sets off triggers)
• On-the-fly creation of gun control translation entity
• Portal looking down gun barrel for sighting
• Little moving box in a maze game
• Rocking platform with a rolling ball

We really do have pretty damn good control over things. Next week, I'll start training the GSEs on the whole entity/messaging shebang. I gave Tom a list of entity tweaks and enhancements that I've discovered these last few days. That list includes:

• Move_to_node path messages
• Forward/back switches that have the option of "wrapping" or stopping at min/max values
• Some sort of conditionals and comparisons
• Trigger filters
• Cinematic camera entity (that can track or follow)
• A play_animation message
• 2 move messages: move_to (like moving to a path node, but it can be anything) and move (simply set a directional vector and a speed to set something going.

NEW WEB UPDATE [5:38 p.m.]

I've started to update this PreyWeb to make it far more useful to us all. I still like the 3 frames approach, since it gives us the best way to navigate through our documents, but I'm cutting out some of the chaff and making things a little more streamlined. I'm also working on putting together a short design overview--sort of a 1 stop shopping place to get the quick low-down on levels, creatures, weapons and all that jazz.

PREY DEMOS

Yesterday, I impressed upon you all, via an email, about the necessity of giving only top-shelf demos of Prey. When in doubt, if something comes up and you can't get in touch with me, then it's generally safe to show just a taste of the tools and the content you're working on.

On the demo side of things, I gave 2 demos, one yesterday to some Creative Labs dudes and one today to Joe Kriener of Cyrix. Both demos rendered the "victims" drooling and speechless. As one of the STB dudes said "nothing even comes close" to Prey, and he promises to let us know if our edge ever starts slipping.

Wednesday  8-19-98    

POWERUPS [7:30 p.m.]

It's probably a great time to start doing some thinking about Prey's powerups, as per Allen's suggestion. Look over some of our idea docs and shoot me your ideas--we'll probably do some brainstorming at our next team pow-wow next week.