3D Realms Buys Physics For Duke Nukem Forever

sp00 writes "In a press release, Meqon announces 3DRealms has purchased the Meqon Game Dynamics SDK engine for the upcoming title Duke Nukem Forever. There are some neat demos of the engine here. Is DNF finally a reality?"

Comments

Re:Heh

[cgenman]

This doesn't appear to be a basic game engine, but rather a bolt-on physics and character animation module, Ala Havok. Buying one generally means that they have a game engine to attach it to, and have tried it out and liked it in-game. The rigid-body and ragdoll collision code on the last game I worked on didn't go in until about three months before the end of the project, as it wasn't integral to the gameplay. Very few FPS games have taken their physics model seriously as a gameplay element, and as such I'd (Id?) be surprised if DNF's gameplay had to be reworked for such a thing. If any other game licensed this engine today, I'd put them roughly 6 months from ship. Now with DNF, on the other hand, all bets are off. This won't be the first physics solution they have tried, and it may not be the last.

Developer's Comments

[Omega037]

This was written by George Broussard, one of the game developers who actually appears on the 3DRealmsforums from time to time. It was a reply to comments made by posters in a thread about the physics engine.

>>There must be considerable advantages to Megon over Karma for you to make the switch. What are they?

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.

>>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.

>> 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.

>> 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.

>>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.

Given what I know about 3D Realms, they saw something they liked and got it. Nothing to do with game being released soon or starting over. More like a "we have money, it is pretty, let us add coolness to this game" type of decision. I wouldn't read too much into this, except that they will likely upgrade things if they feel there are better choices out there, even at the cost of added time.
If I had to predict a release date, given that the basic engine is done and most of their work is on content(or so they claim, although recent hiring of new staff to work on content makes me think its true), I would say a mid to late 2006 release is within the realm of possibility. They totally started over from scratch about 3 years ago, so comparitively it hasn't really been in the works that long for a modern game. Besides, the work on the DNF project only began a year or two before work on HL2 did, and I don't HL2 out yet either :)

PS: I know I'm a Apogee/3DRealms fanboy, you don't have to tell me!