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

Other News:

[sithkhan]

Pigs Fly.
Hell Freezes Over.
I get a date.

Re:Other News:

[bobbozzo]

There is no Duke.

Re:Other News:

[fullmetal55]

no no no, it was never meant to be out the next year. It was all a y2k like bug. they idiotically type in the date 07 for the release date the program dropped the leading 0 and seeing a one digit year added 199 to the front, completely changing the intent of the date "7" which was of course meant to be 2007. so see they're still on track for a 2007 release!!

Re:Other News:

[Rew190]

No, DNF was always a FPS. I remember seeing the first screenshots for it (Quake 2 engine, I believe).

Heh

[cjpez]

While not really knowing much about typical game development processes, I imagine that getting the SDK to your basic game engines would be some of the first steps you'd take before development. Wouldn't that imply that development on DNF, er, has yet to start? Or is being restarted again to use yet another new engine? Too funny.

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.

Re:Heh

[cgenman]

Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.

If you're talking 3rd party rigid body and ragdoll physics solutions, you're not talking about how far the character can jump, or gets blasted by rockets, or most of the other things one would normally associate with physics. You're talking about kicking around chairs and tables. In Doom 3 there are roughly four places where you can get bonuses by kicking rigid objects near other objects. Other than that it just serves to increase immersion and make explosions more fantastic... not to mention get in the way of the player and be annoying. The same was true with Max Payne, the hallmark of the Havoc engine: beautiful physical movements with little gameplay relevance. Even Deus Ex 2's physical model was functionally gratuitous, as the game would have worked just as well if the crates didn't have a coefficient of friction

Actual freeform physics with gameplay relevance is pretty rare. 1: They are unpredictable 2: They are computationally expensive 3: QA will find a million ways to break it until you have to completely neuter the process. I don't mean to disagree with you... stronger physics engines allow for a tremendous amount of freedom for the player, and as such should be integral to the design rather than bolted on afterwards. But quite frankly, right now they're not.

No

[PrvtBurrito]

Is DNF finally a reality?

No.

Re:No

[mog007]

I read an interview with some guy who's writing a book about the development of Half Life 2, and he said that after the physics engine was introduced to the Source engine everybody spent about a month making random machines to play with the physics. Valve is bad, but this is 3drealms, they'll get back to work in a year or so.

Enginer

[Silicon Mike]

The real question is how does the new engine interact with vapor?

Re:Enginer

[lscoughlin]

The Vapor(tm) engine is infact the most advanced graphics engine you will never see. It is capable of interfacing cleanly with havok, and other physics engine, doing policy administration on a mainframe, slicing up julian fries, making toast and having sung hi lee brin you coffee in a cute little french maid outfit.

Do not disturb the Vapor(tm), or it will smite you like the ragdoll you are!

Re:Enginer

[Soul-Burn666]

Pretty damn well.
Download the tech demo from the site in the story. And check Custom Elements -> Particles.

Upcoming

[nick_davison]

for the upcoming title Duke Nukem Forever

Upcoming kind of implies that it's actually going to happen some day soon. As opposed to "the upcoming sun going supernova" - which is on about the same timescale as Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Upcoming

[cephyn]

4 hurricanes and now an upcoming unavoidable supernova?

crap. Florida is going to be pissed...

Re:Upcoming

[NSash]

Upcoming kind of implies that it's actually going to happen some day soon. As opposed to "the upcoming sun going supernova" - which is on about the same timescale as Duke Nukem Forever.

Our sun has insufficient mass to ever go supernova. In other words, you are absolutely correct. ;)

DNF

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the abreviation used in a race to mean DID NOT FINISH

Re:DNF

[penfold5]

Announcer: Looks like that racer Duke Nukem Forever'ed! Thats gotta hurt!

Breaking news...

[badfrog]

The most awaited game of 1998.....Just picked ANOTHER 3D engine to start the development cycle all over again with!

Re:Breaking news...

[Luigi30]

It's not a 3D engine, it's a physics engine.

My God

[togofspookware]

The engine demos are more fun than Doom 3.

(well, unless you've bound some keys to spawn projectiles and chaingun ammo :D)

The DNF Timeline

[ryder]

Check it out! My Favorite bit: The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars within the timeframe of Duke Nukem Forever's development.

DNF and Half-Life 2

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to flog a dead horse, but if, as one poster theorized, DNF is 3-6 months from release, it might actually make it out BEFORE HL2.

Vapor vs. Vapor! It sounds like a bad Japanese monster movie.. >.>

Re:Spirit and Opportunity

[Anti_Climax]

They'll probably make it back before it releases too...

What's that? They aren't supposed to come back?

Oh well, my original comment stands...

Another Engine????

[darthtrevino]

Goodness! DK4EVA has gone through more engines than my uncle on his '66 mustang. Honestly..how about just get some guys to make the damn game with a good engine and get it the hell out there!

There has to be like 3 people working on this game just laughing their asses off about it. It's going to be their life's work, like the statue of David, or the Sistine chapel. I mean, it's been in production for about a decade!

Um, shouldn't a physics engine...

[rsilvergun]

be one of the first things you get done in the game? I know, beating a dead horse and all... I gave up on DNF when the big headed morons took the Jetpack out because they didn't want to risk me missing one second of their fantastic level design. Here's a hint idiots, if it's that good, I'll go back and play it with and without the jetpack, like I did for the first Duke Nukem 3D.

Delicious irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, I know, DNF almost certainly isn't going to see the light of day any time this side of 2010. If it does, it will almost certainly be a flop of Daikatana-like proportions.

However...

Wouldn't it just be wonderfully ironic if 3d Realms did actually pull a great game out of the hat. I mean, Duke Nukem 3d *was* good... in many ways better than Quake. I just wonder how the gaming press would feel if DNF were to come out in the next 6 months and blow everybody away? Remember how until last year, everybody thought Valve were just sitting around doing nothing, until the HL2 trailer appeared? Suddenly, Valve were hot again. And now we have... oh...

Wait a moment...

Let's not press that comparison too far, eh?

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!

They will change physics engines again...

[JavaLord]

The laws of Physics will change before this game comes out.