George Broussard of 3DRealms made this post to the 3DR BBS talking about the complexity of development for Duke4Ever as compared to Duke3D a few years back. Here is what GeorgyB had to say:

Q: Saying that duke3d took longer to develop is not much of an arguement. The target systems then were 486s, it took a lot more skill to write a fast 3D (or 2.5D) game when vga wasn't a proper standard. D3D, glide and openGL do all the hard work. Even I picked up openGL in a few days, it's simple to create powerfully rendered scenes.

George's Response: Ah, but rendering isn't the issue is it? today's game are MUCH more complex. In Duke 3D all the characters were sprites. Today they are polygonal models, have to be skinned, and then animated or motion captured. A VERY long, tedious and complex process. Also games today are "deeper" and require more than key/door stuff. That means more time to develop. Note all the so-so fps games that didn't sell well in the last 2 years and you will see that they were simple compared to more complex efforts like Half Life. A game like DNF is probably 5-10 times more complex that Duke 3D was.

A couple of bits on Duke4 for you guys this evening. Firstly Scott Miller made this post which talks about the possibility of COOP play to be included Duke4 or not. They havent really decided on that one yet. After you checked out that post have a look at this bit from Chris Hargrove also of 3DRealms who talks about the scripting abilities in Duke4Ever. He makes sure we all know that Duke4 is not an Unreal TC. :) Thanks VE and UU

George Broussard made a post to the 3DR boards with word that they will be releasing a few new screenshots of Duke4Ever, but not until the end of November when the December PCGamer is released. (Big Duke4 feature) Havent seen many new Duke4 shots in a while, Here are all the shots of Duke4Ever I have: [shot1] [shot2] [shot3] [shot4] [shot5] [shot6]

Oh yeah, and I updated the suckage as promised to you guys. Working on my Q3Test report this evening, it will be ready hopefully late tonight.

Scott Miller from over at 3D Realms has been posting on the Developer's Corner's 3D Realms board, and in this thread he talks about the networking and deathmatch in Duke Nukem Forever. Here's part of Scott's post:

>>> in designing the game how are you balancing the network/multiplayer with the story driven singleplayer(or maybe multi?) portion of the product? <<<

The multiplayer game will ignore the story and simply focus on various Dukematch games. There will also be several multiplay-only levels, and possibly a weapon or two only available in multiplay. I doubt we'll include the more difficult game types like CTF, mainly because multiplayer focused games like UT and QA3 will do these very well already.

>>>>with the networking bar raised by ut and q3a or conversely or games like thief that have totally eschewed multiplayer to focus on the single player experience (all games that have given up on the story/multiplayer combination), how have you approached this issue from a design perspective? what tradeoffs have you been forced to make in things like programmer/artist allocation, level design, weapon choices, etc.? <<<

Our focus is on the single player experience, but we know we can also provide a great multiplayer experience, too. This is exactly the approach we took with Duke 3D, and we did pretty well.

Thanks Billy.

Duke4Ever progress you ask? Well Billy being a ninja spotted this post over at the Developers Corner from Scott Miller of 3DRealms giving us just that. It looks like PCGamer is going to score another exclusive with them, look for the November issue.

DNF will have all the network functionality of UT. But remember DNF will be a game with a great story throughout the game, while UT (awesome game, btw) and QA3 are not story-driven games with a true beginning and ending. - Scott Miller

Forgot to mention this one yesterday. Some Duke3D commercials are posted on the 3DR page if you're looking for something to look at while waiting on UT. Check out Joe's .plan update at fingershack.com for details.

Got a bit of email telling me that Sgt. Hulka's Bootcamp has an irc interview with George Broussard has announced that there will be no co-op play for Duke Nukem Forever. Seems that the reasoning behind this is the same as Raven's decision with Soldier of Fortune - there is just too much scripting and plot stuff to allow for co-op. Uhm, well can't say this matters to me too much, but some people like Co-op play. Only FPS game that co-op was fun in was Rainbow 6.

With the Duke4Ever project being in development for so long the question was posted on the 3DR BBS if Duke4 technology will be outdated by the time it comes out. George Broussard and Joe Siegler both address the question. George busts out with some Star Wars quotes so you know he has it goin on.

It looks like DukeNukem4Ever is in fact still in development. The almost always silent 3DRealms guys made a chirp last night with George Broussard making a post to the 3DR BBS talking about software mode in Duke4. Check it:

I wouldn't be surprised to see Software go away in DNF. It's a real hassle to add things that look cool in hardware then have to deal with the software version ramifications of that. We had decided to go hardware only way back in the early days with Prey, so it woulnd't be outside the realm of possibility that we go hardware with Duke.
The bottom line is that is software looks "ok" and won't cost us weeks of extra development time to keep it current with the hardware version, it can stay. But as of right now, we've all but abandonned software mode and have the attitude that hardware is the priority.
The reality is that no system ships now without a 3D accelerator. Added to that will be a flood of Voodoo 2 level cards on the market as new hardware ships. And once everyone can have 3D acceleration for under $100, it becomes the same issue as a sound card. Just go buy one.
George Broussard

Not quite Duke4Ever, but interesting none the less to see what is planned for the N64 version of Duke.

3D-Unlimited has scored an interview with Steve Hornback of 3DRealms who is currently working on Duke Nukem 4Ever based on the Unreal engine. Here are a few shots of Duke4 in action that I dug up a while ago, although a few of them are scans: dnf0224 duke041b alley hangout bridge explosion

For one thing we changed game engines in midstream from Quake's to Unreal's. Creating games has also become so much more complex compared to those early days. Cosmo was created by two people (Todd Replogle and me) in seven months. Now we have a team consisting of our project leader, 2 programmers, 6 mappers, 3 artists, 3 modelers, a concept artist, a sound guy, and others. Also, 3D Realms' goal is to put out the highest quality game in the world. You can't achieve that by rushing to a deadline.

Chris over at 3DRealms made a post to the 3DR bbs board talking about the P3 instructions sets and how they will impact Duke4. Thanks DukeFan1