Duke in Trouble? 114
1up reports on rumours of trouble at 3D Realms, the long-term developers of the Duke Nukem Forever project. The duke project is apparently in jeopardy, according to the buzz, as several key developers have left the company for greener pastures. 3D Realms webmaster Joe Siegler has responded to these rumours, saying on the message boards "It's internal business - all employee departures and comings have always been that way. This is nothing new. People have left before, IT IS THE NATURE OF THIS BUSINESS. It's the way it goes ... There's honestly nothing to be concerned about. People leave. People come. There's staff on the project you don't know about."
It is the nature of a business. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact is after EVERY game there's a good amount of turn over and even then that's a game that takes 2-4 years. People wanted to stay with the company til the game goes gold then leave. Duke Nukem has been going for far longer than any other game it's not a shock people are leaving the company now, especially before people have seen the game.
This might mean the game isn't amazing or up to par and people want to cash out now, but more likely it's business as usual.
Re:Nothing to see here.... (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who don't get the reference - Atari announced this top of the line 8Bit computer in 1983 as if it were already shipping. Two years later they "canceled" it. There were never any units actually made (other than prototype), yet they advertised it as a shipping product. I had the misfortune that my family decided to get one and we decided to not buy a new computer to replace our Atari 400 until we could get one of these. All the mail order houses "advertised" them with "call for price". I was 12 (with all that implies), so I called them every couple of days for about 8 months asking when they were going to have units available to sell. So, to me, the Atari 1450XLD computer is the epitome of vapor ware.
The truth.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm surprised the private stock holders haven't made a stink by now. There is no profit in lying for 10 years.
Oh, wait a minute....I guess there is....
Re:nearly 10 years later... (Score:5, Interesting)
A theory of late games and program development (Score:1, Interesting)
Any program or game will be an interaction of modules. The textures can be seen as a module, the models as a module, the graphics engine a module, the AI engine a module, the menu system a module, the maps a module, etc. The final specifications for these are usually decided early - at the very _start_ it's decided what each module will look like when finished. This lets every module as it's created (1) be created at the edge of current technological capabilities into a cutting-edge whole, (2) be tailored to fit every other module.
When development cycles stretch out however, very bad things happen. There is a pressure to remain cutting edge - more in certain (e.g. graphically visible) modules than others. So those get rewritten, with some time taken to make sure everything still interacts right. After the time taken to do that (aided by a small development team at this stage), some other modules may lag behind technologically, and they need to be redone. After those, yet other modules need to get redone. For example, if they had had Duke Nukem Forever 'close to release' for the past five years, they would probably have had to rewrite the AI at least three times.
The problem is that firstly, when release finally happens, some modules are still ten years old, and although not very visible, you can glimpse enough of them that it hurts (e.g. the flag texture in CTF, the fonts used in menus at different resolutions, small things like that), and secondly, all the tweaking of modules has invariably made them fit less well together, leading to random crashes. It would therefore be better to simply discard anything which has been in development for 5+ years, and redo it from scratch.
At the moment I fear DNF will turn out something like Battlecruiser 3000 AD.