Classic Tools Retrospective: Tim Sweeney on the first version of the Unreal Editor

[Accoun]

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidLightbown/20180109/309414/


I don't know how many people would be interested at this, but I only just saw that there's a second episode in a series of interviews centered around tools made for game development - a less talked about part of game development. I really loved the first one, where John Romero talked about TEd (which was used by id until Wolf 3D) and the second one is just as good, touching more on the accessibility and UI parts.

Also, these quotes. Just look at them:

TS: Carmack had written this really advanced editor on the NeXT. I'd read all about it and I had seen screenshots of it, but I never actually used it. At the time, I thought to myself "Holy shit, Carmack wrote a real-time BSP editor!" What I didn't realize was that it wasn't actually real-time, there was this re-build process and all this other offline stuff. I didn't know that, and so I thought I had to create a completely real-time thing, and so I did. [laughs]

Click to shrink...

Also, a bunch of the former Future Crew demo-scene guys had formed a hardware company, and they had released some screenshots with incredibly realistic volumetric lighting in an indoor scene. There were some lights with really big spheres around them, and the volumetric lighting was really clearly clipped by all the geometry around it. It looked completely physically accurate. I was like "Oh my god, it's something I've never seen before, I have to figure it out!"
[...]
I took a screenshot of it, and I emailed it to the guy I knew at the hardware company in Finland. He replied "Oh that's really awesome! But, our picture is just a rendering from 3D Studio Max because we couldn't figure out how to do that in real-time. [laughs]

Click to shrink...

The absolute madman.

 

[ps3ud0]

While I'm not a programmer at all I'm very much interested in accounts about the tools that made gaming what it is.

Ever since DX12 its become more and more apparent how reliant developers are on middleware and well documented engines.

Look forward to this series!

ps3ud0 8)