Duke Nukem Forever Crawls Slightly Closer; New Development Tools for the PSP

Think Half Life 2 is taking a long time? Well, spare a thought for those poor souls waiting for Duke Nukem Forever – the whole affair reminds me of the “Apocalypse When?” headlines when Coppola was working on his Vietnam film. Rabid fans of the first person shooter series will be pleased to hear that a physics engine provider has been chosen, and so hopefully the new game will have the same detail and level of interactivity as its 3D predecessors.

Physics for the world inhabited by the Snake Plisskin-inspired eponymous hero will be supplied by Meqon, a new company in the physics middleware market.

George Broussard, CEO of 3D Realms commented on the choice: “We evaluated several physics SDK’s and Meqon was really fast, had the cleanest interface and integrated into our game very quickly.”

The original Duke Nukem shot to fame in 1991, but it wasn’t until 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D that players discovered the joys of shooting fire extinguishers and laying traps that the series reached legendary status. Since then 3D realms have had a number of hits, including May Payne and of course Wolfenstein 3D.

3D Realms

Meqon

In other gaming news, SN Systems have released a development kit for Sony’s PSP handheld. Their ProDG tools are available to registered developers on the PSP hardware, and include a compiler, assembler, linker and debugger – with full integration with .NET.

Andy Beveridge Co-Founder and Director of SN Systems said in a statement: “It’s been a very exciting time for us, getting hold of the new hardware and seeing what it can do is always fascinating. We’ve put a lot of hours into this latest line of ProDG and we’re really pleased with the results. It doesn’t stop there though; developers choosing ProDG for PSPTM are going to have a few more toys to play with in the near future, I just can’t mention them all right now.”

The development tools are backed by Sega’s Yuji Naka, R&D Creative Officer: “ProDG for PSP has rich functions and is very stable while keeping up with fast changes of development environments. SEGA is very satisfied especially with the fact that important functions such as .NET integration, fast compile speed, and good GUI of debugger are equipped from the early version.”

SN Systems

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?