Ryan Feltrin 08-11

August 11, 1999 on voodooextreme.com/reverend/Articles/ridah_frames.html
A = Ryan Feltrin (A.I. and effects programming)
Q = Anthony

Q: What do you think of the AMD K7?

A: I think it sounds good, from what I've heard in the media.

Q: You said that you think the K7 sounds good...you do not have one to test with?

A: No. Should be getting one soon.

Q: How has the gaming community responded to Kingpin? Why?

A: I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask that question, simply because I don't really interact with the community that much.

I read maybe 2 or 3 web pages a day, the rest is spent programming and reading email. The email I have got has been very positive, so going by that I'd say it's doing ok.

What do you think of some countries (eg Singapore) banning Kingpin?

A: I think it's their right to do what they like, there is nothing we can do about that. That doesn't mean I don't care, since obviously it means less people will enjoy it.

Q: What are Xatrix's project after Kingpin? What is it about and how is the development going? What is the projected time frame for release?

A: It's not my place to comment on un-announced projects. I wish I could, but that's not the case unfortunately.

Q: What are your opinions on the competition between nVidia and 3dfx? What, personally, is your favourite gaming card?

A: I think it's a very healthy thing for the community as a whole. I personally have at least one of all cards these companies have released. I have enjoyed them all at some stage in the passed, and continue to do so. They are great companies that are doing great things for both gamers and developers alike.

Q: Still on 3D cards/chipsets, what features would you like to see implemented/excite you?

A: I'm waiting for the next "big" step as everyone else is. We are closely approaching this with the introduction of hardware transform/lighting, and new approaches to rendering such as 3dfx's T-Buffering technology.

Q: A bit more on 3D chipsets and features....would you agree that larger texture sizes is more important than 32-bit rendering output? Why?

A: Depends on what sort of trade-off you're talking about. Most textures are stored as 16bit no matter what the depth of the buffer, so unless you're eating into texture memory, this shouldn't be much of a concern. Also as hardware advances and we're able to push more polygons, the need to store ultra-high resolution textures will decrease slightly.

Q: Whose voices were used for Kingpin's in-game speeches? Did they enjoy the, er, "foul" languages?

A: Most of them were recorded by Drew Markham, who also led the design and concept for Kingpin. They came very natural to him.. some may call it foul, we call it humour.

Q: Do you sleep at all?

A: Sleep?

Q: Kingpin uses the Quake2-engine albeit highly tweaked by your team. (a) Why choose this particular engine?

A: Because it's very solid and we were all used to its inner-workings from previous projects.

Q: (b) Was the Unreal-engine ever a consideration? If not, why?

A: No, at the time we made the decision to go with Quake2, the Unreal engine was a bit behind in some departments.

Q: (c) And what are your opinions of the Unreal-engine?

A: I think it sounds like Tim Sweeney and his troops have big things coming to them in the future. They obviously have the ability to duke it out with the best.

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