

From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks - edw519
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_the_future_tim_.php

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plinkplonk
" "After that realization about the web, I felt really idiotic. It forced me
to be in the mindset of "Everything I do from now on needs to be thought
through carefully." With every major technical problem, I didn't just look at
"What is the problem I'm trying to solve?", but I took a much bigger
perspective: "How can we really change the game and win this?"

When it came to developing Unreal -- I think we started that in 1994 -- James
Schmalz was writing a solo assembly language 3D game with a dragon flying over
a terrain, kind of a Magic Carpet knock-off. And I was tasked with writing the
editor for it.

But I really thought that through in a huge amount of depth in advance -- you
know, looking at what Quake did and Doom did: they had this little crappy
editor with a very advanced game engine behind it. Completely separate
programs.

I thought it through in a whole lot of detail, and I thought that content
development was really the essential ingredient in all of that. It was
important to spend even more effort on the editor and tools than the actual
game itself, just to empower the artists to make a great game.

So we came up with this editor-centric approach to game development, where you
had this integrated editor that used the game engine for real-time display of
everything. Real-time editing of everything, and all of that. And that came
from really methodically thinking through the problem of "What do you really
do, and how do I not miss the point in this revolution?" "

Inspiring!

