Het blijft een populaire gozer, die Tim Sweeney. Dus dacht VoodooExtreme blijkbaar: what the heck, laten we nog eens een interview online gooien. Dit keer kregen de bezoekers de mogelijkheid om hun levensproblemen aan Tim voor te leggen en dat resulteerde in de volgende vraag over development time bij het maken van games:Question [submitted by Luke "SirXcalibur" Bellamy] -- Ever since the days of Atari and Nintendo, the development time of games has escalated. Do you see this changing, either longer or shorter in the future. Or do you see it sort of stagnating at a certain average amount of time like movie productions. Do you seen long production times as a problem (ie people get bored and lose their vision, gamers lose interest before it even is released) or does it ,in your opinion,usually produce high quality games?

Tim Sweeney's response -- That's a really good question. Nobody knows the answer.

I'll speculate that game development times can't increase significantly beyond the 18-30 months where they currently stand. The core problem is that technology is moving ahead very rapidly -- looking at 3D hardware and game engines especially.

Now, even on an 18-month project, the hardware and a umptions you start out with at month 1 is radically le powerful than what's readily available at month 18. So, even if you are a very speedy developer, a significant amount of your time will be spent playing catch-up with the technology, and upgrading your content to take advantage of new features.

The longer a project takes in development, the higher a percentage of time is wasted keeping up with the Joneses, compared to working towards shipping the product. This makes it uneconomical to ever start a project that is expected to take more than, say, 30 months to develop.

While occasionally you'll see a longer project come out and be very succe ful, these are the anomalies. Unreal 1 was a 39 month project for those of us who were involved from the beginning. Duke Nukem Forever has been in development, well, forever, but I bet it will still be an awesome game. But with these projects, the team didn't start out by saying "let's spend three and a half years of our life developing a game" -- the delays came later as the projects were substantially redesigned.Een interview is het helaas niet, want dan verwachten we wel iets meer dan één vraag. Unreal2 behoorde helaas ook tot een van de onderwerpen waar niet over gesproken mocht worden.