Aha more Daikatana stuff to talk about and let’s start a little on what they were doing during 1999! So the transition to the Quake 2 engine was quite a huge change, the majority of content was basically just ported to the new engine but a lot of it was indeed hugely improved upon, but it wasn’t an excuse for the massive delay as a lot of this was built on top of what already existed, it didn’t need to be “redone” like Romero has claimed as that’s a complete lie… Though it was certainly worth the transition as it truly allowed them to do what they were aiming to do and well obviously a lot of the content from when they were using the Quake engine was rather rough or just plain bad. All this said it seems everything just went downhill afterwards, a lot of the dll system they were using for the Quake engine was just brought over, I can’t really comment too much on the extent of changes they made from when it was being used for Quake and then moving it over for the Quake 2 engine however from what I can see they had not initially changed all that much so it was in some ways completely horrible but I think in another sense it was cleaner than the monster they ended up with in 1999. It’s obvious that 1999 was a pretty unproductive time, I’ve mentioned it quite a few times to people and I still wonder what on earth they were thinking during most of that year.
During that time there was a lot of stuff being removed and added code wise but the progress with models and maps just almost ceased to be, most of it seems to have been just going over the layout of a level over and over again. All I can really say is that in-term of those two things during 1999 all the way to its release, not much changed at all.
A lot of things were simply dropped during 1999, in fact some things were removed pretty much right before the games release in 2000. The hierarchy system for player models was dropped however I still think it’s used for turrets in the final game (I was up late last night snooping through a lot of the code), the procedural textures were dropped and the software renderer was dropped during this time too. They obviously were planning on adding a extreme amount to the game however a lot of it is left unfinished, there was some work done on a D3D renderer and some work also done on a Glide renderer (I’m pretty sure in the final game it uses a wrapper for 3dfx cards). Something else worth mentioning is that a lot of the menu system is pretty horrific in the final version, especially compared to the 1998 version, yet both look the same and (to some extent) work the same.

I’ll carry on with this tomorrow since I’m kinda wasting time right now…