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Thursday Update:

After being questioned on the Xbox 360 demo, a 2K Games representative has been reported as saying the Prey demo should be up:

“in the very near future.”

That really could mean anything though.

“As far as I know, the demo has not been rejected or kicked out. It’s still in testing/certification.”

“Again. If we knew something, we’d tell you. We’re as much in the dark as you are, and we’re not terribly happy about it. What the heck more do you want us to say? Do you think we’re sitting on our asses doing nothing waiting to hear news? We’re trying to find out, constantly. We’re not getting any info.”

Wednesday Update:

George Broussard, President of 3D Realms:

I wish I had some news for you, but I do not. But, at least I can post that I have no news, and let you know that we’re trying to keep you informed. Nobody is telling us anything. If someone from Microsoft wants to contact me, feel free. At this point you know what I know. I have no idea what the specifics are, in regard to the demo, and I have no estimate for a release. The 2K producers on the project don’t seem to be interested in keeping us (or Human Head) in the loop, or emailing us details

Tuesday Update: I just questioned the Xbox Live Operations Mananger, “E” as to why the demo is nearly a week late, and this is the answer I recieved:

I don’t work on the team that tests games/demos/etc. - I don’t know.

He did somehow know that all the theories out there, like that there might be some sort of server problem delaying the launch of the demo, are false. He knows why it isn’t delayed, but not why it is…

Still no date or time.

Joe Siegler, 3D Realms webmaster, made the following post in the official forums:

While we don’t know the formal size of the demo yet, I inquired and was told it was in the neighbhorhood of 650Mb. Yes, that’s larger than the PC side. And before people start freaking out, I did inquire as to why it’s larger, and got this explanation from Peter over at Venom..

To minimise seek time on the DVD, data on the 360 is organised into three PAK files for each level which contain all the models, textures and sound data for that level (those loaded at the start and all those which might be needed during the level, as we also have to pre-cache everything on 360 to avoid stalls caused by mid-level loads).

This means three DVD seeks instead of hundreds when loading a level (seeks are expensive time-wise) and was a necessary change to bring the load time down under 45 seconds- it was around 5 minutes a level from DVD before this was done! However it means textures, sounds and models are stored again in the PAKs for any levels they are needed for.So basically it comes down to the way the 360 streams stuff for the size difference.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 11:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.