Classic Tools Retrospective: The birth, death, and re-birth of Gamebryo 2

[petemage]

For all those 3 EC fans still left.

Due to the success of Mythic Entertainment’s “Dark Age of Camelot”, NetImmerse started to become associated with real-time MMORPGs, which – with the success of Ultima Online, Everquest, and Asheron’s Call – were very popular at that time.

A lot of energy was spent making everything backwards compatible. As a testament to the work that the team put into it, some NIF files from NetImmerse 1 could still be loaded into Gamebryo Lightspeed, over 10 years later.

It didn’t always work, though. Tim said, “We did break it once somewhere on NetImmerse 2 and that made [Mythic Entertainment] very unhappy, because they had a whole bunch of assets that they had already exported, and they didn’t have the master files for them anymore. They went back and wrote a NIF converter for that specifically. After that, we would deprecate features now and again, but we would always make sure that there was a NIF converter”

Classic Tools Retrospective: The birth, death, and re-birth of Gamebryo 2

David Lightbown talks to Dan Amerson, Mike Daly, John Austin, and Tim Preston about the Gamebryo engine and tools. This article traces its history from NetImmerse, the Gamebryo rebranding, merger with Emergent, Lightspeed, and acquisition by Gamebase.

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