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Noel Stephens AI Ninja

If you were to open a dictionary and look under the word 'cool', there'd be a picture of Noel "Shadow" Stephens. Additionally, you'd see him under 'nohairz' and 'noskillz', but that's a whole different article. No3l has been a supporter of the Stormtroopers family of sites since they were founded, first as ION's webmaster and more recently as a programmer for Daikatana. We sat down to ask him some stuff.

Let's get the important stuff out of the way... please list your favorite weapon for SP, fave weap for DM, favorite SP monster, favorite DM map, and favorite episode overall for SP and DM.
Favorite Weapon SP: Nharre's Nightmare... definitely. (ChalreZ RuleZ)

Favorite Weapon DM: Ballista... nothing like giving someone the w00d.(uhhhh)

Favorite Monster SP: Woops... I like them all! Wow, this is a tough one. I guess I have to say that it would be a tie between the Doombat, Psyclaw, and the Griffon. However, I tried to add a little something 'extra' to each monster that I wrote code for.

Favorite Map DM:I like them all... every mapper did a FANTASTIC job with all of their deathmatch levels... in my personal opinion.

During the Daikatana houseboat party, you were suspiciously absent from the DK lan action going on. While some claimed it was because you preferred kneeboarding, others mentioned that it was out of fear of being owned. Care to defend your dm skills?
Hahah, you porch monkey! While you were playing foot monkey with the guy on the other side of the computer screen I was out doing man things... like wake boarding. You see, to speed towards a 3 1/2 to 4ft wake at around 21 to 24 MPH so you can catch air is a different type of adrenalin than say a deathmatch. While both are equally fun, if you have ever sat in a cube for 9 months, 7 days a week, at an average of 14 hours a day, then you would understand why I opted to go wake boarding rather than sit down...again. ;P

Say you had been man enough to come on the houseboat back then and face me in some Instagib.... how would you have allocated your skill points?
I would have put them all in acro baby! It is all in the moves!

You originally hired on to ION as the webmaster, then left to work on other stuff, and got hired back as a programmer on the Daikatana team. Could you describe your background a bit to explain how this change came about?
Sure...I will give you the 'cliff-note' version. :)

In the beginning there was Telecheck. It was a bunch of low level coding for nasty mean Vax computers running the VMS operating system. Life was dull and dreary. Then came DWANGO. For those of you who were still in test tubes, DWANGO was the first low latency online gaming network (pre-internet) that people used to play such games as Doom, Heretic, Duke Nukem, and various other titles with or against other players. I was hired by Interactive Visual Systems, creators of DWANGO, to help with the MIS related duties originally. As DWANGO expanded so did my job description. When Kee Kimbrell left Interactive Visual Systems to go work with John Romero at ION Storm, he mentioned my weight in gold to John. John ended up needing a temporary MIS guy who could also get their website up and running and keep it maintained. I was hired by ION Storm in the month of December 1996. After working at ION for almost 1.5 years, I was hired away by a start up company that never really 'started-up'. From there, Mike Wilson was in need of a multi-talented individual over at Gathering of Developers. I decided to go work with Mike and crew. John and I kept in contact, and about 10 months of working with G.O.D. he asked if I would be interested in coming back to ION Storm to 'help out' with the AI in Daikatana. I accepted... and well... after a very tight schedule and a very large learning curve I ended up leading the AI development for Daikatana.

So there you have it... of course there is much more to this story, but I don't think it would be too appropriate to talk about.

For the map pack, one of the DK artists (Chris Perna) made a few multiplayer levels. Do you have any interest in mapping or art also, in addition to coding?
I have in interest in all aspects of game development. I have been in several different facets of the game industry. Online services, web design, hardware design, software design, software publishing, and various other aspects of the game industry are some of areas that I have worked within. I guess you could say that I don't have the complete picture, but it is getting clearer each day I am in the industry. I think that level design is something I could enjoy, but I think the art work is something that has to be left to professionals. Art is a skill, and if you don't have it then it is pointless to try and force it. :)

What process did you guys go through to identify bugs to fix in the patches. Just internal QA? Or did you troll forums, read through tech support email, etc. And what's it like to actually work on patches?
Hahah, woah... let's see. We had the generic QA testing and bug database that we used pre-release. We would also get bug reports from level designers and artists. As we started getting closer to the release we had a much better understanding of where the code was and what it would take to get the game out the door. I think once the game was released we did have people that 'trolled' through forums and got the general feel from the community. However, after working the death schedule we HAD to take a break in fear of losing what little sanity we had left. Once we had sufficiently rested, we came back and started to tackle the remaining bugs. I was in charge of the 'patch' process and I have to say that it was 'hairy' at times. There are a lot of 'technical' issues that are involved, and if they are not well thought out or taken into consideration from the begining you can run into problems. I do have to say that normally there are like a handful of bugs that will take a good few days if not a week or two to fix. These are the bugs that turn your hair gray. Working on bugs sometimes is like working with a completely shuffled Rubix Cube... it has a logical solution... however depending on how 'shuffled' the bug is depends upon how intimidating it can be.

I'm assuming you've messed with the DirectX 8 SDK and are investigating tech for Romero's next game. What do you see happing in games not in the long run, but say the next two years?
The next two years? Haha, well that is not very long in game development years, but I think there will be a noticable differenece from say today. In the next two years you will be seeing a lot more games using packaged engine technology. We have already seen two fantastic titles released using the next generation Unreal technology (Deus Ex and Rune), and with other engine technology creeping out of the wood-works you can expect to see even more top-notch products. I think you should expect to see additional performance increases as well as a better focus on game content. Also, I would expect that you will see more of the 'online' community forming around different 'genres' at a greater rate. Two years, as stated before, is really the time it takes to develop a solid, deep content, high quality product... so most of what you can read about on the internet is what you will see within the two year time frame...with the exception of a couple of 'sleepers'.

If you can talk about it, care to go into a little more detail on not releasing the DLL source, and the foreign patches?
Sure... I can dive into this pool of sharp clawed monkies. Our DLL code is... well let's just say that there were more than 10 programmers working on the project over the development cycle. We only have 3 left. Two of the three came in towards the end of the project to help get it out the door. So, with this said, I can then point out that the DLL source definitely conveys the image of being worked on by several hands. This was a VERY hard decision, however to release the source code for... say... the World.DLL (where all of the entity stuff occured and where most mod programmers would be doing their work for a modification) would require that we write and support extensive documentation regarding the different sub-systems. On top of this, we felt there were too many 'back-doors' that could lead to malicious modifications, and with the past problems in the community it was a hornets nest ION Storm did not feel they needed to open. Trust me, you wouldn't want to develop a modification using the final Daikatana technology. The technology, for the most part, was using modern-day techniques, however the foundation for the code implementation in several areas was not the 'cleanest' it could have been and would have probably left some mod creators with a bad taste in their finger tips!

Finally, got anything to say to the people that play DK and like it? How about the ones that played it for thirty seconds and decided they didn't?
For the people that actually got to play the game and have a good experience doing it: That makes me happy... we spent all of this time making something that people can enjoy... and to have people enjoy something that you really put your 'life-force' into makes it all worth the while. All of those 18-20 hour days pay off when I hear someone tell me that they actually liked the game...or even just one aspect of the game.

For the people that loaded it for 30 seconds(or the like) and the got completely disgusted with it: I am sorry... honestly. If we had the time to make it better for 'those folks'...we would have. I honestly think that a lot of the negative 'hype' influenced peoples minds from the get go. Maybe if the game was released sooner it would have been accepted a little better, but then again (as described above) we worked our hearts out...I have never seen people work so hard to get something done like this before. We did the best with what we were given and hopefully the next title we can change your minds!

Be sure to read this old interview with Noel from when he first joined the DK team. Thanks to Shadow for answering our questions!