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I spent some time this morning, gazing at a pre-release photo while eating a sandwich, and suddenly had the mind to wonder: what exactly was early Trespasser development like? I feel my notion of the actual level-development process is fairly fleshed out to my liking at this time, but looking again as I am now, I notice a vast dark of the early development of the game, when all that went on was work on the engine's coding and very preliminary asset-creation. What day of what year did the Tres dev team first come together in a single work space (and what happened before that)? On what calendar date did Dreamworks Interactive first successfully open an experimental EXE build which successfully displayed a likely-empty playing space? What were the events of individual days and months, while features were added to the source code one by one, and in what sequence? When did super-early level versions like the empty brown BE and bare-bones SUM first get loaded by Trespasser?

It occurs to me that some of these questions may be answered by looking into notes within the sourcecode, as well as connecting dots from developer interviews... I am afraid at this time in my life, I can't afford the resources for such a project. I am interested to know, still, what details of this variety are known to us at this time, or within our ability to investigate. It seems quite a potent topic, for fans of the game to be aware of...

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->Tres2020 Starter Kit

"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton

The Trespasser Developers, Day 1: "This game's gonna be the greatest game ever!"

The Trespasser Developers, Day 100:

The Critics, Release Day: "This game sucks."

The TresCom Community, 20 Years Later: "Trespasser is the greatest game ever!"

The Trespasser Developers, Circa 2020 A.D.:

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Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Seamus did confirm on Twitter to Glitch that they had a simple engine going back in 1997, probably some images are seen from that. Then I know some devs have said they didn't even have an engine until early 1998.

I've had the idea for some time now that one day to go through the early images we have and try to locate the earliest source of them, like making a timeline when they appeared either on the internet or in a magazine.

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

From what I remember the first subsystem to come online were the dinosaur animations, because Seamus
had already been working on a bipedal physics-driven model before the development of Tres started.

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0066521C: 'Cannot create local swap file - Is Trespasser installed??',0Ah,0
"Cold lino was the driving force behind world power!"

These are great starts. Early engine versions would be one point of focus.

_________________
->Tres2020 Starter Kit

"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton

Here's a timeline for the development of Trespasser. Did I misunderstand the question

March 14th, 1928 - John Parker Hammond was born

1943 - Hammond took a train ride south, wearing his best clothes, eating an apple

1979 - the Biotech industry was beginning to boom

In early 1980 Hammond surveyed a number of small islands in the Caribbean and Pacific.

1982. Hammond hired Robert Muldoon, Dennis Nedry, and Henry Wu

1985 - Ingen held 13 new patents

November 1985. Test fertilization of an artificial ovum

We released the first Raptor on April 22nd, 1985 (which doesn't make sense, if the ovum test was done afterwards, and the first viable dinosaur released the following year)

1986. The first dinosaur to prove viable in the modern age was a small Albertosaur, revision three-oh-eight. It had behavioral quirks and a chronic skin infection, but it lived

1989, International Genetic Technologies had succeeded in their design, to genetically recreate the dinosaurs.

May, 1989. They began laying foundations on the south beach for a hotel for visiting scientists and businessmen

1989 - the Tugboat Emily was scuttled

In 1989, the park was nearly complete. investors demanded on-site approval and Hammond, idiotically as it now turned out, believed they were ready.

The debacle of August 27th, 1989, is now quite well known, and the legal consequences were as you may imagine rather extensive.

October the 3rd, 1989, Hammond sat on a wooden bench in the waiting room in Washington, DC. A government panel put himon the stand

Fall 1989, Bankruptcy! Hammond leaned against the wall. His whole body shook.

October, 1996. The InGen corporation is taken out of Hammond's hands, by a vote of the board of directors. His nephew dispatches his team.

The hunters landed on May 13th, 1997, deep in the island’s southwest

May, 1998 - Trespasser

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Hammond: When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!

Ian: Yeah, but when Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists...

visit my website @ http://www.freewebs.com/masterchiefoo7

Forgot about this thread. Tres's own timeline is nice. Raptoralpha wrote the best one I have seen, yet.

_________________
->Tres2020 Starter Kit

"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton