it to freely reuse code for future projects or to license the engine for profit. NOD was prototyped using the Glide application programming interface (API) because the team believed it would be more stable during the engine's development, intending that once the engine was more complete, it would be moved to a more general API designed to support a wide range of hardware such as Direct3D. However, once a basic engine was in place in Glide, the programmers turned their attention to gameplay and functionality. By June 1999, Redemption was still running in Glide, which at that point lacked some of the basic features the team needed to demonstrate at that year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. When the team eventually switched to Direct3D, it was forced to abandon some custom code it had built to compensate for Glide's limitations such as texture and graphic management, which required the re-exporting of hundreds of levels and models for the new software. The late API switch also limited the time available to test the game's compatibility on a wide range of hardware. The team focused on building the game for hardware accelerated systems to avoid the limitations of supporting a wider range of systems, which had restricted the development of the company founders' previous game, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997). The programmers suggested using 3D Studio Max for art and level design, which would save money by allowing the company to license a single piece of software, but the lead artists successfully lobbied against this plan, believing that allowing the respective teams to choose the software would allow them to work most efficiently. Huebner said this saved the project more time than any other decision made during development. The level designers chose QERadiant to take advantage of their previous experience using the software while working on Id Software's Quake series. Id allowed Nihilistic to license QERadiant and modify it to create a customized tool for its 3D environments. Because QERadiant was a finished, functional tool, it allowed the level designers to begin developing levels from the project's start and then export them into the NOD engine, rather than waiting for up to six months for Nihilistic to develop a custom tool or learning a new 3D level editor. In twenty-four months, the three level designers built over 100 in-game environments for Redemption. They obtained blueprints and sketches of buildings from medieval