Live data from Hacker News

Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

davidgow.net

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#12
Oh man, I loved the keen games. As a young lad in the UK, it always frustrated me how hard buying the full version of shareware software was - the buy screens always had US address/phone numbers for purchasing, and back in the early 90s convincing one's parents of the legitimacy of such a weird foreign transaction was no easy task.

I think I eventually managed to get floppies with the full versions of most of Apogee's catalog through various friends/acquaintances.

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#13
post #3

How does the copyright work with a Re-implementation?

Partly, I think it matters where the information for the implementation came from. Clean-room reverse engineering would be the safest (one team disassembles the binaries and writes a spec for their behavior, a completely separate team implements an engine from the spec, having never seen any aspect of the original code).

The more chance you give someone to claim that your work is directly derived from theirs, the better their chances if they take you to court.

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#14
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dev is just re-implementing the game engine. I think the Ep4 game files only included because it was a shareware release. Still, I'm not entirely sure what the legal ground for the engine here is. It goes back to the whole issue with formats like mp3s/H264 (If you write a decoder entirely from scratch; do you still have to pay party x?)

I think the answer to the mp3/h.264 question today is yes, you do have to pay party X. The payment is for the license of the spec, I believe, and not the implementation.

for the patent you mean? if you didn't read it use the spec, but did a black box reverse engineering of the format, you'd still have to pay for the patent.

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#15

Even though the second Keen trilogy had richer graphics, I really loved the first Keen trilogy for the gameplay. The jumps and movement felt so much more physical. Keen would make this tiny pause as if winding up for a jump each time he jumped. The later Keen just did big floaty isometric jumps that didn't have the same snap. That said, I loved and played every single one of those games.

agreed, the first keen trilogy was right up there with prince of persia in terms of gameplay

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#17
> Omnispeak requires a computer with OpenGL 2.0 support

That is the strangest requirement. I could see requiring OpenGL 3.1+ Core for someone who really wants to use a GPU (despite how unnecessary that would be) and thinks that glBegin is Teh Devil. I could see requiring OpenGL 1.1 for someone who still wants to use the GPU but doesn't want to bother with GLSL or any of the later more complex APIs.

But why OpenGL 2.0? I could see it if the games needed some special effects or something through GLSL, but all Keen games do is basically blitting pixels around (and from a quick glance at github, all the pixel shader code in the source does is to draw the bound texture, nothing else), so they don't need that (nor the code does anything more than that).

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#18

> Omnispeak requires a computer with OpenGL 2.0 support That is the strangest requirement. I could see requiring OpenGL 3.1+ Core for someone who really wants to use a GPU (despite how unnecessary that would be) and thinks that glBegin is Teh Devil. I could see requiring OpenGL 1.1 for someone who still wants to use the GPU but doesn't want to bother with GLSL or any of the later more complex APIs. But why OpenGL 2.0…

OpenGL 2.0 was released over 10 years ago. Why is this requirement a problem?

Anything that is supposed to work should be tested, I can see why people don't want to test against more-than-10-years old APIs.

Re: Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

#19

> Omnispeak requires a computer with OpenGL 2.0 support That is the strangest requirement. I could see requiring OpenGL 3.1+ Core for someone who really wants to use a GPU (despite how unnecessary that would be) and thinks that glBegin is Teh Devil. I could see requiring OpenGL 1.1 for someone who still wants to use the GPU but doesn't want to bother with GLSL or any of the later more complex APIs. But why OpenGL 2.0…

> all the pixel shader code in the source does is to draw the bound texture, nothing else

If that's the case, it should be trivial to re-implement the rendering in SDL or something.

Post reply on HN