Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

forgottenbytes.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 83 posts

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#3

Post by _the_inflator »

evilturnip wrote: post #2

Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.

Fun fact for C64 guys:

The underlying mechanics of Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA delay.

ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact.

Here is the explanation in detail together with all major top notch effects. The article is a legend and kind of the bible of doing the most sophisticated effects on C64. Some effects have since then even more and better explained and exploited due to cross platform development possibilities and better tooling, but understanding all mechanics here is a necessity to play a role in the Champions League of C64 demos, besides and also being able to implement the techniques mentioned here: https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/vic-ii.txt

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#5

Post by LarsDu88 »

Lovely book. Skimming through it. One thing that might help contextualize it is a brief discussion of the how contemporary hardware like the SNES rendered sprites so efficiently compared to the PC hardware at the time. It's not obvious to modern readers why a PC with significantly more powerful compute capabilities would struggle to keep up with significantly slower Nintendo hardware at the time for sprite rendering.
Post reply on HN