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Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

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Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#21

Post by hbn »

vunderba wrote: post #13
hbn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that John Romero released his own book, Doom Guy, a few years ago which contradicts some of the accounts in Masters of Doom. MoD is probably the more thrilling read and I enjoyed both books, but some of the stories need to be taken with a grain of salt. I also think Doom Guy is worth a read because it gives a lot more insight into what happened at Ion Storm and how the Daikatana project fell apart.…

Yeah that's confirmed in Masters of Doom as well - sounds like Romero was a bit hesitant about it but Mike Wilson, the marketing guy, pushed him into it.

Ah I couldn't remember if that was only confirmed in Doom Guy. Regardless, it's still worth a read.

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#22

Post by charlietran »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!

Author's note from the book:

"...I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, explore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book are intentionally similar to Fabien’s Game Engine Black Books, as an homage to those masterpieces. To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white."

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#23

Post by wk_end »

mrob wrote: post #12
LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

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.

>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. To put it briefly, 4th generation and earlier games consoles saved on expensive RAM by not having frame buffers [0]. The CPU wrote a description of how to construct the scene using tiles and sprites to a smaller video…

I get what you're saying, but the comparison to "racing the beam" is maybe a little misleading, because the point is that you aren't "racing" the beam. Rather, the system is operating in perfect lockstep with the beam. From the software perspective, you set the scene up and then sit back while it draws. And then in the abstract and from the hardware's perspective it's not even one line at a time, it's one dot at a time.

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#26

Post by fabiensanglard »

charlietran wrote: post #22
LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!

Author's note from the book: "...I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, explore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book ar…

> To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white.

That is a great idea.

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#29

Post by sasas »

bel8 wrote: post #19
LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!

And his site looks like another thousand, as I'm sure he knows. We consume his site for the content, not for the minimalistic design that exist since the inception of the universe.

It appears the author is leveraging Fabien's branding by copying not only the style of post but more importantly the formatting and style of Fabien's books. Even structurally the book appears quite similar.

If you didn't double check the author while skimming this Keen book, you may well be mistaken that it was written by Fabien.

I took a quick skim of the content, it looks great - tempted to purchase a copy to support the author for their efforts (and have it sit on the bookshelf next to two other very similar looking books...) but need to sit on this for a while.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. Would like to hear Fabien's take on the situation.

[EDIT] It looks that the Keen book author copied and pasted direct sections[1] out of Fabien's book's TeX[2].

[EDIT] The git commit history has comments that indicate that Fabien reviewed the book, e.g. "updated all chapters after feedback Fabien" and "Proofread Fabien Sanglard en hardcopy review", so perhaps this is all sanctioned.

[1] https://github.com/bsmits74/Keen_White_Papers/blob/master/sr...

[2] https://github.com/fabiensanglard/gebbdoom/blob/master/src/b...

Re: Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

#30

Post by sasas »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #26
charlietran wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author's note from the book: "...I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, explore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book ar…

> To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white. That is a great idea.

How do you feel about this book mirroring your prior art in both format and structure? Were you consulted beforehand?

[EDIT] - I see in the Keen book's source git commit logs that you reviewed and assisted with proof reading beforehand, so may we assume that this is all above board and sanctioned by you?

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