Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

evilturnip

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.

LarsDu88

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

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.

woutersf

If you want to play it you can do that here: https://www.playdosgames.com/play/commander-keen-4

pan69

Great write up. Reminds me of Cosmodoc, which is similar source but analyzes Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure instead of Commander Keen. https://cosmodoc.org

ChrisArchitect

Of related interest: Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code https://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=18248 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46321982 )

nnnnico

this looks like a copy of fabien's site, plus the topic is very related and likely trampolining on his brand :/

ForHackernews

Another game from the same era: https://cosmodoc.org/

doctorpangloss

Have LLMs made all arcana about games engineering meaningless?

bluedino

Would love to hear about the other Apogee and Epic games, like Epic Pinball, Tyrain, Halloween Harry, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem...

jzelinskie

Sorry for the "asking for more"-style comment, but it would be amazing if this came in epub and not just PDF.

turpentine

It's a shame that the author both erased their own writing style using ChatGPT, and wholesale copied sections of the content from another author. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550425