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Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation
- techtalsky 10y agoEven 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.
- djsumdog 10y agoThey were super cute. Boy genius builds a space ship powered by a car battery, fuelled by your parents wine and .. yea I forgot all the other things you had to collect in the first one. They were all good, but I think one of my favourites was Keen Dreams with the giant potato monster at the end.
- zem 10y agoagreed, the first keen trilogy was right up there with prince of persia in terms of gameplay
- rzzzt 10y agoHe's bending his knees before the jump. I could never get the timing right in that game, though :(
- rangibaby 10y agoI absolutely hated the pause when I was a kid. Nintendo got it right; there should be immediate feedback from pushing a button.
- jvdl 10y agoI found that jump mechanic very frustrating, but mostly because I could never time it perfectly!
- xupybd 10y agoHow does the copyright work with a Re-implementation?
- djsumdog 10y agoThe 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?)
- allenu 10y agoI 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.
- chii 10y agofor 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.
- packetslave 10y agoWhile it's (obviously) not a full endorsement from a legal standpoint, Carmack retweeted his announcement.
- nerdponx 10y agoDoes "historical preservation" count as fair use?
- djsumdog 10y agoIs there a word for that deep realization of your mortality and existence; almost pain, that comes nostalgia?
- eon1 10y agoThis link leads to an HTML full of garbage data that automatically downloads for me. What am I missing?
- khedoros1 10y agoIt does that if I try to visit it in Pale Moon or Chrome on Windows, but loaded just fine in Firefox on my phone.
- netinstructions 10y agoSame. I was using Chrome on Windows
- NTripleOne 10y agoThis is old so I guess it was probably a momentary problem for me, but it works fine in Vivaldi 1.8.770.25 on Windows for me.
- khedoros1 10y agoYep, it worked fine when I got home, a few hours later. There was a while where it was "wonky". The header looked fine, the body started like this: <body>^_<8b>^H^C¥XÛrÛ8^R}¶¾¢<87>^OñLE"}M%^N]¯¥x<q¢<94>í©ÔÖÖ^Vdb$Ê$Á^E@Ë<9a><9a><87>ù<88>ýÂý<92>= r7;<89>3µ~<90>%^BÝèËéÓ="" Æ?<8c>&ç·<9f>?<8d>)we1ìÅü< Oddly, there was random entified data in there: ^V[^P¿8û0þpöé&<
- NTripleOne 10y agoThat's... absolutely bizarre, I've never seen anything like that before. Garbled characters, but the hex in chevrons I've never seen, that combined with an intact body and html entities too... I guess the server sharted and that was the result? Haha.
- khedoros1 10y agoThe hex is just the way that the editor chose to display it. I think it's just random-seeming binary data.
- giobox 10y agoOh 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.
- teekert 10y agoHa, True! The strangest thing was that you could often buy games on floppies at the stores but they were almost always shareware, with just a single level to play. Never did we get original games, at least, not in the stores. Floppies were traded like crazy, legal games just didn't seem to be available back then. (At least here in the Netherlands, in the early 90's)
- jvdl 10y agoEven worse in South Africa! I only got to play the shareware versions as a kid from floppies included with (I think) Computer Shopper magazines, which my dad used to buy.
- badsectoracula 10y ago> 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).
- jononor 10y agoOpenGL 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.
- khedoros1 10y agoOn one hand, I can see that too. On the other, it would be cool to have the Keen games as an option on something like a little ARM computer, and if what the other commenter said is true, and the game's just blitting a bitmap into a texture and displaying that, there are plenty of libraries to let you do that, while providing a number of different backends. Let the library figure out the actual API to use. On the third hand...it would probably be super-simple to just port the thing to SDL2. And that might be a fun, short project =)
- dTal 10y agoBecause it's unnecessary, and precludes it from running on fun platforms otherwise fully capable of it - like the Zipit Z2 I am currently hacking on (which come to think of it is probably even fast enough to run the original inside Dosbox). It's just less fun.
- throwanem 10y ago
- albertzeyer 10y agoIt looks very cool! How does it compare to Commander Genius? http://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.net http://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.net
- khedoros1 10y agoI kept running into bugs while using Commander Genius (even before entering the first level, I managed to get Billy stuck "behind" the map. This one feels exactly like I remember.
- gerstrong 10y agoPretty funny that you mention that. You should know that a lot of Omnispeak Code is in Commander Genius. Not sure what version you tested, but you should take another look. Also the developers were part of the CG team.
- bobbybroadcast 10y agoWow, takes me back to the BBS days of 28.8. Good times.
- Endy 10y agoI'm sorry if I seem a little obtuse here, but... why? If you need the files from the actual game, and the actual game comes with the tools to run it (i.e. DOSBox), what is the benefit, or in fact the real purpose, of this project as-is?
- packetslave 10y agoTo quote Mark Zuckerberg (about Hollywood and "The Social Network"): "They just can't wrap their head around the fact that someone might build something because they like building things."
- NTripleOne 10y agoI'll take a native implementation over an emulated one any day.
- Endy 10y agoBeing intentionally obtuse here, that raises a simple question. Why not dual-boot into FreeDOS and play from there?
- NTripleOne 10y agoThen I can't be on discord and yell at my friends how cool this native re-implementation of Keen is.
- khedoros1 10y agoDosbox is slow; you need a relatively powerful computer to run most things. That also means it's not really something that you want to run on battery for a long time. Even if that weren't true, I find value in documenting the old file formats and having readable implementations of the games that used them. From the point of view of the developer, it can be incredibly satisfying to see the functionality come together, and to get a picture of how things were done 25 years ago.
- Endy 10y ago
- fapjacks 10y agoHoly smokes!! Commander Keen takes me back to when I first discovered hacking, clear back in the early/mid 90s. I actually met a good hacker friend of mine on a completely different continent on a train. He was playing Commander Keen on a laptop and playing the music super loud. I recognized it and introduced myself. That was almost fifteen years ago and we still work on projects together!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- death667b 10y agoamazing