7 ms·

The fluidity of the scrolling in Commander Keen 4-6 was unmatched on PC for years, even as games moved to 256-color graphics. Between Carmack's incredible techn

The fluidity of the scrolling in Commander Keen 4-6 was unmatched on PC for years, even as games moved to 256-color graphics. Between Carmack's incredible technical work and Adrian Carmack's [1] art, Id had perhaps the best-looking PC platformer well into the 1990s. [1] No relation to the more famous Carmack, but IMO the unsung master of the 16-color palette.

Aeolun 3y ago
I think it might be hindsight, but a lot of these ‘revolutional’ developments seem kind of simple compared to a lot current development. “Our memory is slow, so let’s redraw only things that changed” is kind of a given nowadays. Still the optimization in 4-6 is fun. Did the whole thing in 1-3 just because of an assumption that the buffer would not wrap around, and then it did and all that work became obsolete.
- incrudible 3y ago
  “Our memory is fast, so let us redraw everything” is a given. Our web APIs on the other hand are incredibly slow, so let us carefully track changes in a complicated runtime (or compiler) to avoid redundantly modifying properties in a tree.
- II2II 3y ago
  If I recall correctly, the original Macintosh would go as far as telling the software which regions of a window had to be redrawn at any given time so the idea itself wasn't exactly new. The thing is that these optimizations required tradeoffs. Figuring out which tiles had to be updated required storing extra data and doing extra computations. Not only did you have to recognize the value of these techniques, you actually had to write the code in a way that did not slow things down (and design the levels so they would not slow things down).
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Windows has had this[1] for as long as I remember as well, at least since Windows 3 days so I assume since the very beginning. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/clipping https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/clipping
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    They needed the same info to do clipping (on both the Mac and Windows). I think it is more interesting that the pipeline was invalidaterect/region => getevent => event was a draw event => draw region (or part of it). The getevent would only generate draw events if nothing more important was going (keyboard/mouse input, timer, message from other app/desktop accessory). It would also prioritize top windows first so you would only get a draw event for a window at the bottom once the windows above had no more dirty areas. If you really knew what you were doing, you could short circuit this a bit and draw in your windows outside of draw event handling.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Games have redrawn everything on every frame for decades, certainly since GPUs became a thing. Memory speed is definitely not a concern. 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved to GPU compositing as well. On the other hand, of course, CPUs do have a complex system of several levels of caches, but that's not primarily because of (lack of) memory bandwidth but memory latency.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved to GPU compositing as well. For Win32 and X11 at least the damaged region (or "invalid region") approach is still there and AFAIK recently (as in a few months ago) the modesetting driver for Xorg added the ability to use the damage regions when "TearFree" is enabled (this does server-side composition to avoid tearing - it is disabled by default) to only update the of the screen that changed instead of the entire screen. Also i remember reading some time ago about some monitors being able to use partial frame data (the monitor "shadows" the frame) so that they can support faster updates. I think the concept can also help with slow display tech like e-ink devices.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Games started redrawing everything because once you have a camera that rotates in 3D, the pixel reuse drops a lot vs one that pans over a 2D plane.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - esprehn 3y ago
    All modern web browsers still do tiling (at the compositing layer level). It's the only way to handle large layers and scrolling efficiently. Some also implement partial redraw into the tiles to handle things like cursors blinking to avoid having to redraw the entire tile.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
- dylan604 3y ago
  >I think it might be hindsight, but a lot of these ‘revolutional’ developments seem kind of simple compared to a lot current development. Yes, it's you and your vaulted position of standing on the shoulders of those to whom these developments actually were ‘revolutional’. I equate the level of accomplishments from Id to be at the level of cavemen throwing rocks at the spaceship to cavemen buying insurance on TV levels of achievement.
  - x0x0 3y ago
    If you weren't playing games in early 1997 then Quake started using voodoo cards, it's nearly impossible to understate the before vs after. Carmack and id are responsible for at least 4 or 5, "I had no idea a computer could do that" moments for me.
- fzeindl 3y ago
  > “Our memory is slow, so let’s redraw only things that changed” is kind of a given nowadays. Tangentially related: Android still doesn't get this. Turn on the screen refresh flashes in the developer menu and then look a your static screen and be amazed who often android draws even though nothing changed.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    With modern gpu pipeline and cost of cache misses compared to CPU cycle being what they are - it's almost certainly faster to redraw a few thousand sprites no matter what than to check what changed and redraw only a subset of them. Energy efficiency is a separate matter.
    - djmips 3y ago
      That's not true at all
      - ajuc 3y ago
        Iterate over 1000 objects doing ifs and draw let's say 50 of them vs dump them in VBO and call glDrawArrays every frame drawing all 1000 of them? I'm willing to bet :) The difference in time spent by GPU between drawing 1000 and 50 sprites is almost 0.
    - dakom 3y ago
      Is there another way? I've only done WebGL, so not familiar with Vulkan/Metal/DirectX/etc. - but in my experience you're clearing the screen and re-drawing everything every tick no matter what. If only for applying post-processing effects. Updating buffers is of course a totally separate thing, and on that side I don't think anyone updates everything every tick, usually there's some sort of scene graph that knows about dirty transforms and their children, so only those get updated..
  - izacus 3y ago
    This is nonsense, Android always did "this". It always rerendered only damaged regions and even after switching to HW accelerated rendering, it still only rerenders changed views. And the animation framework always just "scrolled" the view (or screen) when it could.
- anthk 3y ago
  Ncurses does the same on text, just redraw what it changes. Reason? Think about slow terminals or modems.
  - ygra 3y ago
    When I developed a text-mode UI library (not using curses) with a friend in university for fun, we tested this on his actual terminal connected via serial cable. You'll notice unnecessary redraws very quickly that way. (Granted, piping the output through some throttling may have had the same effect, but there was something about writing modern code (even as students) and seeing it work on decades-old hardware :).)
kolanos 3y ago
TIL that Adrian Carmack isn't related to John Carmack. Weird.
- bombcar 3y ago
  They continue to be the only two Carmacks I’ve ever heard of.
Dwedit 3y ago
What about Jazz Jackrabbit? That game had some seriously fluid VGA scrolling.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Came out in 1994, which more or less aligns with OP's "well into the 1990s" timeline.
- marmakoide 3y ago
  In 320x200 or 320x240 VGA, you could had essentially the same trick for scrolling window over the VRAM, checkout Mode X VGA. The Allegro library had baked-in support for that, at least in the early 2000's.
kemayo 3y ago
I'm intensely weirded out to see that all of the classic Commander Keen games were developed-and-released between December 1990 and December 1991. That is a wild pace of graphical and gameplay development. Check out the evolution from the first game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Invasion_of_the_Vorticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Invasion_of_... To the last game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Goodbye,_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Goodbye,_Gal... I was playing them at the time, as a young child, and I'd forgotten the pace at which things were apparently happening.
- pbourke 3y ago
  Not to mention: Wolfenstein 1992, Doom 1993, Doom II 1994, Quake 1996. Unbelievable pace.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    The joke at the time was that if your machine was more than 6 months old it was obsolete. So many aspects of computers were developing at a breakneck pace it was almost impossible to keep up.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      The Bates 4000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjjHzifL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjjHzifL8
    - rob74 3y ago
      Yeah, I had a pretty new PC (my first one after heavy-heartedly switching from the beloved Amiga to the despised PC) when Doom was released, and all my friends would come over to play because it could run it full screen (older 386 and weaker 486 CPUs were not fast enough, so you had to reduce the size of the game screen and play with an ugly static border around it). Then just a few years later I installed the Quake demo and all I got to see was an error message. The PC had a pretty exotic IBM "Blue Lightning" CPU which was a "486SX3", i.e. it ran at 75 MHz internally, 25 MHz externally, and didn't have a built-in FPU - which was a requirement for Quake. So I realized it was time to upgrade to a Pentium CPU...
rasz 3y ago
unmatched, other than Golden Axe DOS port shipped a month before first Keen :-)
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  Ha... look at that. Not bad at all! I wonder how many machines at the time could power through that? ;) Talking about these little tile and scrolling tricks. Golden Axe on the Master System had to get around the sprite size limit by having the entirety of the graphics live on the background layer. This meant everything sat and moved in an 8x8 pixel grid. A neat little hack even if it made the whole thing a little chunky.
- bzzzt 3y ago
  While I have a fondness for that game it really didn't come close to running as fluent as Keen on my 8MHz EGA machine at the time ;)
green_leaves 3y ago
Not an original PC game, but the PC port of Caveman Ninja, VGA and also from 1991, was amazing. Smooth parallax scroll with tons of sprites in screen. It recently got a remake on Steam.
liendolucas 3y ago
> best-looking PC platformer well into the 1990s I think I'd pick Prince Of Persia, not to diminish Commander Keen a single bit but I always found PoP visuals and game dynamics unmatched for its time. I'm also getting biased for two reasons: I played PoP when I believe I was 7 years old and made a magic impression on me when I first played it and is also is my favourite platformer of all times. But of course PoP lacks of the scrolling at all which is Commander Keen's black magic.
- npsomaratna 3y ago
  There is a magic about the character movements in PoP. I recently replayed it—almost 30 years after I first played it. There is a fluidity in how the prince moves that is still impressive today. I understand that Jordan Mechner put in a ton of hours rotoscoping the movements. (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy8WqAgPbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy8WqAgPbY) On a tangent, Mechner is an incredibly talented (and in my opinion, severely underrated) game designer. "The Last Express" is a masterpiece, and wondrous in a different way.
  - liendolucas 3y ago
    > There is a fluidity in how the prince moves that is still impressive today. Yes it is very impressive even today. Those tons of hours on rotoscoping paid off immensely. I haven't played "The Last Express" though I've seen some screenshots and looks a very nice game. Somehow the artwork resembles the style of Alphonse Mucha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha
- nurettin 3y ago
  I'd say PoP is bland and stale in comparison, but that's probably because there's lots of animations going on in the background for Keen. And it is faster paced. I enjoyed PoP2 better compared to PoP. It had grander visuals, epic escape and puzzle scenes.

Aeolun 3y ago

I think it might be hindsight, but a lot of these ‘revolutional’ developments seem kind of simple compared to a lot current development. “Our memory is slow, so let’s redraw only things that changed” is kind of a given nowadays. Still the optimization in 4-6 is fun. Did the whole thing in 1-3 just because of an assumption that the buffer would not wrap around, and then it did and all that work became obsolete.

incrudible 3y ago
“Our memory is fast, so let us redraw everything” is a given. Our web APIs on the other hand are incredibly slow, so let us carefully track changes in a complicated runtime (or compiler) to avoid redundantly modifying properties in a tree.
II2II 3y ago
If I recall correctly, the original Macintosh would go as far as telling the software which regions of a window had to be redrawn at any given time so the idea itself wasn't exactly new. The thing is that these optimizations required tradeoffs. Figuring out which tiles had to be updated required storing extra data and doing extra computations. Not only did you have to recognize the value of these techniques, you actually had to write the code in a way that did not slow things down (and design the levels so they would not slow things down).
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Windows has had this[1] for as long as I remember as well, at least since Windows 3 days so I assume since the very beginning. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/clipping https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/clipping
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  They needed the same info to do clipping (on both the Mac and Windows). I think it is more interesting that the pipeline was invalidaterect/region => getevent => event was a draw event => draw region (or part of it). The getevent would only generate draw events if nothing more important was going (keyboard/mouse input, timer, message from other app/desktop accessory). It would also prioritize top windows first so you would only get a draw event for a window at the bottom once the windows above had no more dirty areas. If you really knew what you were doing, you could short circuit this a bit and draw in your windows outside of draw event handling.
Sharlin 3y ago
Games have redrawn everything on every frame for decades, certainly since GPUs became a thing. Memory speed is definitely not a concern. 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved to GPU compositing as well. On the other hand, of course, CPUs do have a complex system of several levels of caches, but that's not primarily because of (lack of) memory bandwidth but memory latency.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved to GPU compositing as well. For Win32 and X11 at least the damaged region (or "invalid region") approach is still there and AFAIK recently (as in a few months ago) the modesetting driver for Xorg added the ability to use the damage regions when "TearFree" is enabled (this does server-side composition to avoid tearing - it is disabled by default) to only update the of the screen that changed instead of the entire screen. Also i remember reading some time ago about some monitors being able to use partial frame data (the monitor "shadows" the frame) so that they can support faster updates. I think the concept can also help with slow display tech like e-ink devices.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Games started redrawing everything because once you have a camera that rotates in 3D, the pixel reuse drops a lot vs one that pans over a 2D plane.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- esprehn 3y ago
  All modern web browsers still do tiling (at the compositing layer level). It's the only way to handle large layers and scrolling efficiently. Some also implement partial redraw into the tiles to handle things like cursors blinking to avoid having to redraw the entire tile.
- pjmlp 3y ago
dylan604 3y ago
>I think it might be hindsight, but a lot of these ‘revolutional’ developments seem kind of simple compared to a lot current development. Yes, it's you and your vaulted position of standing on the shoulders of those to whom these developments actually were ‘revolutional’. I equate the level of accomplishments from Id to be at the level of cavemen throwing rocks at the spaceship to cavemen buying insurance on TV levels of achievement.
- x0x0 3y ago
  If you weren't playing games in early 1997 then Quake started using voodoo cards, it's nearly impossible to understate the before vs after. Carmack and id are responsible for at least 4 or 5, "I had no idea a computer could do that" moments for me.
fzeindl 3y ago
> “Our memory is slow, so let’s redraw only things that changed” is kind of a given nowadays. Tangentially related: Android still doesn't get this. Turn on the screen refresh flashes in the developer menu and then look a your static screen and be amazed who often android draws even though nothing changed.
- ajuc 3y ago
  With modern gpu pipeline and cost of cache misses compared to CPU cycle being what they are - it's almost certainly faster to redraw a few thousand sprites no matter what than to check what changed and redraw only a subset of them. Energy efficiency is a separate matter.
  - djmips 3y ago
    That's not true at all
    - ajuc 3y ago
      Iterate over 1000 objects doing ifs and draw let's say 50 of them vs dump them in VBO and call glDrawArrays every frame drawing all 1000 of them? I'm willing to bet :) The difference in time spent by GPU between drawing 1000 and 50 sprites is almost 0.
  - dakom 3y ago
    Is there another way? I've only done WebGL, so not familiar with Vulkan/Metal/DirectX/etc. - but in my experience you're clearing the screen and re-drawing everything every tick no matter what. If only for applying post-processing effects. Updating buffers is of course a totally separate thing, and on that side I don't think anyone updates everything every tick, usually there's some sort of scene graph that knows about dirty transforms and their children, so only those get updated..
- izacus 3y ago
  This is nonsense, Android always did "this". It always rerendered only damaged regions and even after switching to HW accelerated rendering, it still only rerenders changed views. And the animation framework always just "scrolled" the view (or screen) when it could.
anthk 3y ago
Ncurses does the same on text, just redraw what it changes. Reason? Think about slow terminals or modems.
- ygra 3y ago
  When I developed a text-mode UI library (not using curses) with a friend in university for fun, we tested this on his actual terminal connected via serial cable. You'll notice unnecessary redraws very quickly that way. (Granted, piping the output through some throttling may have had the same effect, but there was something about writing modern code (even as students) and seeing it work on decades-old hardware :).)

kolanos 3y ago

TIL that Adrian Carmack isn't related to John Carmack. Weird.

bombcar 3y ago
They continue to be the only two Carmacks I’ve ever heard of.

Dwedit 3y ago

What about Jazz Jackrabbit? That game had some seriously fluid VGA scrolling.

kemayo 3y ago
Came out in 1994, which more or less aligns with OP's "well into the 1990s" timeline.
marmakoide 3y ago
In 320x200 or 320x240 VGA, you could had essentially the same trick for scrolling window over the VRAM, checkout Mode X VGA. The Allegro library had baked-in support for that, at least in the early 2000's.

kemayo 3y ago

I'm intensely weirded out to see that all of the classic Commander Keen games were developed-and-released between December 1990 and December 1991. That is a wild pace of graphical and gameplay development. Check out the evolution from the first game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Invasion_of_the_Vorticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Invasion_of_... To the last game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Goodbye,_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Goodbye,_Gal... I was playing them at the time, as a young child, and I'd forgotten the pace at which things were apparently happening.

pbourke 3y ago
Not to mention: Wolfenstein 1992, Doom 1993, Doom II 1994, Quake 1996. Unbelievable pace.
- jandrese 3y ago
  The joke at the time was that if your machine was more than 6 months old it was obsolete. So many aspects of computers were developing at a breakneck pace it was almost impossible to keep up.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    The Bates 4000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjjHzifL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yjjHzifL8
  - rob74 3y ago
    Yeah, I had a pretty new PC (my first one after heavy-heartedly switching from the beloved Amiga to the despised PC) when Doom was released, and all my friends would come over to play because it could run it full screen (older 386 and weaker 486 CPUs were not fast enough, so you had to reduce the size of the game screen and play with an ugly static border around it). Then just a few years later I installed the Quake demo and all I got to see was an error message. The PC had a pretty exotic IBM "Blue Lightning" CPU which was a "486SX3", i.e. it ran at 75 MHz internally, 25 MHz externally, and didn't have a built-in FPU - which was a requirement for Quake. So I realized it was time to upgrade to a Pentium CPU...

rasz 3y ago

unmatched, other than Golden Axe DOS port shipped a month before first Keen :-)

NovaDudely 3y ago
Ha... look at that. Not bad at all! I wonder how many machines at the time could power through that? ;) Talking about these little tile and scrolling tricks. Golden Axe on the Master System had to get around the sprite size limit by having the entirety of the graphics live on the background layer. This meant everything sat and moved in an 8x8 pixel grid. A neat little hack even if it made the whole thing a little chunky.
bzzzt 3y ago
While I have a fondness for that game it really didn't come close to running as fluent as Keen on my 8MHz EGA machine at the time ;)

green_leaves 3y ago

Not an original PC game, but the PC port of Caveman Ninja, VGA and also from 1991, was amazing. Smooth parallax scroll with tons of sprites in screen. It recently got a remake on Steam.

liendolucas 3y ago

> best-looking PC platformer well into the 1990s I think I'd pick Prince Of Persia, not to diminish Commander Keen a single bit but I always found PoP visuals and game dynamics unmatched for its time. I'm also getting biased for two reasons: I played PoP when I believe I was 7 years old and made a magic impression on me when I first played it and is also is my favourite platformer of all times. But of course PoP lacks of the scrolling at all which is Commander Keen's black magic.

npsomaratna 3y ago
There is a magic about the character movements in PoP. I recently replayed it—almost 30 years after I first played it. There is a fluidity in how the prince moves that is still impressive today. I understand that Jordan Mechner put in a ton of hours rotoscoping the movements. (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy8WqAgPbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy8WqAgPbY) On a tangent, Mechner is an incredibly talented (and in my opinion, severely underrated) game designer. "The Last Express" is a masterpiece, and wondrous in a different way.
- liendolucas 3y ago
  > There is a fluidity in how the prince moves that is still impressive today. Yes it is very impressive even today. Those tons of hours on rotoscoping paid off immensely. I haven't played "The Last Express" though I've seen some screenshots and looks a very nice game. Somehow the artwork resembles the style of Alphonse Mucha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha
nurettin 3y ago
I'd say PoP is bland and stale in comparison, but that's probably because there's lots of animations going on in the background for Keen. And it is faster paced. I enjoyed PoP2 better compared to PoP. It had grander visuals, epic escape and puzzle scenes.