/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7428762
From George.txt written by Peter Freese in the Blood Alpha demo:
>George:

>I just got off the phone with Nick, who told me he had passed my previous message about Ken to you. I hope that you understand that I was really just venting at Nick, and I didn't intend that my message be passed on to you, Ken, or his father. There is still, however, a very significant problem we (Q Studios) have in dealing with Ken.

>Every update Ken makes to his engine turns out to be a major tribulation for us. He regularly makes changes that break our code without any advance warning. He consistently ignores our requests for fixes or suggestions for design strategy. Nick is constantly on me to "Call him. Just get on the phone and talk to him," but to be honest, talking to Ken on the phone is pretty much near the bottom of the list of things I'd like to do with my life.

>The problem is, he's just so completely unresponsive. I'll ask him a question, and nine out of ten times I'll either get silence or "I don't know" as a response. I know he's highly intelligent, but so are a lot of people I know, and I can TALK to THEM. Okay, so perhaps his personality is a bit different, but he still needs to work WITH us, not AGAINST us.

>>7428762
>probably would still have duke nukem 3d graphics for modern video games
that would be a good thing

>>7428769
>We've had a resource and memory manager in Blood since last year, and it's been working well and is very solid code at this point in time. To get it working back in December though, I had to completely replace parts of the engine, no thanks to Ken. A well designed system would have been built on the ground up from a good memory manager, or at the very least with hooks laid in so it could be developed later. To get our virtual memory system to work with Ken's engine, I had to spend weeks reverse engineering Ken's code, documenting variables, prototyping functions -- all things that Ken himself should have done or provided.

>Now in June, he hacks in his "group file" system, and says we have to use it. In one sense he's right -- he's hard coded the thing into his engine, and it's broken Blood unless I can figure out which parts of the engine I need to replace. By the time we're done with Blood, we probably won't have any of Ken's engine left... Perhaps you'll want to reconsider the royalties that you are paying him.

>A few months ago, Ken made a change to the engine that allowed each tile to have its own origin -- a reference point by which it could be positioned. This change was a good one, but there were some problems with the implementation. When the bit was turned on to enable sprites to be centered on their origin, animations bounced, and sprites appeared at the wrong position.

>It turns out the solution was one of procedure -- by setting the origin at the base for sprites that are supposed to be on the floor, everything appears correctly. Unfortunately, setting the origin for several thousand tiles using Ken's EDITART tool was just a bit too cumbersome for us, so I spent a few days developing a tool that would allow simple tweaking of the tile origins, among other things. This tool is integrated with our new sequence editor, which will be used to create and edit all the actor animations (walking, attack, death, etc.)

>>7428762
Are you fucking retarded? Ken's Labyrinth came out AFTER Wolfenstein 3D and Ken was heavily influenced by it.

>>7428771
>Everything with this system was going fine until we discovered that Ken has some engine flaws in dealing with sprites that use origin based centering. The clipmove() function doesn't work, and neither does hitscan(). These two functions are pretty much essential to doing anything with the engine. I could rewrite them, of course, but that would be a few days to weeks out of our schedule, depending on how many more bugs and design problems crawl out of the woodwork.

>We had waited a few months before switching to the new origin based centering, so I was quite surprised to find such fundamental problems with it. We called up Ken and told him about it, and he said he didn't think anyone was using it, but he really didn't know. We asked him to fix it.

>Tonight I called up Ken because of the group file problems, and because we still don't have a fix for the clipmove() or hitscan() problems. Ken he wasn't going to fix it and we should go back to using the old centering mode. This is totally and completely unacceptable. We've already invested time and effort (need I say money?) into using something, and we're not about to waste more regressing.

>Ken understands algorithms, and he understands graphics. What he doesn't get is how to design SYSTEMS. Everything he does to the engine is a piecemeal enhancement to something that should have been designed right from the beginning. The memory system is a poignant example of this. It is a hack, like most of his code, and not very robust. From what I've disassembled of the group file code (trying to figure out a way to eliminate or replace it), it too demonstrates plentiful opportunities for crashing the system -- pointers being freed without validation, files being closed without verifying the handle, etc.

>>7428779
>Our resource and memory manager are quite superior to Ken's (no bragging), so to abandon our body of code would be a step in the wrong direction. When I mentioned to him that our resource manager used an LRU list to handle purging of resources, he said that he didn't understand how they worked and he didn't want to undertake something that complicated. It isn't that complex; it's just outside the realm of Ken's experience.

>I usually end my phone conversations with Ken with something like the following: "Ken, is there anything I can do, anything I can provide to you, that would help you make these fixes or changes?" The answer is invariably "No." After we hang up, I usually bang my head on the desk for about ten minutes. I've tried to explain to Nick that this is why I don't like to call Ken, but I think he already knows.

>Tonight I tried to explain to Ken what a library file is. I told him how linkers work, and how they resolve symbol name when producing an executable. I tried to impress on him the benefits of "code granularity" -- breaking a system up into as many small discrete modules as possible so that the linker can efficiently pack only used code into the executable. I informed him about "dead code", and why there was so much of his in Blood. I don't think I made any impression at all.

>George, I want you to understand one thing. When I ask Ken to make a fix or enhancement, it is most surely something we absolutely need for Blood. I wouldn't force myself to make the phone otherwise. However, everything that I ask for would benefit not only Blood, but EVERY OTHER build project. I've spent enough time as a Project Manager for commercial programming tools that I know what makes a good API, and I know what makes a system extensible. The things I've been asking for are "hooks" so we can implement our own features, not have him do them for us.

>>7428781
>I sometimes wonder, though, if I'm going against the flow. Perhaps Ken added his cache system in response to other teams request for a memory manager? Maybe the group file code was asked for by the Duke Nukem team? These fears usually turn out to be unfounded, since other teams report similar problems as a result of Ken's "updates."

>I realize that most of the problems I've been describing with Ken are highly historical in nature, and there's no way to change the past. What can and must be done though is to make Ken more responsive to our needs. He needs to work WITH us, not against us. I don't know why he is so combative, but I can guess -- ego. He probably feels about his code the way a lot of programmers do: it's okay to criticize your own code, but for anyone else to do so is blasphemy. I used to be that way until I realized that a lot of the suggestions people were making to me were actually right.

https://tcrf.net/Proto:Blood/Alpha_Demo#GEORGE.TXT

>>7428785
Bonus Epic.txt, an outline for an unsent termination of contract letter with Apogee/3D Realms due to issues above as well as many others
>Termination contract - Release agreement

>Send them a letter saying why we want out - make it clear that we will no longer continue our business relationship under any circumstances. Try to separate Scott and George from Apogee. Avoid personal attacks.

>Intro- recieved draft agreement. Doesn't follow intent of agreement. We left higher paying jobs. Apogees priorities changed. We lost creative control, potentional income. We can't work under a situation like this.

>Points:

>* stole development teams

>* quote emails

>* "mission of Apogee West is to ...."

>* "all games produced by AWD recieve xx%"

>* recruited Richard away from us

>* withdrawn Sonic Holography agreement

>* Promises about ports to consoles

>* "Nick met with people from several console platforms - Atari, Goldstar, Sony"

>* AWD was supposed to receive 70% of console

>* Apogees failures to produce a Blood contract despite frequent promises

>* Georges recommendation to defraud IRS


>Demands:

>* 35% on sales of ruins

>* Severence

>* compensation for amounts that would have been made through ports

>Conclusion:

>We want to be fair, we want a clean exit

>We should to be free to get back on track with the project, but this may not be possible due to the damage you have already caused. We feel that you owe us at least this.

>Avoid any mention of personality conflicts, i.e. Greg Malone.

>>7428762
reminder that without this hook-nosed kyke retard we wouldn't have a middling shooter series that only geriatrics care about

>>7428762
>without this one game developer, no other game developer would have made similar advancements, therefore we would be stuck in 1992

>>7428762
Kens Labyrinth fucking SUCKS according to Doom dev Sandy Petersens review in Dungeon Magazine and Ken's Labyrinth came out AFTER Wolfenstein 3D. Ken's Labyrinth was possible because of Wolfenstein 3D, not the other way around

>>7428762
Wolfenstein 3D
Released: May 5, 1992

Ken's Labyrinth
Released: January 1, 1993

You're retarded OP. The only game that you mentioned that came out after Ken's Labyrinth was Nitemare 3D and that was summer of 1994.

>>7428762
You are saying a gtx1080 wouldnt exist without that guy.

>>7428762
Sure buddy.

>>7428892
he knows this, he's just trying to troll where his other methods failed

>>7428921
Who is he?

>>7428956
shit generic troll #343253, trying to make a na

>>7428961
name*
You'll soon see Alf copycats too

>>7428963
Well I am Alf that's why I was asking. At least you can discern these schizos aren't me.

>>7428762
Reminder that the opinion on some faggot on youtube isn't reality

>>7428917
Hack.

3D games are so resource intensive thanks to this faggot.

>>7428964
no, I can tell when its you, been here so long I can also spot the retarded kellyposter faggot who does nothing but yelp LARP

>>7428762
He didn't revolutionize 3D graphics actually, he revolutionized voxel. His Voxlap engine was far more advanced than anything Carmhack could ever come up with. He made a 3D engine with fully destructible environment a decade before Minecraft came out.

>>7428762
He's hot

>>7429092
>He made a 3D engine with fully destructible environment a decade before Minecraft came out.
wat gaem

>>7428762
I don’t give a shit, I’m pretty sure Star Fox still would’ve happened without this guy

>>7429180
These and several others. They're all only demos though because the voxlap engine was never licensed to any game studio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irvFiTsY05Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXbU2wzFLdk

>>7429198
>that second vid
amazing how that demo and the person playing it make that tech look so un-fun

>>7429198
>>7429237
...and whys that fucking school shooting korean dipshit richard mcbeef on the wall?