Public Commander Keen Forum

One improvement which might be fairly easy to do would be hard-coded random placements for keycards. Here's how I would do it (the simplest way I can think right now): For every keycard color assign a value not used by another tile (such as 650, 651 etc -- although I'm too lazy to check those speci...

Glad people have found it interesting. I was largely inspired by the A Link to the Past Randomizer , which shuffles the contents of the various chests in the game. Keen is somewhat less complicated, fortunately, though I'm sure there's a lot more you could do. I've uploaded a new version (v1.0a) of ...

It's been 30 years :birthday since Keen 1 came out, so most of us have worked out where all of those pesky spaceship parts are hiding on Mars. So to shake things up a bit, here's the Keen 1 Randomiser : a program which shuffles various items, levels, etc. in Keen 1 around. Hopefully this'll give peo...

I just read about this, and couldn't find anyone mentioning it here, but apparently the original Publishing Contract for Keen (& Wolf3D) finally expired in July this year. The 3D Realms Legacy history page states: 2020 Jul 9: Wolfenstein 3D, Keen Vorticons, & Keen Galaxy no longer sold by Apogee/3DR...

A fix for a bug in the original code where it could crash if the game was saved while things were flower-powered. There's a similar problem with the "Zzz" sprites if the game was saved while Keen was sleeping. Did you fix that as well? I don't recall fixing an issue with the "Zzz" sprites, but I'd ...

I wondered if anyone would notice that appearing! Yup — I've been going through backups and uploading a few things, and since the rest of the Keen Dreams source is available, this seemed worthwhile. There's nothing enormously exciting in it (mostly bugs), but here are a few highlights for those who ...

I think I might've found this on a backup disk. I don't have the original zip, so I just zipped up what was in the directory I had: https://davidgow.net/stuff/isisiia-2012.zip It crashes on startup for me (under wine on Linux, though), but maybe it'll work for someone else and/or with more poking ar...

Hmm… I'm not sure which version of the 3D Realms installer I was checking (I think it was 1.0 of the 3D Realms complete pack installer), but I downloaded the "Commander Keen Galaxy 1.1" installer from the 3D Realms store, and the files all match. (I checked the contents as well as the sizes, the Ste...

All of the currently sold releases (Steam, 3D Realm's website, as well as the now-defunct id Software store) are selling the Apogee 1.4 versions. 3D Realms 4/5 version: -rw-rw-r-- 1 david users 33325 1 Feb 1992 AUDIO.CK4 -rw-rw-r-- 1 david users 101990 1 Feb 1992 AUDIO.CK5 -rw-rw-r-- 1 david users 5...

K1n9_Duk3 has it right: you can play (with a small amount of effort) level packs and mods which only change levels and graphics (and sounds), but anything else will need changes to the code (or at least to some data files in Omnispeak-specific formats). One thing to note is that you don't actually n...

gerstrong wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 16, 2017 5:24

Should I merge some of the stuff into CG? I see the scanborders and Starwars text to be useful for my implementation. Hope that's okay for you...

Feel free!

It's still Keen Day over here, so I'm taking the opportunity to release v1.0 of Omnispeak. Omnispeak is an (almost) complete, bug-for-bug reimplementation of Keen 4, 5, and 6 for Windows and Linux. Homepage : https://davidgow.net/keen/omnispeak.html Windows : https://davidgow.net/files/omnispeak-win...

For what it's worth, early on in Omnispeak development, we were running at MAXTICS 1 (70Hz). There were quite a few physics bugs – particularly to do with ledge-grabbing – which disappeared when it was fixed to run at 35Hz like the original game. Going back and trying it again, though, those bugs se...

That's a nice gesture, but would Valve even allow that? Valve do allow that, though as Keen Dreams is not yet on Steam, the point is moot for the moment. I'm not sure what happened to the windows build: it certainly was available. PM/email me (david@ingeniumdigital.com) if you still can't get it. (...

Okay, a (very) rough guide to LZHUF: It's adaptive Huffman + LZSS. Basically, there's a Huffman dictionary that encodes both output bytes (0-255) and lengths of repeated data (from 2–30 bytes). This dictionary starts off with all leaves having equal probability. Every time you decode (or encode) a v...