source code found?

[Grimson]

Gosh, I can't believe it's been two decades, and Commander Keen might not have even seen his golden days yet

[Captainkeen]

So it is settled. Today is the beginning of the end of patching.

wait a minute are you implying we can also acces the vorticon episodes with this? If not this is bitter sweet.

[Nospike]

IIRC the Galaxy engine is a (edit) heavily upgraded Vorticons engine with many more features. Its source code should be useful for modding Vorticons too.

[MoffD]

Or remake Vorticons in Galaxy?

[T-Squared]

Now, if only Apogee could do the same with their game engines... (HINT HINT)

[Levack]

Ah! That would be great!

[Roobar]

Now, if only Apogee could do the same with their game engines... (HINT HINT)

Unfortunately, this is unlikely, at least for Secret Agent and Duke 1 because Joe Siegler said:

Allen Blum tells me the source code for old Apogee stuff like Secret Agent, and Duke Nukem I and things from back at that age were stored on a floppy disc on an Amiga in his attic. Likelyhood of those being readable is near zero.

I hope you do realize how lucky we are for even the fact that Tom found the source code and even more that it was readable!

I think after all those years, Tom still keeps the Keen spirit and deserves a game equivalent of an Oscar or something! And better luck with his game projects!

[StupidBunny]

It's fascinating in a way. Games like Duke 1 and Secret Agent are like the craft of dead civilizations. We can admire their splendor but the secrets behind them are lost to time, their creation forever a mystery for man down the ages to speculate upon. (Sort of.)

[Levellass]

Of course if any significant number of people actually cared then it'd bet he matter of a week before everything about them was laid bare.

So yeah, exactly like lost civilizations.



And I don't think I shall ever abandon patching; I enjoy it too much. Lemm can do the compiling.

[T-Squared]

Now, if only Apogee could do the same with their game engines... (HINT HINT)

Unfortunately, this is unlikely, at least for Secret Agent and Duke 1 because Joe Siegler said:

Allen Blum tells me the source code for old Apogee stuff like Secret Agent, and Duke Nukem I and things from back at that age were stored on a floppy disc on an Amiga in his attic. Likelyhood of those being readable is near zero.

I hope you do realize how lucky we are for even the fact that Tom found the source code and even more that it was readable!

I think after all those years, Tom still keeps the Keen spirit and deserves a game equivalent of an Oscar or something! And better luck with his game projects!

Well, at the very least, what we do know is that there are betas of those games. (They may not be the same, but the betas exist in some readable form or another.)

[DoomJedi]

I think professional recovery guys can restore it.

[Malvineous]

Just heard about this, that's fantastic news!

@Levellass: I don't think patching will end - it depends on the licence they put the code under. You can't distribute the registered .exe files now, so that won't change if you compile it yourself, unless they allow it in the licence. Maybe, like their other games, the code is open but the data files are not able to be shared.

But if you can find the exact compiler they used, and produce almost byte-identical .exe files, then you might be able to write your patches in the source code, compile it, and then extract the differences in the binary .exe file and use that as the basis of your patch. That might allow for much more complex patch behaviour. If the game was written in Turbo C, then the compilers are now freeware.

Not to mention that if you change the code substantially and recompile it, it will become less of a mod and more of a fangame, which are already categorised differently. Half the fun of a mod is working within the imposed limitations, which go away once you start talking about fangames.

[Dynamo]

@Levellass: I don't think patching will end - it depends on the licence they put the code under. You can't distribute the registered .exe files now, so that won't change if you compile it yourself, unless they allow it in the licence. Maybe, like their other games, the code is open but the data files are not able to be shared.

If this is anything like the wolfenstein 3d one, then it should be no problem since wolf3d mods come with their own exe's compiled from the source code that add their own features. I don't see why this should be any different.

But if you can find the exact compiler they used, and produce almost byte-identical .exe files, then you might be able to write your patches in the source code, compile it, and then extract the differences in the binary .exe file and use that as the basis of your patch. That might allow for much more complex patch behaviour. If the game was written in Turbo C, then the compilers are now freeware.

But that still sounds like it'd be hackier and very limited, right?

Half the fun of a mod is working within the imposed limitations, which go away once you start talking about fangames.

For you, maybe. Games like wolfenstein 3d or doom have demonstrated that editing the source code can result in projects that are extremely ambitious but faithful to the original material at the same time. I think this far from being the time where we need to be nostalgic about patches or something, and think about the future of the modding scene as a whole.

If the way mods and fangames are currently categorized irks people, feel free to change it, I don't think this is some sort of geography map that needs to be preserved in the exact same way it was made - when landspaces change, the map has to change accordingly. if the source is released, obviously some categories as well as much information on the keen wiki will need to be altered, and I really doubt the way it was previously.

Thinking about the difference between fangames and mods NOW seems trivial at best, and conservative at worst, also because a fangame is (as far as I know) a game categorized by having an entirely different engine than the source material, simply taking place in the same fictional universe.

[NY00123]

Looks like CKeen has already done some of the job I've planned, but I'll write this anyway.

wait a minute are you implying we can also acces the vorticon episodes with this? If not this is bitter sweet.

So far there have not been an official release of source code for any of the first three episodes of Commander Keen. In practice, though (and only in practice), someone known under the nickname of QuantumG did some reverse engineering work on the Keen 1 executable. See here for a post of him about that: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s ... d=27903551

Eventually, this work was indirectly used in... some way.

Just heard about this, that's fantastic news!

@Levellass: I don't think patching will end - it depends on the licence they put the code under. You can't distribute the registered .exe files now, so that won't change if you compile it yourself, unless they allow it in the licence. Maybe, like their other games, the code is open but the data files are not able to be shared.

Well, so far it has been the case that a user gets a patch file and has to let a CKPatch loader modify a temporary copy of the original executable in RAM before executing its code. I don't know for sure if you've referred to that or not, though.

But if you can find the exact compiler they used, and produce almost byte-identical .exe files, then you might be able to write your patches in the source code, compile it, and then extract the differences in the binary .exe file and use that as the basis of your patch. That might allow for much more complex patch behaviour. If the game was written in Turbo C, then the compilers are now freeware.

Not to mention that if you change the code substantially and recompile it, it will become less of a mod and more of a fangame, which are already categorised differently. Half the fun of a mod is working within the imposed limitations, which go away once you start talking about fangames.

I'm afraid that even with some older compilers, if you try building the same executable more than once, even with the exact same source code structure, identical command line arguments or configurations and the exact same versions of all involved tools, there are still chances that you'll get different executable files (say, with different checksums.) Even if it is not the case, it still sounds a bit risky to me. Anyway, as long as the patches are dynamically applied to the original executable at runtime, that shouldn't be a problem.

Furthermore, it seems like there is another case which you have missed, to which CKeen has referred. Basically, even if many modifications are applied to the source code, then at least in some cases there will still be the *feeling* that you play something based on the original game. It's not necessarily something that can be easily defined; It's more about the experience.

[Ceilick]

Haven't commented yet since there wasn't much to say other than this is exciting news.

Some thoughts concerning modding:
Until we have official word, I think what was done in the case of Wolfenstein 3d (a similar property, to my understanding) is where we should lodge our expectations. Ckeen indicates that wolf 3d .exe's can be distributed; can we get a source for this, or is it simply what is practiced?

Concerning modding limitations:
Keen modding has so far been about working within hard-limitations imposed by the code. It strikes me that this is especially the case in Keen Galaxy. Looking to the future in which the source code is altered rather than patched, I expect we'll still have some hard-limitations, but our mods may be defined and categorized by soft-limitations, limitations not imposed by code but by gameplay style or some other qualities. The modder gets to define the limitations based on what they want, for some that will be faithfulness to the original feeling, as Ckeen and NY00123 mentioned.

Modding within limitations is fun. It focuses and guides design, often forcing the modder to find creative solutions. I think it's ultimately better that our limitations not be predefined by the code, but by what we want to accomplish.