Public Commander Keen Forum

VikingBoyBilly wrote:One of my pet theories is they might have wanted to use a modified wolf3D engine to build TUIT.

Hadn't thought of it before, but that would seem to match Tom's descriptions. Third person, probably 2D sprites moving around in a 3D environment.

It's true that a Super Mario 64 kind of game is what Hall had in his mind back then. Interestingly this wasn't the original plan for a Keen 7 game. We also know by now that the devs had an attempt with a modification of Keen 4-6 that employs parallax scrolling. Not a lot of time was spent on it, though, and they moved on to Wolfenstein 3D and later.

Back to the original topic, just a few additional notes to add about a few versions:
- The Keen 4 demo (prepared for FormGen) has the "Help" sections available by pressing on "F1". It looks a little bit different from what's found in the final releases of Keen 4 and 5, though, and the ordering info section is not there - weirdly the same as in the late GoodTimes/GT editions of Keen 4 and 5.
- As already mentioned, the Keen 6 Promotional Release looks based on the little-bit older revision of the codebase used for Keen 6 v1.0 and the demo, although the title screen is shown after pressing on a key during the introduction (same as seemingly later releases like Keen 4 v1.0). As an additional difference, though, it looks like this release has the same default high scores entries as found in Keen 4 v1.2 / Keen 5 v1.0 (Mitzi is the last shown in the table). This shows that maybe the Keen 6 demo was used as a base for this release, and at least a couple of later changes (like the point about the title screen) were separately imported into it. Doesn't mean this was always what was done, though, as it truly looks like Keen 4-6 v1.4 (for Apogee and FormGen) were all prepared around from the same codebase (or at least, they were very close to each other). I'm still guessing, though.

So ORIGINALLY: Keen 7-9 was planned to use a modificated Keen 4-6 engine??

NY00123 wrote:A couple of bugs are known to be fixed in Keen 5 here. The "Order info" section is removed from the list of sections available by pressing on F1 (in Keen 4 and 5 altogether), but the list itself is there as usual. When one thinks about it, it may seem a bit weird the same was not done for Keen 6.

The reason an in-game help wasn't present in Keen 6 was probably because of the manual check they had when you tried starting a new game. Wouldn't make much sense to ask about creature names if they were listed by pressing F1.

Litude wrote:The reason an in-game help wasn't present in Keen 6 was probably because of the manual check they had when you tried starting a new game. Wouldn't make much sense to ask about creature names if they were listed by pressing F1.

You're right about this. In fact, it's weird I haven't thought that the in-game help sections may be considered unnecessary once you have the physical manual. Comparing Keen 4 help texts to the Keen 6 manual, at least a few sentences/paragraphs/chunks are very similar in the two, if not exactly the same.

Calvero wrote:

NY00123 wrote:- Keen 4 v1.0: While all files from the game may have the common timestamp of "December 1 1991 13:00", it looks like this was a part of some policy coming from Apogee (I don't remember the source for that as of typing this). However, an original ZIP archive (e.g., _1GALAXY.ZIP) can be found with an installer file named #1GALAXY.EXE and having the timestamp of "November 22 1991 04:32".

The first time I read of that policy was in a post by Litude.

Just for everybody's information, I've accidentally spotted this post of Litude where I probably encountered this policy http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showpost. ... ostcount=4

As mentioned by Litude, the modification dates of ZIP files and/or installer files may be the better pick, if there's any.

Just stumbled upon an interesting Keen tidbit. Here's John Romero explaining the design of every Doom 1 level. That alone is interesting, but he also talks about Commander Keen from time to time. Here's the interesting part: https://youtu.be/Gt4NK3Ke-20?t=16m50s This might not be news to some, but it's interesting non the less. Keen 5 was their biggest and fastest game they've ever made! It took them just 1 month! Wow...

What I find interesting is that Keen 6 wasn't the last game, I KNEW it! I KNEW Keen 5 was better put together!

Keen 6 v1.0 and the keen 4 demo have the same climb clipping error:

If Keen gets knocked off of a pole he will stand in the air when he tries to grab and pull up on a ledge.

Has that been added to the wiki? It sounds neat.

Levellass wrote:What I find interesting is that Keen 6 wasn't the last game, I KNEW it! I KNEW Keen 5 was better put together!

Thus it is confirmed that Keen 5 is the best Keen game of the second trilogy

lemm wrote:

Levellass wrote:What I find interesting is that Keen 6 wasn't the last game, I KNEW it! I KNEW Keen 5 was better put together!

Thus it is confirmed that Keen 5 is the best Keen game of the second trilogy

I still cannot believe how they made it in one month! And they've got time to make a secret level, come up with new enemies, music, graphics... Just wow! Imagine if they have had 2 more months!

wiivn wrote:

lemm wrote:

Levellass wrote:What I find interesting is that Keen 6 wasn't the last game, I KNEW it! I KNEW Keen 5 was better put together!

Thus it is confirmed that Keen 5 is the best Keen game of the second trilogy

I still cannot believe how they made it in one month! And they've got time to make a secret level, come up with new enemies, music, graphics... Just wow! Imagine if they have had 2 more months!

This was 1991. It was as big as it could get.

No. They limited themselves because of the size of the floppy disk drives.

wiivn wrote:No. They limited themselves because of the size of the floppy disk drives.

Which is another way of saying 'This was 1991. It was as big as it could get.'