Public Commander Keen Forum

https://vimeo.com/148926335

In early January 1992, before we decided to make Wolfenstein 3D, we planned on making the third Commander Keen trilogy, "The Universe Is Toast!". This is the VGA parallaxing technology demo that used VGA versions of Keen 4's background texture. The project was actually seriously underway with entire directory hierarchy and 230 files in it before we decided to make Wolfenstein 3D instead.
The demo only shows one level that we made with parallaxing graphics. We only worked on this project for a couple weeks before switching to Wolfenstein 3D.

@_mr_m_ are you thinking what I'm thinking?!

Can Romero legally release this? Because we must have the source code

I think Keen: Mystery Of Isis 2 looks strangely similar to the Keen 7 Tech Demo from 1992. One could wonder if anyone from the MOI2 team knew what Keen 7 would actually be looking like.


Look at that house! And the grass surface playground is deeper. Were they thinking that Keen 7 should return to Gnosticus IV? Or were they just using the existing graphics for testing purposes?


New kind of obstacle? That's definitely on my to-do list now .

So: new weapons, parallax scrolling background, support for VGA graphics (even though the demo looks it's in EGA, I think the background is using some kind of different brown variety from a VGA palette). Neat!

Not a clue about the music. It sounds like a track from some RPG from the SNES/Genesis era.

In the end of the trailer, it says "That's all...". There are 3 dots. Does that mean that that's not all?

All is cool, but I don't like the hud. It takes too much from the visible playground area. But it's from too early version to judge. The final version probably would have been something completely different.

Once again, I applaud John Romero for digging this! Most developers wouldn't care enough to post such things. I really appreciate what he's doing. I really like that once in a while he digs something from the past or go even beyond that (Dangerous Dave for iphone for example). Tom Hall also. John Carmack not so much. Romero, if you're reading this: thank you for posting this! You're a legend!

Thank you based Romero. We get to see what TUIT would've been like. I'm definitely getting some SNES vibes.
I'm glad to see the trees return.

Wow this would have been absolutely amazing. Obviously the content remains forever in our/?Tom Hall's imaginations. It would be very neat if we could get the source code... and port Ceilick's UTUIT over to this engine!

Also it's worth noting that the video was uploaded by John Romero on
Monday, December 14, 2015 at 3:07 PM EST.

So he was probably going to upload it one year ago, but for some reason he decided not to.

Roobar wrote:So he was probably going to upload it one year ago, but for some reason he decided not to.

He made a tweet a year ago about there being a surprise today. So now we know that this was the surprise. Last year's surprise was the mario demo.

delete.

I'd like to point out that it appears to be running natively on a Mac.
Edit: or at least with Wine since it says "DEMO.EXE"

Roobar wrote:Were they thinking that Keen 7 should return to Gnosticus IV? Or were they just using the existing graphics for testing purposes?

I'd say it's the later. Tom Hall did say that he intended to do a zoo-type level for TUIT that would have had all the enemies from the old Keen games, but I don't remember anything about actually revisiting the old locations.

Also, I think that they originally intended to make CGA, EGA and VGA versions of Keen 4-6, so the VGA background might be a leftover of an unfinished Keen 4 VGA version.

Roobar wrote:So: new weapons

I don't think so. Keens 4-6 had the same ammo icons and only ever used one of them. Seriously, this is nothing more than scrolling two images at different speed. The video doesn't show any gameplay because there probably isn't any. If there was, John Romero would have shown that off instead of just scrolling around.

Roobar wrote:Not a clue about the music. It sounds like a track from some RPG from the SNES/Genesis era.

I don't think the music has anything to do with Keen 7. It's probably just some tune that was added during the production of that video. It doesn't sound like AdLib music to me. And I wouldn't expect to find music playback in an early techdemo. Especially not in a techdemo that isn't actually playable.

keenmaster486 wrote:Can Romero legally release this? Because WE MUST HAVE THE SOURCE CODE

I can't remember John Romero ever releasing any source code. Don't know about the legal situation, but it might be similar to the Keen 4-6 sources, so don't get your hopes up.

Doing parallax scrolling isn't too hard to pull off if you know how to work with VGA video modes, so there is little to learn from this techdemo anyway.

Hey, speaking of VGA source code, how is work coming in upgrading our current Galaxy-compatible codebase to VGAGRAPH?

Holy cow-patpats! that's bootyful!

That looks pretty cool! I wish we lived in a universe in which Wolfenstein 3D and Keen 7 were released.

Nisaba wrote:@_mr_m_ are you thinking what I'm thinking?!

Yes. Yes I am.

Not so sure I'm fond of the status boxes taking up so much screen real
estate, but nonetheless, this looks quite nice.