Lately I have seen that giving Keen a lifebar is not possible. Does noone has the urge to modifiy more things in the games?
Hit points was done last week, a lifebar in Keen 4 should be possible. And look at Keen 1, music in every level, 900 tiles per level, color cycling...
You know what you need to do? Seriously you need to look at the Keen Community Mod. It stretches the limits of the Vorticon engine, and someone like you could really hammer out some good stuff on it I think.
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
I see, so it is more a question of whether we should do this instead of could we?
Right, the Galaxy engine has its charm, I know this really good! And there is also the problem if the engine created will ever meet the expectation of the community...
Consider the GBA game, that wanted to be a successor. Didn't manage it...
Honestly, maybe I should look more into the available mods and engines, but there are so many. And although I have been a keen fan for many years I just don't know much about the community and their projects.
So there are some concerns about a new engine, ok. But isn't the galaxy engine different from the vorticon engine? And isn't the second trilogy a further improvement of the former one? Isn't there a guy from New Zealand who makes a new engine on his own? I don't have a link, but you know this, it looks great! Sure, it is not the galaxy engine. But a new official keen from Tom Hall would look and feel different too.
You're right, Keen 4-6 obviously uses a new engine. Pretty much only the smooth scrolling code stays the same. The thing is that it's still similar to Vorticons at the first glance and works really damn well. The physics are great, the game itself runs at a perfect speed, it's just brilliant. The Vorticons engine is much easier to mod though, and with all the new patches we can add many of the key Galaxy features like instant exits, makeshift level entrance texts, music, new enemies, one of the few things that haven't yet been done is instant jumping (I'd really give this a go if I had any knowledge of assembly, it MUST be possible... it simply must) or 3 level planes...
Foddy Fod wrote:I see, so it is more a question of whether we should do this instead of could we?
I don't think it would be much of a task to finish up the two remaining episodes of Chocolate Keen 1. I can give you my IDA databases if you're interested in doing that.
NetKeen is sort of almost the same engine - it bears more in common with ZDoom than CG does since NetKeen has an actual source connection to the original games, even if a tenuous one. NetKeen is based on the Wolf3D source code (which I gather was created with the recycling of much Keen code), with all the Wolf-specific code stripped out and Keen functions reimplemented based on disassemblies.
Commander Genius, on the other hand, is built from scratch, and it, well, shows. The CG team have done an admirable job of recreating much of the original game, but it's rapidly apparent that it is a recreation. Whether this is for better or worse, I'll refrain from comment.
Of course, to create something more akin to a "ZDoom for Keen", a halfway point would have to be reached - reimplementing much of the "backend" of the engine (input, drawing, etc) while closely studying disassemblies to recreate the feel as faithfully as possible. Unlike Doom, however, there's a) not as much incentive to port, since DOSBox runs Keen and existing mods just fine, and updating the engine would break many mods that require patches, unless these are implemented case-by-case as CG attempts to solve the problem (rapidly unfeasible when mods like ValKeen have to be accounted for, when Lass is practically rewriting the engine herself) and b) the Doom source code is available, while the Keen source is not, making it much harder.
Shonikado wrote:Looking back on what we've done and wanting to change it is the first step in becoming a weakling that cannot do anything.
