Re:Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling
by djmips on Thursday July 27, 2023 @11:06PM
(#36902728)
I worked at a different game company in the same time frame and I invented the same technique as the second approach. I don't think it's that amazing - if you were working on it at the same time you probably would have come around to it. Just as we also made our own PWM audio driver to play sampled sounds through the PC speaker - so did everyone else it seems. The PC didn't get enough love before we were all on to the consoles. I get excited when I see demos like 8088 MPH by Hornet.
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Re:Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling
by mysterydip on Thursday July 27, 2023 @11:19PM
(#36902799)
If the game went to release, would you mind sharing the title for comparison purposes? I agree most would come up with similar solutions, but I'm curious if the result feels the same to play.
There's no doubt that commander Keen is a better game. We didn't linger on that tech long enough before we moved to console game dev.
Here's one game. Note we did not do the smooth scrolling but the coarse scrolling worked by the second method.
We had the tech to do smooth scrolling, I don't recall why it didn't make it to final game. Maybe compatibility.
On a fixed horizontal scroller idea for avoiding the full screen move / copy at the end is to amortize it while you are moving. So over many frames you build up the screen you need to reset to at the end.
Re:Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling
by green_leaves on Friday July 28, 2023 @04:58AM
(#36904457)
I remember playing that game in CGA (and speaker) back in the day. Fond memories :)
Re:Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling
by Gareth321 on Friday July 28, 2023 @04:30AM
(#36904294)
People often don't realise but it's not the invention itself which results in fame. It's the ability to commercialise and market it. There have undoubtedly been countless incredible inventions over the millennia. I myself "invented" LinkedIn a decade before it was a thing, but I never successfully commercialised it. I would estimate that most inventions were never widely known. This is why many startups begin with two people: an expert, and a business person.
So you're not wrong: this invention is perhaps nothing particularly special. What made it special was the combination of novelty, utility, and successful commercialisation.
> I don't think it's that amazing - if you were working on it at the same time you probably would have come around to it.
Then why there were so many 'top tier' scrolling platformers at the time that ran so choppy? While I don't think it's a hard requirement for a fun game, the level of smoothness Keen had (especially on low-end hardware like a <10MHz machine) was eye-opening at the time.