The 3D Realms main Build engine games thread

[Technician]

SavageCorona said:

I found a pretty good video on the history of the Build engine, with clips from pretty much every game the Build engine was used in, the development of the engine over time and a small insight on what happened.

Ken's story is such a romantic tale.

What's he doing now? Was his game career short?

[Stroggos]

Technician said:

Ken's story is such a romantic tale.

What's he doing now? Was his game career short?

I think he just didn't like competing with id Software as 3D Realms was constantly. After writing the Build engine he did actually (partially) create a 3D engine to compete with Quake but 3D Realms didn't use it, I'm not sure what happened there. But after his work with 3D Realms/Apogee he went back to college to complete his degree.

Now I have no idea what he does in a professional capacity but he's still programming and has created some really neat things in the past decade or so.

[Gez]

If you wonder what Ken is doing now: http://www.ardfry.com/

[Magnetick]

Kind of disappointing to see that Ken's making something as boring as... codecs for pictures.

Not to mention, the stuff he is selling might have been useful ten years ago, but who needs something to optimize PNG's in browsers to save bandwidth today?

[Gez]

Webcomic authors I guess.

[Blzut3]

Magnetick said:

who needs something to optimize PNG's in browsers to save bandwidth today?

You'd be surprised how much you can save if you process user avatars through image optimization programs. Now granted this applies more to animated gifs where people waste frame after frame because their animation tools only do constant frame delays, but still. Lets not forget there are still many areas that don't have access to broadband Internet. (Not to mention those constant delay animations waste CPU resources.)

Even assuming the load time doesn't matter, for heavy traffic websites the optimizations can help reduce transfer volume costs. It's even typical for a web master to remove all white space from production code.

[SavageCorona]

Still not as cool as building (haha get it?) your own game engine which would go on to be successful and a spiritual successor to the Doom engine for the next 4-5 years.

It inspired me to make my own engine because he was roughly my age but it'd probably be shit, since I'm a massive retard.