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While Keen Dreams isn't the best Keen out there, the heavy use of cyan and interesting monster designs soothes me something fierce when watching or playing.
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Feb 2, 2015 10:27
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One thing that is unusual, is that dead (or stunned?) enemies keep sitting on the screen unlike, say, Mario, where they disappear after flashing for a second. It'd make me think that they could come back to life again any second.
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Feb 2, 2015 15:54
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Stone cold murder. And there's plenty more as we play... Part 1: Brought to You by ACME
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Feb 2, 2015 20:38
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Stone cold child murder, I see!
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Feb 2, 2015 22:47
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Oh, hey, this is the engine they used with the SAM games. I never really played the Keens before 4 (which I sucked at because I was a child) But I loved Secret Agent as a kid. I'm just glad glad that, unlike Keen, Agent 006½ could fall silently.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:16
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Actually, Keen's weapon is explcitly a neural stunner in the games! And one thing you didn't mention is that turning off the lights also turns off the Vorticon's ability to jump. 
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Feb 2, 2015 23:30
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I must be a true child of the 90's, because the noise of Keen grumbling and bleeping around the place is music to my ears. Although the ice cannon does make an annoying noise.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:34
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Anticheese posted:Actually, Keen's weapon is explcitly a neural stunner in the games! In Keen 4-6, yes, but in this game, it's the Vorticon HyperPistol, which does kill enemies. Who wants to guess how many children we will murder by the end of these games? quote:And one thing you didn't mention is that turning off the lights also turns off the Vorticon's ability to jump. I was getting to it! There's still two videos left, I just didn't get the chance to say since it wasn't very obvious. Jaguars! posted:I must be a true child of the 90's, because the noise of Keen grumbling and bleeping around the place is music to my ears.  Soon we'll be doing Keen Dreams... soon...
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Feb 2, 2015 23:39
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Huh. Well, gently caress Vorticons. They had it coming.
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Feb 3, 2015 02:35
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Part 2: Mind Control My Bullet To Yo Face
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Feb 5, 2015 02:42
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Can't Keen destroy those shooty robot things at all?
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Feb 5, 2015 09:53
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I'd feel bad about all the dead children but apparently the vorticons are just as willing to shoot their own kids so clearly nobody cares.
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Feb 5, 2015 10:25
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Garrand posted:I'd feel bad about all the dead children but apparently the vorticons are just as willing to shoot their own kids so clearly nobody cares. To be fair, they are being mind controlled. They probably wouldn't murder their own kids if they had a choice.
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Feb 5, 2015 11:43
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I'm disappointed you didn't run back to the bridge lever and pull the bridge out from under those Scrubs. 
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Feb 5, 2015 12:00
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Garrand posted:I'd feel bad about all the dead children but apparently the vorticons are just as willing to shoot their own kids so clearly nobody cares. 
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Feb 5, 2015 12:03
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I'll say that Keen 2 looks markedly better than the first, but the odd, blocky landscapes from Keen 1 beats out the samey areas of 2. It's also pretty interesting how they developed Yorps into puzzle elements in the Scrubs. Also, going from 1-3 to 4-6 really makes you appreciate the new engine for the later games, there's really no comparison.
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Feb 5, 2015 13:21
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They're shoving an awful lot of teddy bears at you in this one compared to the last one, neh?
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Feb 5, 2015 16:58
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Valgaav posted:They're shoving an awful lot of teddy bears at you in this one compared to the last one, neh?
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Feb 5, 2015 17:00
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Carbon dioxide posted:Can't Keen destroy those shooty robot things at all? There are some enemies that are invincible. Unfortunately, that robot is one of them. Garrand posted:I'd feel bad about all the dead children but apparently the vorticons are just as willing to shoot their own kids so clearly nobody cares. I know I don't care!  Poil posted:It didn't help if you were as bad as me at the game. Especially if you never learned about light switches. You're never told that Alt activates stuff (or at least it tells you in the Help section, but pfft, who actually reads that?) so I'm sure I had plenty of troubles when I was younger. Not anymore! Instead I have to deal with how annoying the game is by not letting me save in level.
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Feb 6, 2015 04:28
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Of course, when they did add the ability to save in levels, that gave them the freedom to Kaizo Mario up the design and make levels that in some places pretty much demand save scumming.
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Feb 6, 2015 08:23
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Crosspeice posted:You're never told that Alt activates stuff (or at least it tells you in the Help section, but pfft, who actually reads that?) so I'm sure I had plenty of troubles when I was younger. Not anymore! Instead I have to deal with how annoying the game is by not letting me save in level. The Keen games have always had some in-universe neat stuff in their help sections, they weren't just dry facts.
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Feb 6, 2015 09:44
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THE BAR posted:The Keen games have always had some in-universe neat stuff in their help sections, they weren't just dry facts. Kind of. In Keen 1-3 you can get Help by pressing F1, but it is a load of dry facts. In Keen 2's help section, it never says you can activate levers and buttons with Alt, just that you can. Keen Dreams has a slightly bigger help section to tell you of Keen's increased movement, but there wasn't much else to it. Keen 4 onwards is when the help section had small tidbits with various enemies and had a lot more personality, which I'll show off along with the story. Shame that me and Deeds can't participate in online Paddle War though...
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Feb 6, 2015 10:10
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Oh, Paddle War. That was more fun than it had any right to be.
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Feb 6, 2015 12:28
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Part 3: Limp Back to Your Own Planet And that's it for Keen 2. Thinking about it, I'm not sure which of Keen 1 or 2 I like best. I think I prefer 2 slightly for higher difficulty and slightly more polish. It can get pretty samey, so I do prefer the variety 1 has, but it's a pretty close contest. Oh, but that means Keen 3 is up next. How does that compare? ... 
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Feb 6, 2015 21:13
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Enjoying these vids, back when I was a kid I only played Keen 1 and Keen 4, so seeing the others is and will be interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj4HJkeQSg0 if you're interested here is the thing that started it all
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Feb 6, 2015 21:27
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Keen is a cool piece of history, really. Carmark has been known for his engines, especially creating the 3D genre with Wolfenstein and Doom, but even Keen uses a for the time sophisticated engine. Today, a 2D scroller is trivial to make, but back then it was not so on the PC. The PC did not have hardware scrolling not enough power to do it in software. A screen was 320 * 200 pixels, which would only leave around 250 instructions in a 16 MHz computer for each pixel, which is not really a whole lot when the memory is slow as molasses and super-scalar chips still far in the future. Carmark used a trick that is still used today: making the displayed window smaller than the drawn window. By doing so, he could simply move the window instead of redrawing the entire screen every frame, which is why Keen has "smooth" scrolling (smooth in that it doesn't scroll an entire screen at a time, but does so while the player is moving). When working with fast graphics libraries today, you often have to specify the width and stride of an image independently (check for example Intel's IPP library). The stride is how much memory is used for one horizontal line. If it is larger than the width, your displayed window width is smaller than the full drawn one. Keen uses a width of 320 pixels and a stride of 384, which means that for 64 glorious pixels the computer does not have to redraw the entire screen, but can just move the window. Moving the window is performed by adding one to the address of the first pixel in the window. Modern libraries specify an image using an offset to the first pixel, a width, a height, and a stride, so moving one pixel would just add or subtract one from the offset. This is literally what happens if you look at something like the "outside world" thru some manner of hole. When you move the hole, the entire outside real world is not redrawn; only what you see changes. The world is only redrawn in the parts you cannot see. Maybe this is a little different from literally what happens in reality. Now, all that is left is a bit of trickery when moving to the boundary of the 64 bit border (redraw the entire screen 64 pixels offset or even smarter: redraw just parts at the border and continue scrolling the offset using a bit more memory). For animations, he'd use double buffering (having two drawings of the screen in memory, drawing on one while showing the other, and swapping between them). It's really quite clever what the guy could do with almost nothing. I bet the psychedelic color effects some of the death fields we saw in the last levels were made using palette rotation rather than redrawing. This was accomplished because we didn't have enough memory to represent an entire pixel, so instead we just has an table index of 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits (2, 4, 16 or 256 possible values) pointing into a table of real RGB values. Instead of redrawing all those pixels of a death-field, he'd just change the RGB values for the 16 different colors used to draw the field. In Keen 2 we see two elements not in Keen 1: light switches and moving platforms. These elements were only added to the engine for Keen 2. It was literally a graphics engine like we know them today for 3D games, except it was a simpler time, so the world was 2D and likewise were the games. They were experimenting with which features could be added while still keeping the game playable. It's fun how you can see a lot of the limitations in the games. You cannot look down because that's an expensive operation: to do so you need to either redraw the screen or to have a tall image. The first is not an option, and if you have a tall screen you do not have memory for double buffering. Falling is also very slow for this same reason, and the same is carefully engineered to not have too much moving on screen at the same time. The no saving in levels? Now a safe-file is reduced to the number of levels you have completed, your points/lives, and your position on the world map. If you save in a level, you have to save which enemies you killed, which bonuses you picked up etc.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:48
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A good post. Now what I don't understand is how it's possible that console games (e.g Super Mario Bros) were so far ahead of pc's. What did they do different to make it possible? Have more memory?
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Feb 6, 2015 23:32
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Carbon dioxide posted:A good post. Now what I don't understand is how it's possible that console games (e.g Super Mario Bros) were so far ahead of pc's. What did they do different to make it possible? Have more memory? Well for one you didn't really have the interactable OS layer to deal with. Secondly, in some cases the consoles were being programmed below the assembler/binary level due to how and what chips and resisters were placed. And lastly the hardware was much more focused. The money went into the specialized chips and less into the overall system. Sure you could run duck hunt on the NES. But, could you write a book? Do accounting? Draw anything? Or even program a new game? Basically, the more things you are ok/good at the less you are Great at. And in the beginning you had to be great to more easily make a fun/playable platformer.
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Feb 6, 2015 23:44
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Aw, you can't leash a yorp like that. 
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Feb 6, 2015 23:49
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Carbon dioxide posted:A good post. Now what I don't understand is how it's possible that console games (e.g Super Mario Bros) were so far ahead of pc's. What did they do different to make it possible? Have more memory? Carmark's trick was only possible on the EGA adaptor, which came with a whopping 64 KiB (extendable to 128 KiB) memory, which is just enough to store 2 16 color (4 bit) images at 320*200. Previous CGA adaptors had 16 KiB or just enough to accommodate one copy 320*200 4 colors (2 bit) or 640*200 2 colors (1 bit). So, PC adaptors before EGA could only store one image. Furthermore, you could only just store 2 images with the standard memory, and not the extra 64 pixel band and a bit at the top/bottom with standard EGA. As PCs didn't have hardware support for sprites (many consoles did), you could choose between flickering or scrolling, and most went with the secret option 3: WordStar instead. VGA came about in 1987 and added more memory (256 KiB) as standard, making it possible to have 2 screens with a 64 pixel rim on standard high-end PCs. So, only around 1990 did it make sense to use it for games. Consoles instead supported sprites. The NES (Super Mario) supported up to 64 sprites in hardware and allowed you to compose them as objects. On top of this, it supported scrolling of the background directly in hardware. It was the lack of sprites that forced the PC to redraw the entire screen as a whole and to need double buffering. Consoles were basically made for simple scrollable backgrounds with tiny moving sprites whereas PCs were made for "high resolution" static graphics. Consoles also had dedicated CPUs for all kinds of stuff like sound and graphics (really, PCs did as well, but optimized for WordStar, VisiCalc and that sort of fun). IIRC, the C64 had a processor identical to the main CPU to run the floppy drive if installed and the NES graphics processor was way more powerful than the main CPU. The PC had basically one CPU and that was that (and a surprisingly powerful and programmable processor for the serial ports). Sound is a bitch to program on the PC without dedicated hardware (and sounds like crap).
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Feb 7, 2015 00:58
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Ah, good ol' Billy Blaze, how you made my childhood less sucky!  Klafbang's post is but one example of the fuckery people used to do with old games to make them work on computers that, no joke, sometimes had as little as 16K of RAM. Essentially, there was a lot of cheating. One of my favourite methods for this (I still play with it every now and again, and am going to make a point of mentioning it in my blog posts on old BASIC books for kids) is user-defined symbols combined with the aforementioned palette rotation. What are user-defined symbols, I hear you ask? Well, they're basically making your own ASCII symbols. Imagine an 8 by 8 grid. Each row is a 2's compliment 8 bit set (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.) So, to make an 8x8 sprite symbol, you'd make a DATA entry (An old BASIC command), with 8 numbers, each one adding up to the total on each row. So let's say you wanted pixels 1, 3, and 6 on the first row. You'd make the first number 69 (64+4+1)... And so on, until you had an 8x8 "sprite". Of course, later games used different methods, but early BBC games, for example, used this method to make... Well, Things like this. (Better games were made in BASIC, but I'm having trouble finding an example that's explicitly stated to have been coded like that.)
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Feb 7, 2015 01:15
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Since we're talking about 'cheating' to get insane amounts of stuff out of low system requirements, there's the 8088 corruption and 8088 Domination videos. It's not something that could have been done at the time, since it requires the heavy lifting to be done by more modern computers. But it's still something that is pretty impressive. I suppose back then it could have been done by hand, but I don't think it would have been at all practical. JamieTheD posted:Ah, good ol' Billy Blaze, how you made my childhood less sucky!
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Feb 7, 2015 01:53
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This is all very interesting and please do continue. Alas, it goes right over my head, though I think I get most of it. I know that they had to do some crazy stuff to get these games to work and I'm happy I can play them on my Windows 7 laptop in 2015. I don't know how (other than it pretends to be an older computer, or program, or whatnot), but I can.
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Feb 7, 2015 04:39
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Carbon dioxide posted:A good post. Now what I don't understand is how it's possible that console games (e.g Super Mario Bros) were so far ahead of pc's. What did they do different to make it possible? Have more memory? JamieTheD posted:sometimes had as little as 16K of RAM Y'see this little phrase right here? Especially that first word. Sometimes. That's the big reason why consoles have always been "ahead" of PC games as far as technical specs go. A console is A) a dedicated video games machine that B) only plays games approved by the makers for use on their computerbox and C) is the same as every other superbox that plays the same games. So a developer making a console game knows exactly the limitations they're working under and how far they can push the technology. Contrastingwise, the only thing a developer making a PC game can say for certain about their target audience is "at least 90% of them own A computer of some description." If they develop for the absolute best the tech sector has to offer they're actually shutting out the bulk of their market (this is assuming their company can afford to have the best themselves in the first place). I don't know about you but my computer is five or six years old and I shouldn't have to replace it for another two or three at least; it's a deep, deep wallet that replaces its computer as soon as the technology improves, never mind thinks that's even reasonable. So they have to softball things a little to make sure they don't release a game their customers' computers can't handle. That's a really simplified explanation of the phenomenon, but it'll do, since I haven't freshened up on my research to know all the fancy words about it recently.
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Feb 7, 2015 04:53
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Interesting posts, do go on.klafbang posted:you could choose between flickering or scrolling, and most went with the secret option 3: WordStar instead. WordStar? 
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Feb 7, 2015 10:00
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Carbon dioxide posted:WordStar? In other words, "screw video games, let's just focus on word processing?"
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Feb 7, 2015 15:15
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Kgummy posted:Since we're talking about 'cheating' to get insane amounts of stuff out of low system requirements, there's the 8088 corruption and 8088 Domination videos. Looks pretty cool! But not too complicated to make work if you have another computer doing the encoding. The first is just text, so that's 80 * 25 * 2 * 24 = 96000 bytes/second at "full screen rendering", which should be doable to read and push thru at 4.77 MHz. If sound is handled by a SoundBlaster (as the second one), that's not really hard at all. The second does a lot of tricks to not redraw the entire screen - in color mode it looks like only around one fourth of the pixels are used and/or only the center of the screen. The B/W mode has clear interlacing. Some cooler things made "during the days" are things like this real-time 3D rendering on the C64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Oqz5WjDPI Or how about one of the big hits from the 90s, Second Reality by Future Crew form 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA This is all done on a PC without any hardware acceleration. These guys later went on to make thinks like May Payne, and some other crazies redid the demo for the C64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVPW40ygds4 Some of these guys did entire 3D engines with sound for intros (64 KiB) and even 4K (4 KiB total program size). For a view into what these kinds of loonies do these days, check out the 1 K intros (1 KiB total program size, that is including program, graphics and sound): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJO4AtxKJiFOaMSsK3DtH1MzhKKsbXtca KieranWalker posted:In other words, "screw video games, let's just focus on word processing?" Yup. Pretty much the big one on PC before WordPerfect and later Microsoft Word came along. I think it's neat that a game like Keen actually has a lot of replayability. Sure, you can breeze thru it, but even then you can spend quite some time going for full points. It's also fun to see how much it was influenced by arcade machines - why would you bother with lives when you could just save-scum? As I remember som of the id guys mention at some point that games just had to have lives, and only later did they realize that since the game was not trying to get quarters out of you, it didn't really need them.
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Feb 7, 2015 20:51
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klafbang posted:I think it's neat that a game like Keen actually has a lot of replayability. Sure, you can breeze thru it, but even then you can spend quite some time going for full points. It's also fun to see how much it was influenced by arcade machines - why would you bother with lives when you could just save-scum? As I remember som of the id guys mention at some point that games just had to have lives, and only later did they realize that since the game was not trying to get quarters out of you, it didn't really need them. Then again, New New New Super Mario Bros Wii U Tay or whatever the latest game is called still has lives. They are almost completely useless because you just get a set of new ones if you game over, which never lets you go further back than a few levels, and you can basically find them anywhere, but the system is still there. I did enjoy the novel system of Wario Land II and III where you couldn't die at all.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:44
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klafbang posted:Looks pretty cool! But not too complicated to make work if you have another computer doing the encoding. I think you did pretty much hit the nail on the head on how it was done. There is a video explaining the process of how he got the first one working. I think the video even has him saying how long it took to get the encoding done for that one. He didn't do a video for Domination, but there is a post mortem of it, with the second part linked in. It's an interesting read. A quote from the description of the video the guy made comparing the two: quote:The 2004 Corruption tech never drops a frame due to the way it was designed, but there is obvious loss of fine detail. The 2014 Domination tech drops portions of frames when available CPU/memory bandwidth is exhausted, but because it uses graphics mode, there is much more fine detail (you can read expressions on faces, for example). The demoscene stuff is fascinating, though I'm not sure I'll ever be able to fully understand how they do these amazing things. Or at the very least, anytime soon.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:45
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Carbon dioxide posted:Then again, New New New Super Mario Bros Wii U Tay or whatever the latest game is called still has lives. I'm on firmer ground with this one. "Lives" is an outdated holdover from when video games were primarily played in arcades, for a quarter a play. It was 100% a moneymaking tactic. Either you got good enough to beat the game in three tries, or you kept feeding money into the machine. Console games at home initially used lives because they were ports of arcade games. Then it was padding to make the game last longer (most of the games from when the likes of me were young'ins, on the NES and the Genesis and that, could be beaten in an hour or two if you were good, the main thing that made them last longer was having to start over because a level kicked your rear end too many times. Please don't feel patronized if it turns out you're actually my age). These days lives are nothing but unexamined habit and lovely Nerd Nostalgia. Games have lives because they've always had lives, and nerds hate change, so video games have to have lives or else it's bad and ruined. But, you know, lots of people play video games who are grown-rear end adults and have other things to be doing with their time than replaying the same three levels over and over because number four keeps kicking their rear end. Speaking as one of said adults, having to start from scratch every time is only fun when it's built into the experience from the ground up, like in Binding of Isaac and what have you.
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Feb 8, 2015 01:07
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