Can a GZDoom-like engine be made for Build games?

[dpJudas]

On that subject, is Ken's Labyrinth considered a Build engine game?

[Apeirogon]

What's next? That we say John Carmack invented the BSP?

As says my grandpa "hero not the one who begins, but the one who ends".
Carmack dont invent bsp, but he used it in the right place in the right time to become HALF GOD OF THE PROGRAMMING!!!! HAIL TO THE CARMACK!!!!!!!

All I want to say that, based on silverman code, time when it was created and etc, it LOOKS LIKE that he write it using "how to C for dummies" book and his own view how "good" code must looks to implement his idea. So this is only an instrument which silverman use incorectly, like knife to screwing screw.
So for me this is like saying that my bad inglish sais that Im stoopid and bad person at all, bicos its OBWIOUS haw to vrite vords correctly. And this is not true
Or....

[Rachael]

Please, no idol worship here... it's fine to venerate Carmack if you think he contributed something important to gaming as a whole, but there are no gods among men.

[Phredreeke]

On that subject, is Ken's Labyrinth considered a Build engine game?

Nope. It has its own Wolf3D-like engine

[Graf Zahl]

Please, no idol worship here... it's fine to venerate Carmack if you think he contributed something important to gaming as a whole, but there are no gods among men.

I don't think he intended to display hero worship with that post but ridicule it. Beware of the language barrier.

[Rachael]

Ah, okay, if that is the case then, sorry Apeirogon - my mistake

[InsanityBringer]

There's something that's bugging me about the whole availability of information thing: Of course the access to information was nothing like it is in the current era of the internet, but when you read something like Masters of Doom it constantly talks about how Carmack was struggling with Quake since it's moving into territory no one has ever gone into before, and that there was no relevant documentation, and sure, there was nothing telling you directly how to do a fast, BSP sorted, PVS visibility filtered, lightmapped polygon scan convertor with zero overdraw, but at the same time, a lot of sources make it sound like there was almost nothing at all, but how would engines like Descent and Unreal come into existence? Even though the Descent source is very questionable in terms of overall program structure, there's enough citations in it to suggest that those involved were all fairly well read. The engine lacks the elegance of Quake, with the clipper having some serious problems (the texture mapper does basic bounds checks as a result, because otherwise it can easily underflow or overflow), and polygons otherwise jittering in weird ways, and there's none of the zero overdraw stuff that Quake had, but it's still functional and has perspective-correct texture mapping available.

[Kinsie]

Maybe it was just that the Build engine never attracted a programmer who is radical enough to toss out the old to reimplement it in a more approachable fashion. To work with this code I think one's thought patterns have to be in sync with Ken Silverman and such a person won't find much wrong with this coding style and most likely continue in the same way.

As I understand it, the core engine source code was not actually provided to licensees - they were provided with a pre-compiled "black box" to write their game code around, and if they wanted any new core engine features they'd have to speak to Ken, who being a teenage programming savant was allegedly not the easiest person on Earth to deal with.

In comparison, Doom and Quake licensees just received a raw copy of Id's development folder without much support or documentation outside of an offer of a few bouts of tech support from Carmack that supposedly few people took up - the joke going around was that licensees were basically paying, what, US$50,000 for someone to do an XCOPY command in DOS and that was that!

[Graf Zahl]

I was speaking about the source port era.
While Doom surely got its Team TNT which strictly worked within the confines of the original framework (and a certain Lee Killough even went as far as reducing code quality with his obfuscations) it also got Randi who tore it apart and rebuilt it in a much more modular form.
For Build such a developer never appeared. EDuke32 as the most advanced port has meticulously preserved the clusterfuck coding style that was the trademark of both Build and Duke Nukem's code bases.

Having dug through the code in the last few days I can surely say that there's a lot of potential to make the code more approachable without breaking anything.

[dpJudas]

There's something that's bugging me about the whole availability of information thing: Of course the access to information was nothing like it is in the current era of the internet, but when you read something like Masters of Doom it constantly talks about how Carmack was struggling with Quake since it's moving into territory no one has ever gone into before, and that there was no relevant documentation, and sure, there was nothing telling you directly how to do a fast, BSP sorted, PVS visibility filtered, lightmapped polygon scan convertor with zero overdraw, but at the same time, a lot of sources make it sound like there was almost nothing at all, but how would engines like Descent and Unreal come into existence?

If you take a look at computer graphics books from the early 1990's, the ones university students would just have read, you'll notice that a lot of the basic algorithms are actually very old. I.e. the diffuse light algorithm used in OpenGL dates back to 1978. However such books also reveal that the subject was not very well understood at the time, even by the universities. PVS, painter's algorithm, BSP, rasterization and such usually was described in very loose terms.

So it was a combination of collecting information, connecting the dots and paying a lot of attention to what the others were doing. A lot of what Unreal did was based directly on what hints they could collect about what id software was doing.

[Kinsie]

Yeah, Unreal 1 was generally Tim either a.) trying to make sense of a vast and stygian mass of assembly that Digital Extremes founder James Schmaltz had written up or b.) trying to recreate half-understood effects from either Id engines or demoscene images that he didn't know were actually pre-rendered.

That engine's true success, however, was in providing scores of tutorials, documentation and support to licensees - learning from and making up for the support shortfall provided by Id and 3D Realms.

[Apeirogon]

Lee Killough even went as far as reducing code quality with his obfuscations

Why he was do that?

[Graf Zahl]

Because he probably considered it cool to condense code into as few lines as possible.
This was a different time when code readability often had no meaning for programmers, so it was very likely some of the same mindset that made Build the way it is.

[Apeirogon]

Ah, the dark age of technology.... Time when java was born.

[Graf Zahl]

Well, that "dark age" gave us Java.
That's nothing to the modern age which gave us Swift, Rust and Go (yeah, 3 more languages trying to reinvent the wheel while attempting to simplify its design.)