Best Fangame Engine

You can discuss anything about fan-made Commander Keen games here.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Iv4n wrote:Is it me or the screen on the watch is wider now?
That's because the standard resolution for DOS games was 320x200. This engine emulates a resolution of 320x240 with the default resolution of the game being 640x480 (so that any graphics will be scaled to 200%), which is a standard resolution that should run well on any PC. I could rewrite the engine to emulate 320x200 (in fact, you can do this by editing the game.ini), but that would mean the Graphics will look a little wierd in 640x480 since the scaling factor would not be an integer value
Iv4n wrote:What I dislike is the welcoming screen. Especially the purple-pink background. It doesn't look right. Hopefully you'll change it in future versions. Also a note for the destroyable bricks. Maybe you should add some more depth and shadows.
As the welcoming screen says, this is just a techdemo. It's only porpose is to show what the engine is already able to do. Most graphics are just placeholders. (And the destroyable bricks were just taken from Jill of the Jungle and then recolored, I was too lazy to draw them myself)
Iv4n wrote:I wasn't able to open the editor though. It displays me a message for a missing exe file.
You probably ran it with a wrong working directory. MapEditor is just a batch file that runs the main (and only) exe file with the parameter "-mapedit".
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Iv4n wrote:You may add continuing jumping after holding the jump button. You see, as it is now, if you press the jump button and hold it, Keen will jump only once, which in the original Keen is not the case.
That isn't quite right. In the original Keen (I've checked out 4-6 before witing this), if you just press end hold the jump key, Keen will jump only once. However, if you hit the jump key, then release it and hit it again while Keen is still in the air, he will start jumping as soon as he lands on something solid, but then again, he will only jump once.
This doesn't work in my engine yet, but most of the controls are still basically unchanged since the first version of this techdemo (which was done by Rübennase, my co-programmer) and definitely need to be redone for the final version.
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jimmyjames
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Post by jimmyjames »

If anyone is interested I could make a keen engine which is all controlled by modifiable external files and level editor. I can also release the source for those wanting to have a bit more control.;)

And if not many great keen games are made with it it could always be used as a platform game maker.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

If you're able to script Actor AI in text files and then let the game act as a cool interpreter, this could work out well. I'm not quite that familliar with script lanuages such as Python or Lua, so I don't know how to add the variables needed for the AI routines that are not hard-coded in the engine, since those variables would need to be saved when saving a game, too.
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Malvineous
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Post by Malvineous »

I think the most common way of doing that is to have the engine call a serialise() function in the script - the script could then put all its important data into an associative array (for example) and return it to the engine. Likewise the engine will call unserialise() when loading a game, passing in the original array, which the script "unpacks" into all its local variables.

Of course an easier way (which I imagine the Keen Galaxy engine uses) is to have the AI remain "stateless" so there is no information that needs to be saved, other than their current position.
Todo
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Post by Todo »

Hi, I would like to ask (if possible) for someone to upload a copy of the source code archive that was posted here a few years back. Does anyone still have a copy? And if not, does anyone have a way to get in touch with z-one, the original author of Keen: Next? Thank you.
CommanderKing
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Post by CommanderKing »

Hello everyone, I would highly recommend Scirra Construct.
http://www.scirra.com/

It's the easiest 2D game engine I've ever used. There is enough flexibility to recreate the Commander Keen engines and then some.

You can create games really fast.
Construct uses "events" and plugins instead of scripting. It's really innovative. You can still script if you want.

Did I mention it's free and open source?
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