[UnknDoomer]

In continue of https://www.doomworl...th-john-romero/ topic. By coincidence, Ken got in touch shortly before John Romero, so the formation of the list of questions turned out to be parallel. For those who don’t know who he is, but still want to address a question:

1. https://en.wikipedia...i/Ken_Silverman.
2. http://www.advsys.net/ken/.

Three conditions applied:

1. No joke questions.

2. 1 person - 1 question. Subquestions allowed.

3. Total amount will be limited to 30. Slots left: 27.

Will be waiting for your offers.

--
Current questions list:

1. Does anything inspired you to create the Build engine? And, regarding your participation in specific games development, perhaps you can mention few interesting facts?

2. taufan99 asking: "Ever since I played Ken's Labyrinth and your other programs, I've fallen in love with the KSM format. However, I'd like to know if you may release a converter to the General MIDI format, because even though I acknowledge that AdLib is a good sound card, I'm more of a General MIDI enjoyer myself.".

3. DNSKILL5 asking: "Build during developing of first Blood times. There are some controversal information about this period available around the web. Long story short - things seems to be gone rough with this one. Could you tell us a little about the specifics of the work at that project?".

[Phredreeke]

Have you played Ion Fury and if so what do you think of the game?

[UnknDoomer]

Noted. Looks like I cannot edit first message here. So, the whole list of questions can be checked on doomworld in this case - https://www.doomworl...ken-silverman/.

[ck3D]

To this day, Build is an oddity in the landscape of game engines that, most often, are designed with rather imminent concerns of practical application in mind; especially modern games tend to rely on photorealism a lot more than in the general 1990's for user immersion and relatability, sometimes at the expense of more creative alternative approaches to complement, when games such as Duke Nukem 3D didn't miss any of those marks and somehow managed to push credible environments all the while technically introducing reality-bending tricks: sector-over-sector allowing for the potentially endless stacking impossible spaces on top of shared coords, and walls possibly rewriting their position at runtime with unrivaled flexibility at the time makes it that in addition to being a tool that was destined to serve production, Build also can be approached as its own mini-medium and generally is as such by most longtimers in the mapping communities. How much of this creative freedom was deliberate and maybe important to you when designing the engine, were you hoping (or did you even expect) those uncommon and relatively experimental features would be embraced by its users, were you aware of the punch they would eventually pack to the point where they still are influencing some niche schools of level design, or were you just having mindless fun while it lasted and still unaware of how more rigid gaming was just about to become as soon as the next couple of trends came up?

Subquestion that is also related to intent: while it is common popular canon to retain 'realism' as a forte of the engine, I would tend to disagree and argue it really is suggestion-based, and the apparent relatability of most Build environments really is just a surface level hook towards more abstract level designs and creative layout ideas. It relies on disguising a lot in order to put players in situations they normally wouldn't be drawn to because said situations usually are quite technical (and so, paradoxically, a lot of fun for mappers to compose). What do you think?

[UnknDoomer]

Noted.

[Phredreeke]

From DW thread

Quote

Generally speaking. It is possible to bypass the limitation through the your utility, POLY2VOX. But this requires a schizophrenic voxel-model-voxel conversion scheme with dirty hacks in the 3D editor for centering. Which is also not good.

...and if you use a hardware renderer, those voxels are turned into models again before they're displayed.

[UnknDoomer]

Have sent this information to the guy.

[Aleks]

I hope this technically still counts as a single question with multiple "sub-questions", but in general, I think all of them can be answered organically with a couple of sentences:
How was your experience working with 3DR on Duke 3D regarding the feedback you got directly from level designers? Did you approach your task of creating the game engine purely from a coding/mathematical perspective according to what the developers needed, or did you actively look at it in a way that a level designer/player would? Did the level designers catch on quickly with how to use the editor or did you struggle to find a common ground/show them your perspective?

[UnknDoomer]

Noted.

[High Treason]

Could ask him about GEORGE.TXT, but that one might be a bit awkward.

[UnknDoomer]

Question about Blood already included.

[Phredreeke]

Ok, since you're opening up for further questions.

Is there any feature that Build engine (prior to open sourcing) didn't have that you wish you had implemented?

[UnknDoomer]

Noted.

[UnknDoomer]

6 slots left.

[UnknDoomer]

1 slot left.

[IDHLEB]

Cheello is currently working on his his massive Voxel Duke Nukem 3D project, which aims to recreate every sprite in the game.
Have you seen Cheello's other work: Voxel Doom, Voxel Blood?

[UnknDoomer]

Noted. Slots are full, questions are no longer accepted, list has been sent to the addressee.