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Comment by Jayschwa | Hacker News Reader

Hovertank and Catacomb, the games between Keen and Wolfenstein, are both open-sourced:

https://github.com/FlatRockSoft/Hovertank3D

https://github.com/CatacombGames/Catacomb3D

I'm the current owner of the Catacomb games, and have been working on improving and porting them in my spare time (not publicly available yet, but will be When It's Done). Fabien's Game Engine Black Book has been an invaluable resource for me. I highly recommend it!

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How did you become the current owner? I'm very curious about how you went about obtaining the rights.

The original publisher, Softdisk sold many of its assets to Flat Rock Software in the 2000s. Flat Rock sold off bits and pieces over the years, and the Catacomb games were one of the last things it held [1]. In 2017, I wrote a toy implementation of Catacomb 3D in WebGL [2]. Since the project used art that was under copyright, I contacted Richard at Flat Rock to ask permission to use it. That conversation eventually led to me deciding to buy the overall game ownership from him [3].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150101022225/http://www.flatro...

[2]: https://github.com/jayschwa/CatacombWebGL

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170623155041/http://www.flatro...

Wow! Mind if I ask what the price is to the rights of an old game like Catacomb?

The most important factor is likely the current owner wanting to making sure it's going into the hands of someone who will do something caring with the rights.

I was looking into buying that IP a few years ago, and the asking price was affordable (I just didn't have the $ at the time so I went onto other projects). Glad to see someone doing something with it, I think it's perfect for a remake.

Would you be willing to share an order of magnitude?

Keen Dreams was $1500 so around that I guess

It was high four figures

>Fabien's Game Engine Black Book

>Hovertank and Catacomb

One omission from that book that would have been nice to have been included is an explanation of how the 3D scenes are drawn in those games. In one of the quoted passages, Carmack states that it is something other than the raycasting used in Wolf3D, with the added disadvantage of not being correct in every case.

From personal observation, the perspective looks strange in those games (no consistent single vanishing point). However, maybe this can be fixed by tweaking a few variables. Supposedly Catacomb and Hovertank have much higher frame rates that Wolf3D on old computers.

(another omission is that it doesn't completely explain the theory behind linear feedback shift registers, necessitating further research on the part of the reader to understand them).

Just to clarify: the question regarding LFSRs is not in how to implement them (which I think was described adequately), but how to determine what their orbit is upon repeated application, and how to choose one that generates a complete permutation when this is done. And furthermore, how was the particular one used in Wolf3D found. Was 100% Psyched to hear how the screen could be efficiently cleared pixel-by-pixel seemingly at random, but ultimately was left in the dark on this specific question.

I wish the owner of the Keen Dreams IP was as dedicated and resourceful as you are. I have a feeling we've lost that one for good.

Many people not know what you're alluding to, so I'll clarify. The current owner of the Keen Dreams IP (Javier Chavez) is a weird internet racist who got himself permanently banned from selling games on Steam after a meltdown where he changed his name to something that can't be repeated in polite company and began having a meltdown about SJWs and Trump.

In addition to releasing Keen Dreams, he also did a reskin of Hovertank 3D (which I believe is open source) except the plot is replaced with weird racist revenge fantasies about killing refugees.

Then, after being forced off Steam, he seems to spend most of his time creating anonymous email addresses and harassing people.

A company called Night Dive Studios (the current licensee of System Shock) managed to get Keen Dreams back on Steam with reassurances that they had gotten it from Chavez and that he would receive no ongoing income from it, but the game was mysteriously subsequently pulled.

Here are some Twitter threads that speaks to the above. Warning: racial and homophobic slurs, open praise of Hitler, pages and pages of abuse, etc:

https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1100934501277016065 https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1140641745920770051 https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1140726699014971393

Keen Dreams is currently available on Nintendo Switch apparently with Chavez's blessing, but buying that is obviously supporting the above insanity.

Wow, that's insane.

What's more insane is the downvoting of actual factual information. But then again, I'm not surprised, it seems to be a norm. Too bad the moderators don't have the brains to implement and enforce a "You must post a reason which will be publicly shown before you can downvote, and you cannot delete this reason or edit it after submission" function to the site.

Not sure why this comment is gray, it’s informative. Sounds like a similar situation to Notch who worked on Minecraft.

Wow, how sad. We didn't have a video game console growing up, so I have very fond memories of Commander Keen. Does Chavez own the rights to Commander Keen 4 too?

He only has the rights to Keen Dreams specifically due to it being the only one published by Softdisk.

I've noticed that videogames, where killing is normally the main point of them, often justify it by dehumanizing the enemies, but does that make any difference to anybody except worried parents?

For example, Wolfenstein 3D has you killing Nazis which we're already trained to see as valid targets for violence fantasies. Doom's human enemies are "former humans", Quake's human enemies have probes in their brains to make them evil. Sonic the Hedgehog only kills robots, not animals or even Dr. Robotnik who always escapes. But you wouldn't know these things unless you read the manuals or really paid attention. So would a teenage player really feel any different killing non-dehumanized humans instead? Maybe it's just a storm in a teacup when there's outrage at games like this immigrant killing one, Postal 2, or CoD's No Russian level. It all seems kind of perverse to train people that killing is very bad unless it's somebody belonging to a class which has been labeled as "bad" in any superficial way, or a humanoid monster, in which case any amount of gory violence is fine, such as Doom 2016.

Except that it's a game, and unless a person has significant problems anyway, they will understand that there is a difference between killing something in a game and doing it in real life.

That said, children have been playing games of "shoot em up" for many years. At one point it was cowboys and Indians, earlier it would have been whoever the local defender and perceived "bad guy" was.

I have a feeling that this is human nature, and I actually feel that we are far better having our children playing computer games where they are targeting mythical creatures, than playing shoot the Taliban or some such.

I have really fond memories of buying Catacomb Abyss by mail order in the early 90s when I was 11 years old. We used to play — my brother and sister were younger than me — with the lights turned off, terrifying!

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