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Comment by ndegruchy | Hacker News Reader

The linked GitHub thread with Ken Silverman is gold. Watching the FastDOOM author and Ken work through the finer points of arcane 486 register and clock cycle efficiencies is amazing.

Glad to see someone making sure that Doom still gets performance improvements :D

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I haven’t thought of KenS in ages but back in the 90s I was super active in the Duke3D modding scene. Scripting it was literally my first “coding”.

So in a way, I owe my whole career and fortune to KenS. Cool.

I feel like Duke 3D was probably the first mainstream accessible moddable FPS. Doom of course had plenty of level editors, but Duke Nukem brought the ability to alter and script AI as editable plaintext CON files, and of course any skills you learned on the BUILD engine were transferrable to any number of other games (Shadow Warrior, Blood, etc.)

Also shout out to anyone who remembers "wackplayer" - Duke's equivalent of the BEEP keyword.

Duke also had a map editor with a 3D editing mode. It allowed raising, lowering floors and ceilings, and picking textures. Ahead of its time. The complexity of brush-based true 3D really put a damper on good, built in editors.

Command and Conquer with Rules.ini was similar and had many fond memories of mine

C&C Red Alert. C&C 1 wasn't too easy to mod. Also, Dune 2000 (derivatives from Red Alert engine), was pretty easy to mod .

His blog was the first page I "surfed". Talking about duke3d map editor and his big project using voxels.

AFAIK the CON scripting language (used in the *.CON files in DN3D) wasn't made by Ken Silverman but by the Duke Nukem 3D team at 3D Realms. I think it was Todd Replogle who wrote the CON stuff.

Last year I emailed Ken Silverman about an obscure aspect of the Build Engine while working on a similar 2.5D rendering engine. He answered the question like he worked on it yesterday.

There are some real gems in there.

I especially liked the idea of CR2 and CR3 as scratchpad registers when memory access is really slow (386SX and cacheless 386DXs). And the trick of using ESP as a loop counter without disabling interrupts (by making sure it always points to a valid stack location) is just genius.

Yes! I know nothing about low level programming, but the idea of using a register that you don't need for a fast 'memory' location is particularly clever.

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