I can understand the feeling of loyalty to a widely admired figure (and deservedly so!) but this isn't a great way to respond to someone else's work. Unless there's some evidence of ill intent, why not just classify it as an homage?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fabien's site is an invaluable resource, but I think I've read it all over the years and he one has post specifically on Commander Keen, and that's focused on just the adaptive tile refresh (https://fabiensanglard.net/ega/). This book is 211 pages on the entire game.

On the first page this author credits Fabian's excellent analysis of Doom and Wolfenstein as the inspiration to attempt the same for Commander Keen.

> "Fast forward to 2021, I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, ex plore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book are intentionally similar to Fabien’s Game Engine Black Books, as an homage to those masterpieces."

Just skimming so far, but this book looks like a valuable contribution to the genre of retro game code analysis. Obviously, it will build on the work of others who've done adjacent research. In a page 87 footnote the author refers readers to Fabien's site for detailed instructions on installing a DOSBox and Borland C++ dev environment.

57 lines of CSS and the only distinguishing characteristic, the use of Deja Vu Sans Mono, isn't present.

This is trampolining on his "brand" as much as my text editor is

First, shallow dismissals are against HN guidelines, for a good reason.

And I fail to make the connection. This content-heavy but minimal design is not unique.

Text inside a centered element, text-heavy but also packed with images, exists from the times of formatinng websites with `<table>` tags in DreamWeaver or Microsoft Frontpage 98.

If you're talking about the highly detailed article, can we not gatekeep this? I want more of that on the internet, not less.

From the preface: > Fast forward to 2021, I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, explore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book are intentionally similar to Fabien’s Game Engine Black Books, as an homage to those masterpieces. To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white.

Yeesh, until I saw your comment I thought this was Fabien. I'm sure it's not intentional but this goes beyond "homage" and into "deceptive". The replies to this claiming to not see what the issue is are inexplicable to me.

The work on the book itself looks fantastic, so it's a shame about the site design.