bananaboy

For anyone wondering, Gustavo runs https://pikuma.com/ which has a host of lectures on a variety of topics from PlayStation 1 programming to maths to triangle rasterisation.

From the company about page: "In August 2025, Kristian Wares, Paul Fox and other key employees acquired the assets, cleared the debt, and incorporated Nuclideon. No external investors with exit pressures. The engineering team that made the Unlimited Detail engine perform now owns it."

Ohhh gotcha! Gyr was another scener from Queensland. I don’t think he was with us on that trip. I think it was just me (Sam - bananaboy), shock (Raj), and ript (Dave)

Yeah I’m pretty sure I was using bananaboy back then! That’s right Remedy, I was trying to remember what the demo party we went to was. That was a lot of fun, I have fond memories of that trip!

I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.

I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).

Hey! I'm pretty sure I stayed at your apartment around 2003 with shock and ript when we were travelling around Europe going to demo parties!

100% agree. I don't understand why there is pushback against this.

Haha yeah I just went by his LinkedIn title

If you set up the RISCBoy toolchain and port it then yeah.

Oh this is Luke Wren’s work. He’s an ASIC design engineer at Raspberry Pi. Amazing project, I love it!

Always love to see new stuff on Paul Bourke's web site!

A bit more info here from the person who did this https://x.com/4gb7xvbwqx/status/2074834114847309981 (although I can't shake the feeling that the person is actually an AI!)

I assume he means Command and Conquer: Renegade

I was wondering the same thing

We used ODE on Barnyard (released 2006 but started maybe two years earlier) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnyard_(video_game)

They also started top posting!

My friends and I made a game for Ludum Dare 36 called No Mario's Sky years ago and received a DMCA take down notice. We weren't selling it, but we still had to remove it. Maybe because Mario is 100% a Nintendo property but Pokemon and Advance Wars are co-owned with other companies.

Wow this is amazing work!

It was based off the q1 engine but heavily modified and took stuff from q2 as well, notably coloured lighting and radiosity lightmaps.

I've been using p4 daily for about 21 years at various game studios (with a small break of around 5 years in the middle, where I used it only sporadically) and I think I can count the number of times I've used "reconcile offline work" on one hand. I think the only time my workspace has gotten into some kind of corrupted state was because of a crash that left it half-synced. If that ever happens I usually just blow it away and force sync the entire repo again rather than use reconcile (because it's so slow).

Harry was written by an Australia, John Passfield, on his own and published by apogee (I forget but apogee might have provided some art support). John is still making games today!

Yes, I played it at the time on both a 286 and a 386. You might be right, although you're describing an algorithm more like what Duke3d used rather than raycasting in that case. I was talking purely about raycasting. So it sounds like a misunderstanding on my part.

It's true that Carmack has said several times, including in the readme to the source release of Wolf3d [0], that a BSP-based renderer might be faster than raycasting. He used a BSP tree based renderer for the SNES port of Wolf3d because the CPU was even slower, so I suppose that answers it! There's also a note in the GEBB page 164 from Carmack where he says it was slower than "looping through a few long wall segments". [1]

Early alpha versions of DOOM used a sector-based rendering technique, maybe like what you're describing, which ultimately was too slow [2]][3]. Then Carmack switched to BSP trees after doing the Wolf3d SNES port.

I think it would be pretty interesting to implement the same game with both a raycasting approach and a BSP or Build-style portal/sector approach and compare performance on a 386. DOOM ran terribly on a 386 but it did a lot more than Wolf3d, so it's not a great comparison. Catacomb 3D didn't use raycasting (it used a wall span rendering techniqe) and ran better than Wolf3d on similar hardware, but it had a bunch of glitches. But Carmack says they were due to lack of experience rather than the technique itself.

Anyway thanks for challenging my assumptions. This'll go on my todo list!

[0] https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbwolf3d.pdf [2] https://youtu.be/NnkCujnYNSo?t=1592 [3] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_rendering_engine

A grid of squares makes sense for the target hardware at the time though (286 or better CPU)

I wouldn’t be surprised if 7-zip can extract the files from the installer if the installer is not a custom thing.

CGA is even more nuanced than just two palettes. You can choose from three palettes, and each can be set to low intensity or high intensity, so you can effectively choose from six. On top of that, the background colour for each palette (colour 0 which defaults to black) can be set to any colour from the full CGA 16 colour palette! I wrote a sample program for a friend recently to demonstrate this https://github.com/samizzo/cgasample

Exactly! Armchair enthusiasts and gamers and such will talk about some game release and its "new engine" but throwing away the entire codebase is rarely a sensible choice financially speaking.

Very true!

You might be thinking of unchained VGA modes but in unchained modes you want to draw columns because that means you only have to switch which memory plane is active four times instead of every four pixels, ie select plane 0, draw column 0, 4, 8, etc then select plane 1 and draw columns 1, 5, 9, etc etc

It does render columns though. Maybe we are talking about different things but the algorithm is essentially: for x = 0 to 319 draw_vertical_line(x, height). The detail there though is whether you cast a ray for each column or do what this does and go from far plane to near plane drawing the columns.

The 286 didnt have an integrated floating point unit so you would have been using a software floating point library that came with your compiler. That would have been very slow indeed!