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Information about Ken Silverman

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Ken Silverman in 2002
Ken Silverman (born November 1 1975) is a game programmer, best known for writing the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s. Once considered the primary rival of John Carmack, Ken started work on the Build engine sometime before his first semester at Brown University in 1993, under a contract with Apogee Software. Prior to this, Ken created Ken's Labyrinth, which was later completed and published by Epic Games.

Projects by Ken

Ken's Labyrinth

Main article: Ken's Labyrinth
Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter game coded by Ken. It was originally released in 1993 as shareware by Epic Megagames. The source code to the project can now be found on Ken's website. [1]

Build engine

Main article: Build engine
The Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms from 1993–1996. The engine was used in a number of popular games of the era, and is now open source. [2]

Polymost engine

Main article: Build engine#Polymost
When the Duke 3D source code was released, Ken decided to update the Build engine to support true 3D rendering with OpenGL.

Voxlap

In 2000, Ken started work on Voxlap, a voxel-driven graphics engine. In addition to the engine, a Voxlap-powered tech demo was produced in cooperation with Tom Dobrowolski. The source code to the engine was released by Ken in 2005,[3] allowing commercial derivatives with permission. [4] Since 2003, development on the engine has been fairly static.

Other projects

Other creations by Silverman include the ZIP file archiver KZIP and the PNG file-size optimizer PNGOUT. In 2006, a GUI-driven version of PNGOUT known as PNGOUTWin [5] was released by Ardfry Imaging, a small company Ken co-founded in 2005.

References

External links

Persondata
NAMESilverman, Ken
ALTERNATIVE NAMESAwesoken
SHORT DESCRIPTIONGame designer
DATE OF BIRTHNovember 1 1975
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
November 1 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events


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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1972 1973 1974 - 1975 - 1976 1977 1978

Year 1975 (MCMLXXV
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A game programmer is a programmer who primarily develops video games or related software (such as game development tools). Game programming has many specialized disciplines; practitioners of any may regard themselves as "game programmers".
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Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like Doom, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites
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Shadow Warrior is a first-person shooter computer game featuring Lo Wang, a master ninja assassin or "Shadow Warrior", developed by 3D Realms and released on May 13, 1997 by GT Interactive.
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Blood is a PC game developed by Monolith Productions and distributed by GT Interactive. Released on 31 May, 1997, it utilized the first Build engine from Ken Silverman to feature voxels.
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John D. Carmack II (born August 20 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991.
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Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like Doom, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites
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Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as the College of Rhode Island, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in New England and the seventh-oldest in the United States. It is a member of the Ivy League.
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3D Realms

Private
Founded 1987
Headquarters Garland, Texas, United States

Key people Scott Miller
George Broussard
Industry Interactive entertainment
Website www.3drealms.com
3D Realms (legal name Apogee Software, Ltd.
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Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter DOS game, released in 1993 by Epic Megagames (now called Epic Games), and was mostly coded by Ken Silverman, who went on to design the Build engine that was used in Apogee Software's Duke Nukem 3D.
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Epic Games

Private
Founded Rockville, Maryland (1991)
Headquarters Cary, North Carolina

Key people Tim Sweeney, Founder/CEO
Mark Rein, Founder/Vice-President
Mike Capps, President
Jay Wilbur, Vice President
Cliff Bleszinski, Lead Designer
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Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter DOS game, released in 1993 by Epic Megagames (now called Epic Games), and was mostly coded by Ken Silverman, who went on to design the Build engine that was used in Apogee Software's Duke Nukem 3D.
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personal computer game (also known as a computer game or simply PC game) is a video game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine.
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Year 1993 (MCMXCIII
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Epic Games

Private
Founded Rockville, Maryland (1991)
Headquarters Cary, North Carolina

Key people Tim Sweeney, Founder/CEO
Mark Rein, Founder/Vice-President
Mike Capps, President
Jay Wilbur, Vice President
Cliff Bleszinski, Lead Designer
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Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like Doom, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
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1990 1991 1992 - 1993 - 1994 1995 1996

Year 1993 (MCMXCIII
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1993 1994 1995 - 1996 - 1997 1998 1999

Year 1996 (MCMXCVI
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Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like Doom, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites
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OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics.
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2000 by topic:
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A game engine is the core software component of a computer video game or other interactive application with real-time graphics. It provides the underlying technologies, simplifies development, and often enables the game to run on multiple platforms such as game consoles and desktop
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2000 2001 2002 - 2003 - 2004 2005 2006

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ZIP

A zip archive icon from the Nuvola icon set.
File extension: .zip
MIME type: application/zip
Uniform Type Identifier: com.pkware.
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PNG may stand for:
  • Papua New Guinea, a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous off-shore islands.
  • Portable Network Graphics, a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression.

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PNGOUT is a freeware optimizer for PNG images and is written by Ken Silverman. The compression is lossless, meaning that the resulting image will have exactly the same appearance as the source image. This program can often get higher compression than other optimizers by 5–10%.
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