Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!

charlietran 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Author's note from the book:

"...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."

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_jackdk_ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's a really cool homage, but that the site could be a little clearer that it's not Fabien's work. When I first clicked through and saw a different name, I was hopeful that someone had started a publishing house dedicated to high-quality dissections of classic games.

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fabiensanglard 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white.

That is a great idea.

	▲	LarsDu88 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Imitation is the greatest form of flattery! I suppose there's still Quake 3 Arena and DOOM3 to complete the full "John Carmack" early 90s to early 2000s technical overview series. Or maybe something with the Sega Saturn. I heard the Sonic X-treme team worked so hard to make a 3d Sonic game for that platform in the mid 90s that multiple team members had to go on medical leave!
	▲	sasas 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How do you feel about this book mirroring your prior art in both format and structure? Were you consulted beforehand? [EDIT] - I see in the Keen book's source git commit logs that you reviewed and assisted with proof reading beforehand, so may we assume that this is all above board and sanctioned by you?

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ndiddy 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow I assumed it was one of his books before I saw your comment. Thanks for pointing that out!

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bel8 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And his site looks like another thousand, as I'm sure he knows.

We consume his site for the content, not for the minimalistic design that exist since the inception of the universe.

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sasas 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It appears the author is leveraging Fabien's branding by copying not only the style of post but more importantly the formatting and style of Fabien's books. Even structurally the book appears quite similar.

If you didn't double check the author while skimming this Keen book, you may well be mistaken that it was written by Fabien.

I took a quick skim of the content, it looks great - tempted to purchase a copy to support the author for their efforts (and have it sit on the bookshelf next to two other very similar looking books...) but need to sit on this for a while.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. Would like to hear Fabien's take on the situation.

[EDIT] It looks that the Keen book author copied and pasted direct sections[1] out of Fabien's book's TeX[2].

[EDIT] The git commit history has comments that indicate that Fabien reviewed the book, e.g. "updated all chapters after feedback Fabien" and "Proofread Fabien Sanglard en hardcopy review", so perhaps this is all sanctioned.

[1] https://github.com/bsmits74/Keen_White_Papers/blob/master/sr...

[2] https://github.com/fabiensanglard/gebbdoom/blob/master/src/b...

	▲	bombcar 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He responds to this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546779