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.

1 Projects
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Projects

[edit] 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]

[edit] 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]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.