dukenukem3d VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

A while ago most people thought QuakeWorld was the first game to do client-side prediction. Carmack has a .plan from 1996 talking about it so there's a clear reference.

But one day I went to the wiki page for client-side prediction and it said Duke Nukem 3D was first which I thought was curious, so I checked the reference on it and it was a recent interview with Ken Silverman - creator of the Build engine that DN3D ran on - which clearly stated DN3D was first:

> "People may point out that Quake’s networking code was better due to its drop-in networking support, [but] it did not support client side prediction in the beginning,” he explains. “That’s something I had come up with first and implemented in the January 1996 release of Duke 3D shareware."

Pretty unfair for Ken, I thought, that everyone’s got the wrong idea that it’s QuakeWorld. Since the source is available, with the help of Hacker News we even found the code for it in game.c[0].

To be a good citizen I went back over to the Wikipedia page and added a link to the source code to help solidify the claim. But while I was there I went back and read the interview again, and noticed a part I’d skimmed the first time:

> "It kind of pisses me off that the Wikipedia page article on ‘client side prediction’ gives credit to Quakeworld due to a lack of credible citations about Duke 3D."

I wondered if and when it had been changed from saying Duke 3D to QuakeWorld in the past (before eventually being changed back again sometime after the interview), so I went and had a look through the page history. It had been changed a few years ago. And the person who had removed it due to lack of any citations... was me.

[0] https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef...

Duke Nukem 3D had BUILD.C (6500 lines), ENGINE.C (8800 lines), and GAME.C (6000 lines).

I second the Quake games as well. Despite their age, the OG releases are still pretty timeless (especially compared to some of their contemporaries). You can read more about them on Fabien Sanglard's blog. He's done code reviews of Quake 1-3, Doom 1-3, Duke3D, and more.

It might be useful to maybe look at the Vulkan.hpp examples since you can do the same in about 200 lines of code. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp/blob/main/samples/15_DrawCube/15_DrawCube.cpp

Wow that library looks amazing, I'll definitely be using it. Bonus that it's official from the Khronos Group. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp

Even auto-generated c++ wrappers like vulkan-hpp require lots of manual maintenance.

Ultimately I went with vulkan.hpp RAII bindings, even though that way also has some learning curve and I couldn't find any documentation other than the RAII programming guide. It's great for getting started, but could use a complementary auto-generated API doc. There are also decent programming samples, which really suck for getting started, but otherwise do a good job of presenting concepts they focus on. Putting the available resources together I was able to get a project going in two weekends.

This is exactly how the official Vulkan C++ API, Vulkan-Hpp does it. For the precise example mentioned in the blog post:

Or the vulkan.hpp RAII samples would be a good place?

For a real-life example: consider the vk::raii namespace of Vulkan-Hpp, where the developers have posted examples. The vk::raii::su namespace has a bunch of free functions that one might think are associated with a Vulkan instance/object (in fact, the Vulkan Tutorial does implement them as member functions), but they are much nicer when used as pure functions. It keeps the class/struct definition itself nice and clean.

final c++17 draft (N4659) first post-publication draft after c++20 (N4868) vulkan-structs.hpp (containing the vk::ImageCreateInfo definition) VkImageCreateInfo struct