(not yet) Moddable Game Engine v0.17 - engine for platform games
Copyright (C) 2004 Zoltán Sólyom

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA


About This Archive:
-------------------

This archive was put together by K1n9_Duk3. It contains all the files related
to this project that I still had backed up on one of my external HDDs.

Just to be clear, I had nothing to do with this project when it was in
development. I just downloaded these files (over 18 years ago, according to the
time stamps of these archives) just like anyone else who wanted to take a look
at this pretty impressive demonstration of a "hi-res" Keen fangame.

The alleg40.dll file was not included in the original downloads, but it has to
be present if you want to play the demo. When you extract the files from the
CK-v0.3.zip archive, you need to copy the extracted alleg40.dll file into the
same directory, otherwise you won't be able to start the tech demo.


Contents:
---------

This package consists of three major parts:

* CK-v0.3.zip        -- main "game" (tech demo)  -- 2005-Aug-27
* CK_editor_v0.zip   -- map editor               -- 2005-Jan-06
* CK_2005_dec_24.zip -- source code for the game -- 2005-Dec-24

The first two were bundled together in the CK-v0.3.rar archive.

The source code has obviously been modified after the tech demo executable was
compiled. I have never explored the code in-depth and I have never tried to
compile it myself, so I don't know if the code even compiles in the first place
and how much the code changed between the revision that you can see in action
in the playable tech demo and what's avaiable in the source code archive. All I
can say for certain is that the CKdata.dat file from the source code archive is
incompatible with the compiled game executable.

I also never got to do anything with the map editor. All the game assets are
bundled into the CKdata.dat file and the editor cannot load anything from that
file. I don't remember seeing any source code that would have explained the
layout of that file, either. Judging by the contents of datafile.h, it might be
a standard Allegro group file, but I never worked with Allegro, so I still
don't know how to extract its contents.


Legal Bullshit:
---------------

I decided to leave the original ZIP and RAR archives unmodified, meaning they
should be considered "verbatim copies" as far as the GPL is concerned. The DLL
file hasn't been added to the archive that contains the main "game", just to
avoid creating anything that could be considered "a work based on the Program".

This is important because the source code was released under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, version 2. But the files, as originally released by
the author, are already violating parts of this license. The license document
itself wasn't included in the original download and vital parts of the source
code that are necessary for compiling the code (like the allegro.h file) are
missing.

Another possible complication is that, when you modify the code or use parts of
the code in another project, the ENTIRE source code must be released under the
terms of the GPL, including the source code of the Allegro libraries (unless
you find a way to argue that the Allegro libraries fall under the exception
detailed in Section 3 of the GPL, or you can convince the original author(s) to
allow the code to be used under a different license). I have never worked with
Allegro, so I have no idea if it is GPL-compatible or not.

I have added a copy of the GNU GPL v2 (COPYING.TXT) to this archive. Be sure to
read the entire thing before you do ANYTHING with the source code. If you have
any questions after reading the license, don't ask me, ask a lawyer.


Hacker Info:
------------

The compiled game executable contains the following string:

Borland C++ - Copyright 2002 Borland Corporation

That means the source code must have been compiled with a C++ compiler made by
Borland. But the plain "Borland C++" product line ended with version 5 in 1997,
so I'm not sure what the full product name would have been. Maybe it was
"Borland C++ Builder"?

Knowing which compiler was used might be useful in case the source code uses
some quirks that other C++ compilers don't support.

In addition to the source code, you will also need some Allegro source code
files to get this to compile. Most of the source files depend on a file named
"allegro.h" that isn't included in the source code archive.


The editor appears to have been written in a different programming language.
The Borland C++ string cannot be found in the executable, but there are some
references to Borland Delphi. It doesn't really matter since the source code
for the editor is not included in this package anyway.


That's all. Have fun exploring this.
-- K1n9_Duk3 (2026-09-04)