Build Engine

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

The Build Engine was essentially a one-man project for Ken Silverman, though he consulted John Carmack for guidance early in the project. Silverman was hired by 3D Realms on the basis of his demo for Build. Though he continued to refine the engine after becoming employed at 3D Realms, according to Silverman he never teamed with any other 3D Realms employees on the project and was never directed to tailor the engine towards any particular game. On June 20, 2000 (according to his website) Ken Silverman released the Build Engine source code under a proprietary non-commercial license. Silverman explained that after id Software set a precedent by releasing the source code for the Doom engine, fans had been pressuring him to release the source code for the Build Engine. On April 1, 2003, after several years of claims to the contrary, 3D Realms released the source code to Duke Nukem 3D under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. Not long afterwards, both Ryan C. Gordon (icculus) and Jonathon Fowler (JonoF) created and released source ports of the game, including the Build Engine.

In Their Own Story

The room hums with the low thrum of a CRT monitor. Ken Silverman, barely out of his teens, stares at a flickering screen, lines of C code scrolling past. A simple map loads—a box with a pillar. He presses a key, and the pillar rises, revealing a hidden alcove. The engine's sector manipulation works. He grins, knowing this single feature will let players explore skyscrapers, sewers, and alien ships in ways no other engine can—without a single polygon. Outside, the 3D Realms office buzzes with the sound of Duke Nukem's one-liners being recorded. The Build Engine is about to change everything, not by brute force, but by cleverly faking depth on a 2D grid.

Reader's Guide

The Build Engine was developed primarily by Ken Silverman at 3D Realms, with the first commercial release being Duke Nukem 3D in 1996. The engine was licensed to several other studios, including Monolith Productions for Blood and 3D Realms themselves for Shadow Warrior. The engine was praised for its technical achievements, particularly its sector-based geometry and dynamic environments. Sectors can be manipulated in real-time; all of their attributes such as shape, height, and slope could be modified 'on-the-fly' by games, unlike the earlier Doom engine. This allowed games to have destructible environments, such as those seen in Blood. Later versions of Ken Silverman's Build Engine allowed game selected art tiles to be replaced by 3D objects made of voxels. This feature appeared too late to be used in Duke Nukem 3D, but was seen in some of the later Build Engine games. Blood uses voxels for weapon and ammo pickups, power-ups, and eye-candy. Shadow Warrior makes even more advanced use of the technology, with voxels that can be placed on walls (all of the game's switches and buttons are voxels).

Did You Know?

• Ken Silverman consulted John Carmack for guidance early in the Build Engine project.
• The Build Engine was essentially a one-man project for Ken Silverman—he never teamed with any other 3D Realms employees on it.
• On June 20, 2000, Ken Silverman released the Build Engine source code under a proprietary non-commercial license.
• On April 1, 2003, 3D Realms released the source code to Duke Nukem 3D under the GPL-2.0-or-later license.
• Blood uses voxels for weapon and ammo pickups, power-ups, and eye-candy like tombstones and a crystal ball.