Ken Silverman

Ken Silverman (born November 1, 1975) is an American 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 (later succeeded by Tim Sweeney), Silverman started work on the Build engine sometime before his first semester at Brown University in 1993, under a contract with Apogee Software. In the wake of Duke Nukem 3D and other Build engine games, Silverman left the commercial game industry.

Ken has been CTO and co-founder of Ardfry Imaging, LLC responsible for the PNG Compression tool PNGOUT. Currently, Ken is founder and Chief Computer Scientist at Voxiebox, makers of the Voxiebox holographic 3D arcade game system.

Projects

Ken's Labyrinth

Ken's Labyrinth is a first-person shooter game coded by Silverman. It was originally released in 1993 as shareware by Epic Megagames. The source code to the project and even older versions can now be found on Silverman's website.

PNGOUT

PNGOUT is a freeware command line optimizer for PNG images written by Ken Silverman. The transformation is lossless, meaning that the resulting image is visually identical to the source image. According to its author, this program can often get higher compression than other optimizers by 5–10%.

PNGOUT is also available as a plug-in for the freeware image viewer IrfanView and can be enabled as an option when saving files. It allows editing of various PNGOUT settings via a dialog box.

In 2006, a commercial version of PNGOUT with a graphical user interface, known as PNGOUTWin, was released by Ardfry Imaging, a small company Silverman co-founded in 2005. There is also a freeware GUI frontend to PNGOUT available, known as PNGGauntlet.

Main operation

The main function of PNGOUT is to reduce the size of image data contained in the IDAT chunk. This chunk is compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm. Deflate algorithms can vary in speed and compression ratio, with higher compression ratios generally implying lower speed. Ken Silverman wrote a DEFLATE compressor for PNGOUT that is slower than the ones used in most graphics software, but produces smaller files. PNGOUT also performs automatic bit depth, color, and palette reduction where appropriate.