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Carmack to Bring "Graphical Tour de Force" to the iPhone
Apparently developer John Carmack loves his iPhone and is still kicking himself for not having something ready to go at launch time. However, he has announced plans to bring a "graphical tour de force" to Apple's popular device. "But as for which one, the company isn't saying just yet, though given that the recently launched id Mobile division already has Doom RPG and the forthcoming Wolfenstein RPG to its credit, we wouldn't be at all surprised if Carmack will bring Quake or some flavor of Rage to the small screen as well. What's more, he's apparently considering the idea of tackling the MMO market on the iPhone down the line, though he admits that he's being 'conservative' and doesn't 'want to be in a bet-the-company situation' just yet."
Here's the actual Forbes article rather than a link to a website that links to the article.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I don't see FPS being that fun with out a buttons. A RTS / TBS may work good but not MMO / FPS / driving games.
heroes of might and magic type games should work fine.
I gotta say I really like the idea of a game that combines the Star Wars universe with the world's most famous bike race. If they can pull it off, that is, and I have to wonder if the iPhone is really going to be the best target for this... wait...
Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG? Okay, since I can't really imagine what that would look like ("you shoot the pinkie demon with the rocket launcher and hit for 100 damage"?), it does sound somewhat creative. Maybe, I guess. Not nearly as cool as "Tour de Force" though... :(
The enemies of Democracy are
Can you imagine using the iPhone camera to capture the environment that you're in, like a street in NYC, and using that as a real time background for a FPS? It would put something like zombies in the image and real people in the image would be "hostages" that you need to protect or save.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
On a related note, where exactly would you play games on an iPhone? I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it. And if you just end up using it inside, you might as well play games on a PC.
How about a game where you stand in line for hours in front of the Apple store waiting to buy the new iPhone? You can watch your character sit for hours doing nothing in the hot sun looking at his other Apple gadgets. The more time that goes by, the more chance he has of losing his job because he played hooky from work to sit in line all day. When his "hooky" bar gets depleted, he loses his job.
"Oops. You just got fired!"
Play Again?
Health Insurance Quotes
So is a "graphical tour de force" putting on a big turban and cracking stupid fortunetelling jokes about the iPhone on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson? Well, at least it'll get Ed McMahon off the unemployment line for a while.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Children at local high schools use iPhone camera features for photorealistic school murder simulations
The only part that needs to be converted to Objective C is the part that creates and manages the game's viewport. THe existing game logic and models can remain in C or C++ (or Fortran=Fortran+1, or "ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL"), and the user interface would be rewritten from scratch for the iPhone regardless.
Who says an MMO has to be like those that've come before? Why not an RTS/TBS type MMO?
As long as the developers can throw in meaningful persistence (most easily done with RPGs), I don't see any reason that an RTS or TBS wouldn't work as an MMO. Cavedog was doing something along those lines with their boneyard service for TA and the crusades for TA Kingdoms. Unfortunately, internet gameplay was still problematic and cavedog became an unfortunate casualty of bad management.
If you were porting something that's been written in C to Objective-C, you wouldn't need to change much. Only the points where your code absolutely must call objective-C library calls, really.
-mkb
A Graphical Tour de France?
Will Lance Armstrong be in it?
How about Neil Armstrong?
Maybe Stretch Armstrong?
I think the Hulk Should be in it too!
Does my mind wander? Sorry, I thought I was posting on YouTube!
That's Romero you're thinking of, not Carmack.
Quake and Doom were developed on NeXTStep 3.3. On hardware with less computational power than an iPhone.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Uggh, I'd hate to be the guy having to port all of that old C code to Objective C
First of all, Objective-C is a pretty nice language with a lot of good features. It's hardly torture to use it.
But I doubt you'd know much about it, given that you do not realize you can mix C and objective C freely. Only the UI has to be objective C. Even that doesn't really have to have much objective C, just the bits where you make use of the UI frameworks... in a game you'd be doing mostly OpenGL anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Objective C is closer to C than C++ is. Porting the code over wouldn't be that bad.
I read the internet for the articles.
How many buttons do you need? Motion can easily be controlled by tilting & turning the iphone (tilt forward for forward, back for back, rotate clockwise & counterclockwise to do the same for the character, & tilt left or right for strafing). Then make 2 mostly transparent buttons on either side of the iphone screen. Put an extra transparent button in the middle of the top for a menu. I can't think of a racing game that would need more buttons than that; & I think most FPS would be set too. For diablo-esque hotkeys you could even make the bottom 3/8" (10mm) a series of 7 to 8 square buttons. And then you can nest more commands, or toggle between different sets of hotkey definitions for different applications (e.g., lots of little enemies set, or one big honking baddie set, etc.)
Objective-C is C with some extensions. C++ is a language of it's own.
are the tilt sensors that precise in the iPhone? Is it as good as the wii? could we soon have the WiiPhone
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Come on, ya know thats whats coming . . .
Ohh spiteful one tell me who to smote and he shall be smolten!
Objective-C is C with some extensions. C++ is C With a lot of extensions.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Erm, the tilt sensor isn't that precise and controls will be ridiculous to get right. I really fail to see how people consider the iPhone to be a good gaming platform; it'll be good for casual games, but I don't see anything beyond that. Tilting the screen left and right makes it difficult to see the screen. 'Touch' buttons are difficult to find/hit in a game.
Only the low-level parts of the code that interact with the APIs need to be Objective C. Just like you can mix C and C++ together in a single app, Objective C can be mixed as well.
And BTW this is no different from Mac OS X development. A lot of cross-platform apps are C and/or C++ with thin wrappers for interacting with the Cocoa API.
I was quite dissapointed that the article made no mention of that.
With soundtrack provided by Kraftwerk
Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D is available on the iPhone and works pretty damn well!
"lack of quality control is one of the pillars of slashdot"
I forget the term for it, but there is a variation of TBS where you have a certain amount of time to take your turn, and you are rewarded for making your choices more quickly (like rolling higher initiative or something).
Check out Bang Howdy for an example of this
Objective-C is a strict superset of C, any C code will work just fine as part of an Objective-C project.
C++ is not a strict superset of C, although a lot of the incompatable C++ syntax has been added back into C as of late. Even with that there are still a lot of gotchas when switching between C++ and C code.
Honestly I've found Objective-C to be very powerful, intuitive, and easy to use. C++, although powerful, has a lot of tricky syntax and ideas behind it. It's a great language for experts and because it is a statically-typed language it is fairly quick, but I think Objective-C is a much better programming language overall. Oh and even though Objective-C is a dynamically-typed language you can still run it fairly quickly by "freezing" some of the method calls and making them static. This gives you the freedom of choice between the ease of a dynamic language and the speed of a static language.
Apple has also worked it so that you can use C, C++, Objective-C, and several other languages fairly transparently in a single project.
Sapere aude!
Why keep wasting time on mobile telephones when Id Software could be pushing the Wii to its limits instead?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Yes, the tilt sensors are very precise, but you do get some random noise that you have to account for in your software. Current tilt-based games such as Labyrinth (marble table game) and Super Monkey Ball are very playable, and the motion detection is incredibly sensitive and quite realistic. An anonymous EA developer actually commented on the iPhone's accelerometer's characteristics as an input device in this story, where it is compared with the Wii remote minus the Motion Plus additions.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Actually I could see a driving game working if it takes advantage of the accelerometer... tilt left / right to steer, forward/back to accelerate / brake.
Don't forget Objective-C++. All the best masochists use it.
Probably because iPhone games are an 'untapped market' to date, and the first person to make a really good one will sell a million units courtesy of the precreated marketing channel and DRM which hinders piracy.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
So we can expect another tech demo from Carmack and not a game?
It will be good to see Quake finally running on a mobile device. Maybe someday they'll even have a go with Quake 2.
Better known as 318230.
I think im the only one to point out that with a jailbroken iphone 3g or 1st gen with 2.0 firmware the installer cedega has a quake package to download, its pretty cool. the controls are a little difficult mainly cause it doesnt support more than one touch at the same time atm but its pretty fun and runs at full speed. has a similar one on my old ppc device, they even had quake 2 and 3 for pocketpc, 2 was too slow to play though and 3 was a slideslow but still, thats pretty cool. you could also play multiplayer online over a cellular conneciton too, that rocked.
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
A FPS could work quite well on the iPhone, especially if they look at how the Wii Metroid did it. In Metroid you aimed with the pointer and the more you moved the pointer from the middle of the screen the faster it turned in that direction.
You could do the exact same thing with the iPhone, always play with your finger touching the screen, and as you move your finger from the center look in that direction.
If you constrained an iPhone FPS to only allow horizontal camera panning then moving your finger up and down the screen could move you forward and backwards, and movement to the left and right would turn you. Tapping anywhere would shoot (either always in the center of the screen, or the exact point that you tapped).
Alternatively if you use the multitouch you could remove the vertical constraint and look by stroking in any direction and move by stroking with two fingers.
Another option if you don't want to be always touching the screen is to allow you to flick the viewpoint around (sort of like flicking through photos). A stroke to the left (from anywhere on the screen) turns you left, a faster stroke turns faster, and flicking turns really quickly... Continuous turning either by multiple strokes, or have the initial speed of the stroke set the turn speed and if you hold your finger at the end point continue to turn or move at that speed until you release.
I really think there are a lot of options for rather precise control and I think a most game genres could work on the iPhone; determining which control scheme works the best will just require a few demos and some testing.
I guess you didn't know that Doom was originally written on NeXTstep? Or that the original level editor was a NeXTstep .app?
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Development_of_Doom
And it's trivial to call pretty much any sort of code from Obj-C anyway.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Why? Carmack wrote his first games for machines that had much less power than an iPhone. I think it'd actually be really fun to make a game that's really complex and pushing the limits of the hardware, even/especially if the hardware is really constrained; one would have to do clever tricks instead of brute-forcing the solution ("Oh by the time I release this, the GeForce 1 hojillion will be out and everyone will have 128 cores at 10 GHz each, and I can actually do this!")
I don't see FPS being that fun with out a buttons. A RTS / TBS may work good but not MMO / FPS / driving games.
heroes of might and magic type games should work fine.
They put touch sensitive virtual buttons at some spot on the screen. It works for me.