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id Releases Open Source Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone
An anonymous reader writes "id Software has released a port of the classic Wolfenstein FPS to the iPhone. Some of the coding was done by John Carmack himself, who also used original code combined with new code from Wolf3D Redux. The original code was open sourced years ago, and enthusiasts have been updating it, which made the port considerably easier for id. It's available in the iTunes App Store, but the source is available for free at id's website."
Carmack also posted a detailed writeup about the decision to bring Wolf3D to the iPhone, including design notes and a few snippets of code. At the end, he says, "I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone." Kotaku got a chance to try the game at GDC: "It's not just a good reproduction of the original, it seems better."
So when you shoot that BFG...does your whole iPhone reset....or just melt?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Was the best movie of all time.
That's pretty sweet.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
what happens if you accidentally set of the BFG while the phone is in your pocket?
Another great contribution by John Carmack, this time bringing and ol' classic game
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Plus 5 to the 'nostalgic games' index of computing power that is cheaply available.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
note that the game costs $4.99 at the app store
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You guys always get shafted waiting for the ports.
.... original FPS that started the whole trend?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As an iPhone developer, I welcome anybody to look into this and compete with me. I wouldn't mislead anybody! Come from all over the world! Just remember, you need a Mac "pro" model to develop. Have fun!
Not to by any means demote the sheer awesomeness of playing a FPS on your iPhone, but what is next? We are already reliving the classics on handhelds with today's technology for the games of yesteryear. (Well, not all of the classics as this article seems to remind some of us.)
How about playing against other phones on your network? In that case, when does Star Craft come out on the iPhone??
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
Doom already runs on Rockbox. If the iPhone were an open platform, this would have happened a long time ago.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Engine is only 2.5D though.
Your comment is a comment
Any chance of this happening on Android? Someone step up to plate!
But from the screenshot we can see that both the sprites and the textures have been filtered. Filtering the textures is no problem, but the sprites are "pixel art" - they are designed around the pixel boundaries to pack more detail into a limited resolution. It's the same principle as manually hinting fonts. The only acceptable scaling method for pixel art is unfiltered "nearest neighbor" scaling, as used in the original game. This new version is not "crisp", it is an ugly blurred mess.
Doom and Quake already run on windows mobile. big deal
FUCK YEAH!
When's the g-phone version coming out?
Sent from my desktop computer
but the app is $4.99
Not quite, the wikipedia article is quite thorough on the history
But apparently not thorough enough to link to MIDI-Maze or FaceBall, one of the first multiplayer deathmatch FPS games. (I have to reply here because Slashdot has less of a "non-notability patrol" than Wikipedia.)
- which would be the natural thing to do.
i'm seriously losing faith in /. readers history education.
The only acceptable scaling method for pixel art is unfiltered "nearest neighbor" scaling, as used in the original game.
There exist algorithms for enlarging pixel art that overcome both the blocky appearance of nearest-neighbor resampling and the blurry appearance of linear resampling. The Scale2x algorithm, for instance, can be applied multiple times. The hq2x, hq3x, and hq4x can be applied only as the final step, but with amazing results.
John Carmack has a very well-deserved reputation for generosity. A couple of years ago he gave one of his NeXT slabs to a friend of mine on a "free to good home" basis. He not only gave it to her, he paid for the shipping.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The iPhone gets a killer app!
Jeez... I mean, I know he knows that code intimately and all, but it seems like even someone as good as Carmack wouldn't be able to do a project this large, in final and polished form without bugs, in four days like he claims in the article. That's got to at LEAST be discounting things like QA testing, right? ... maybe?
I went to App Store and saw it was $4.99. Went to Cydia and installed it for free. Why would you pay for something that you can legally get for free?
Posting as a coward because I will get flamed about this no doubt, but does there have to be a slashdot article about every single application/game/whatever made available on the iPhone?
I remember playing Doom on a Nokia 4 years ago, have played Wolf3D, Doom and Quake on Windows Mobile some time ago as well. And before that, I even played them all on a computer! Wow!
Just because its now available for the iPhone does not make it news.
Isn't this supposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters" ? Articles like this belong at "fanbois for Apple, stuff that's outdated". Real nerds don't use Apple.
How is it that one man, and indeed, one firm, just keeps giving to the world of gaming? John Carmack is a legend. My childhood would not have been the same without Wolf, Doom and Quake.
I'm sorry about the gushing, it's just that I can never read an article about id or Carmack without feeling a little misty eyed. This dude has been producing quality games for well over 15 years now, and he just keeps giving. All the XBOX 360 developers in the world will never be able to make the kind of initial impact id did to gaming. They are the Olympians of shooting zombies, and rightly so.
...by not forwarding his email to his current address.
"I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things."
He'll probably learn about the missed opportunity by reading slashdot...
I thought the same thing. If he's still a developer, he really missed a huge opportunity. On the other hand, he can still say that some of his work was used in a commercial game for the iPhone, selected by Carmack himself, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to put on your resume.
Oh Shi....
*goes to kill self*
Wow, that is quite unfortunate!
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
the only examples you ever show to anyone are the ones that work well...
Have you any 8-bit or 16-bit games whose graphics make these pixel art enlargement algorithms into miserable failures?
From Carmack's TFA:
Can you imagine doing a simple port of a trivial (but classic) game that nearly everyone has forgotten about and then missing that one email from John Effing Carmack himself saying, "hey, want to work with me on this?"
Somewhere there is a developer kicking himself HARD for not checking his sourceforge email account.
FTA: Bad: Frame rate is less than ideal
WTF? My old DOS 386 ran this great back in 1992! I thought Apple made the iPhone, not Fischer-Price.
Fuck you and your resumes. Ladder climber.
Who modded that "offtopic"? Someone correct this! :-)
FWIW, Quake has run fine on the iPhone for some time now.
(the jailbreak'd ones, at least - the only ones really worth having)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As always, Thank you Mr Carmack! It's always nice when developers let you look at their code; there's always a bunch of stuff to learn. hacking around on the q3a source taught me so much more about c programming than I got from a software engineering degree
TIAEAE!
The shareware version is also available via Cydia for people with jailbroken phones.
Exact same code, it just only has the first mission instead of all six, but no cost...
Details: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/iphone-news/542821-wolfenstein-3d-5-app-store-0-cydia-exact-same-game-legal.html
Any word on delivering this to the Android phones?
Does 5.99$ in Aus./sigh
but must have game now!
How hard would it have been to rotate the screen shots 90 degrees? Why in the heck have they posted photos that are sidways from the direction it's played? Was the author really just that lazy?
What we really need is Wolfenstein for the Nokia Nxx series, Freerunner, and other GNU/Linux devices. I was disappointed to find the Nokia Nxxx had Doom and not Wolfenstein. Everybody knows Wolfensteign is the better of the two games! :) Now who wants to port it to the Nxxx so I can play it?
This would be a good time to spread the word of one of my favorite open source game projects, Voxelstein 3D:
http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net/
It's still only at v0.1, it only has one level and it is a bit buggy in places. But the fact that due to being build from voxels, EVERYTHING is destructible (even more than in Red Faction) sort of makes up for it. It's a really fun take on the Wolfenstein ideas, and I would love for it to be build into a full 10+ level game.
Blowing down walls with C4 never gets old :-)
Eat the rich.
How is this news??
Wolfenstein 3D? Really? This is what iPhone owners get hot over?
S60 3rd edition devices have had Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, AND Quake 3 (with multiplayer and bluetooth mouse support) for a Looooong time now and you don't see that making the front page of Slashdot.
Is the entire United States still in some iPhone induced mass hallucination that this phone is still relevant, let alone cutting edge?
How is this news?? Wolfenstein 3D? Really? This is what iPhone owners get hot over? S60 3rd edition devices have had Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, AND Quake 3 (with multiplayer and bluetooth mouse support) for a Looooong time now and you don't see that making the front page of Slashdot. Is the entire United States still in some iPhone induced mass hallucination that this phone is still relevant, let alone cutting edge?
".. the input processing, and the process scheduling meant that doing a locked-at-60-hz game on the iPhone wasn't really possible"
Surely, he doesn't expect 60 fps from a mobile platform? Apple recommend to throttle fps at 30 to conserve battery power
Last I checked, ZSNES filtered its whole framebuffer instead of filtering the sprites independently then compositing them onto the background.
That's because sprites on the NES, TurboGrafx-16, and Super NES are made of multiple individual texture tiles placed side-by-side, usually 8x8, 8x16, or 16x16 pixels in size, because of limitations in what a display list (OAM) entry could specify. Scaling each of those individually might cause artifacts at the seams. Worse, several NES games such as the title screen of Contra and the entire Mega Man series would overlay two textures to increase the number of colors available in a sprite from 3 to 5 or 6; that would result in particularly nasty artifacts at the seams. Games that use a 3D engine or a pseudo-3D engine, on the other hand, usually don't split textures into tiles before rendering them.
Do these filters even support alpha channel?
Like the 8- and 16-bit consoles, the pseudo-3D engines of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom follow the same alpha model as GIF and indexed PNG: color 0 is 0% opaque and the rest are 100% opaque. Scale2x supports this model just fine because it deals with individual pixel values, not RGB values like 2xSaI and hq2x.
To properly scale pixel art is "AI complete", as it involves figuring out what the original artist was trying to do and then redrawing the graphics at higher resolution but in the same style.
Capcom hired artists to do just this for its HDTV rereleases of Street Fighter II and Puzzle Fighter II. I'd bet the artists used a tool analogous to Scale2x to provide a cleaner starting point.
I'd rather tolerate consistent blockiness than inconsistent scaler artifacts.
I'd guess that your opinion is in the minority.
Apparently.
C'mon the linked article is a complete joke! "The best FPS on iPhone!?! C'mon Quake 3 can run on the iPhone: so please stop with this rubbish.
Also 4.95$ for this is a scam!
Not really.
Peter