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."

Comments

Re:So when...

[stonedcat]

Wolfenstein doesn't contain the BFG... you're thinking of Doom.

Re:not free if you can't jailbreak

[The Warlock]

The game engine is open-source, but the levels and art assets have always been non-free.

Re:Wasn't that the....

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly I feel old.

Re:Sweet

[HTH NE1]

And also available for the iPod Touch:

It is almost tempting to try to hijack the side volume switch for fire, but the ergonomics aren't quite right, and it would be very un-Apple-like, and wouldn't be available on the iPod touch (plus I couldn't figure out how...).

Re:Wasn't that the....

[Medgur]

Not quite, the wikipedia article is quite thorough on the history

The earliest two documented first person shooters were Maze War and Spasim. Maze War was the most similar to modern first person shooters, as it featured characters fighting on foot. Development of the game began some time in 1973 and was likely completed before Spasim, however its exact date of completion is unknown. Spasim had a documented debut at the University of Illinois in 1974. The game was a rudimentary space flight simulator, which featured a first-person perspective.[5] Spasim led to more detailed combat flight simulators and eventually to a tank simulator, developed for the U.S. army, in the later 1970s. These games were not available to consumers and it was not until 1980 that a tank game, Battlezone, was released in arcades. A version was released in 1983 for home computers, the first successful mass-market game featuring a first person viewpoint and 3D graphics.[27]

Id Software released Hovertank 3D in 1991, which pioneered ray casting technology to enable faster gameplay than 1980s vehicle simulators. Later developers added texture mapping with Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (by Looking Glass Technologies), a role-playing game featuring a first person viewpoint and an advanced graphics engine, released in 1992. During development, this led to Catacomb 3-D which was actually released first, in late 1991, and introduced the display of the protagonist's hand and weapon (magical spells) on the screen.[27]

Re:Sweet

[HTH NE1]

How do you install apps on the touch?

Through the App Store?

Re:I welcome the competition!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, you need a Mac "pro" model to develop. Have fun!

not according to my $300 amd based hackintosh.

why hasnt this been tagged johncisgod yet

[Meshugga]

- which would be the natural thing to do.

i'm seriously losing faith in /. readers history education.

Enlarging pixel art

[tepples]

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.

Re:Enlarging pixel art

[Mprx]

They sometimes work, but when they fail the results are more distracting than nearest neighbor resampling. The "Yoshi" sign in Test Case 2 is a good example, where the algorithm has failed to identify the gradually sloping line and exaggerated the stepped appearance.

Re:Enlarging pixel art

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack mentions how Wolf3Redux used to do that in his notes, but says it didn't work well with the sprites:

Wolf3D Redux included a utility that extracted the variously packed media from the original games and turned them into cleaner files with modern formats. Unfortunately, an attempt at increasing the quality of the original art assets by using hq2x graphics scaling to turn the 64x64 art into better filtered 128x128 arts was causing lots of sprites to have fringes around them due to incorrect handling of alpha borders.

Nonetheless I agree with the OP that the scaling he ended up with looks really crummy. Just plain blocky would have been better.

Re:not free if you can't jailbreak

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I suspected as much but when I checked out the zip, it's actually got all the level data there.

Re:So what?

[onefriedrice]

but unfortunately it seems that Iphonedot, er I mean, Slashdot only covers the Iphone....

Your bitterness is juicy.

However, lest anyone get the impression that this is a first for the iPhone, 3D apps have been available since the store itself was opened (and probably even before that). This article is not so much about the iPhone as it is about id Software and John Carmack, so you see, there's really no need to get all rabid.

aarrrggghhhhh

[Eil]

From Carmack's TFA:

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. I thought about it a bit, and decided that I would go ahead and do the project myself.

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.

Re:Sweet

[Em Ellel]

When theres no Apple Store in your country? (that's like 90% of the globe). Not trolling I really would like to know. Proxy? gift cards? some hack?

JailBreak your phone, then either install apps manually or use one of the number of AppStore alternative Installers (Cydia comes to mind)

-Em

Re:not free if you can't jailbreak

[Anonymous Coward]

John Carmack's post about the release mentions that they are trusting people to purchase on the app store before making use of the game data included in the source download (because there's no way to extract the game data from your app store downloaded copy, which is why they've made it available for download online too).

You're free to use the engine source code minus game content though without buying a copy on the app store.

Re:Wasn't that the....

[cr_nucleus]

What really gets me is how Ultima Underworld never gets the credit it deserves. It shipped before Wolfenstein 3D, and was a better game to boot.

I think you're missing the point.

Wolf 3D was about performance and fast paced action. If i remember correctly, ultima underworld wasn't exactly blazing fast.
I remember playing wolf3D on a 386, and i seriously don't believe ultima underworld would have run correctly on this machine.

Id was never about never done before stuff, it's all about technical achievement that allows action games that acually run fast.

If you want to go the "me first" route, then you should talk about Corporation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_(video_game) ) and Midi Maze ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze ). Corporation had some RPG components as well.

I'm sure there are even more titles i don't know of.