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....

[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: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: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.

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