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

Hackers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was the best movie of all time.

What about the gPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance of this happening on Android? Someone step up to plate!

Graphics quality

[Mprx]

The graphics are crisp, intense duplicates of the original.

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.

Re:Wasn't that the....

[TJamieson]

"Man, this 486/66 runs Doom so smoothly compared to my 33..."

Yeah, I feel old too.

No FaceBall?

[tepples]

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.)

Carmack Rocks!

[jcr]

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

Re:Carmack Rocks!

[sessamoid]

From the linked article:

I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself.

Carmack is such a bad ass. "You guys are morons. I'll code this myself."

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.

Not only that, but what the dev team estimated would take them at least 2 months, Carmack did in four days.

Re:Sweet

[X0563511]

What's more sweet? Something that pushes the hardware a bit more.

http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html

I think the Wolf3D Redux guy made a big mistake...

[7 digits]

...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...

Re:Enlarging pixel art

[tepples]

John Carmack wrote:

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.

Workaround 1: Use Scale2x instead.
Workaround 2: Do the alpha with Scale2x and the red, green, and blue with hq2x on a copy of the image modified such that each transparent pixel duplicates the non-transparent pixel closest to it.

Re:Sweet

[indi0144]

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?

Re:Wasn't that the....

[imamac]

Personally I loved Bungie's Marathon. Then Bungie got taken over by the devil...

Also available in Cydia for free

[modemboy]

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

Re:aarrrggghhhhh

[cerberusss]

Somewhere there is a developer kicking himself HARD for not checking his sourceforge email account.

This doesn't just happen to Carmack. I've found and logged bugs on SourceForge, then wrote e-mails to developers asking whether they'd consider fixing it for a fee. Never got a reply.