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Classic Doom Coming To the iPhone Next Month
Two months after releasing an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D, id's John Carmack brings an update to the similar effort underway to bring classic Doom to the iPhone as well. He provides some detailed information on the development process, and says they're aiming for a release some time next month.
"One of the things I love about open sourcing the old games is that Doom has been ported to practically everything with a 32 bit processor, from toasters to supercomputers. We hear from a lot of companies that have moved the old games onto various set top boxes and PDAs, and want licenses to sell them. We generally come to some terms in the five figure range for obscure platforms, but it is always with a bit of a sigh. The game runs, and the demo playbacks look good, but there is a distinct lack of actually caring about the game play itself. Making Doom run on a new platform is only a couple days of work. Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort."
The original Doom has already been ported to Android, Android beats I-phone again!
Now that makes me think of buying an iPhone
... thanks to http://www.rockbox.org/
What's the big deal. People should be happy that they can play a 15 year old game on a touch screen. Plus isn't playing on a touch screen going to get really annoying. I mean imagine this, you've got one thumb in the forward "button" and another hovering above the shoot button. You have move your thumb vertically down too shoot. Now on a real game pad, you just lean your thumb on the pad, you don't have to hover over it.
I bought Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone, and I found it utterly boring. Yes, that's right -- I'd never played it before. (Oddly enough, I remember the original Castle Wolfenstein a bit fondly from childhood.) I would have asked for my money back, if not for it being open source and Carmack writing that interesting letter about the process leading up to bringing it to the iPhone. As an iPhone developer, it seemed a nice enough gesture on his part that I'd return it with a nice gesture. That said, I can't see myself buying Doom.
Oddly enough, I've only bought three apps for my iPhone despite having $30 in gift certificates and being an iPhone developer myself. My other two purchases are Leaf Trombone, which is a music-playing game that sounds bad (I've played trombone and that, sir, is no trombone) and therefore disinterests me; and Eliss, which is actually a pretty fun and creative vector graphics multi-touch style game. Eliss gets a little frustrating in its difficulty, but the levels are actually solvable and it's a really good use of multi-touch -- eventually you end up with four fingers dancing around, trying to get past each other.
I'd like to see really talented people like Carmack put more effort into using the different gameplay aspects of newer devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch. I remember him mentioning the limited precision of the accelerometer for movement in Wolfenstein, but if he had a go at a different style game I'm sure he could come up with some cool ways to use the hardware. I suppose it's naÃve to hope for someone to step outside of the tired FPS model when it's still ridiculously lucrative, but hope is a low-effort use of time and I don't mind.
I have a personal interest in toasters, I would like to know which toasters in particular you can play doom with? ps. I'm serious. pps. I might be getting the wrong end of the stick.
It was first ported way back in the days of the 1.x iPhone OS. The control scheme sucked, which is what I guess these guys are working on. One way or another, this isn't news.
It's a game for an Apple platform.
They don't get to see many of those. So, every little bit counts.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If someone ported Redneck Rampage I might be tempted to buy an iPhone...
Making Doom run on a new platform is only a couple days of work
And who said that you needed fancy managed stuff to be cross platform. C++ is the ultimate cross-platform language.
The best part about FPS on phones is that now I can play them while driving my SUV in the fast lane. Outta my way, I'm excited!
... that would be a little more entertaining. (at least MAME with better performance handling)
Sorry but Doom is not that cool. Quake is in fact much much cooler and goes to prove that Maddox is right about the iPhone vs. the Nokia E-series. Oh it legally unlocked, it multitaskes, and it will be OSS soon.
Doom has been on Cydia for quite awhile as shareware and will unlock as retail if you transfer the .wad files from your PC.
It currently requires firmware 2.x so maybe it's different from what you are mentioning.
Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort."
This is of course, retarded.
Keyboard? Mouse? The Android port of Doom not only runs great w/sound, but *doesn't* require a keyboard (although it works with the G1 phone's keyboard and mouseball as well). It's very playable w/o using the keyboard at all. Incidentally, there are currently TWO ports for Android.
Excess of processing power?
The HTC G1 (Android) has a Qualcomm® MSM7201A, 528 MHz which is underclocked to 384mhz.
The iPhone has an ARM 1176JZF, 620MHz which is underclocked to 412mhz.
So the iphone, not the G1 is faster.
Incidentally, rooted Android users can return the clock speed to native with Open Overclocker or overclockwidget.
This is of course, retarded.
To be clear-- I wasn't implying Carmack is retarded- only the GP suggesting the Android port is not an "honest development effort".
Yeah, "these guys" just happens to be the guy who actually wrote Doom in the first place. What's he know? Sheesh!
How about enhancing the game engine with polygon graphics like http://www.doomsdayhq.com/ ...? I read the iPhone port has audio improvements. Can we get those for the original computer/PC port?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Honestly don't play mp3's for ringtones; they get cut off anyway: vocals, music from a tiny speaker that's meant for ringtones, all of it. THe midi sound is suited for it. Which short clip from which map would you go for :) (I still have them just for reminiscing)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The one thing nobody has noted yet is that this is not really a port.
Doom was originally developed on NextStep, which is the OS that was used as the basis for Mac OS X when jobs came back to Apple in the late 90's. The iPhone runs OS X!
As a result, the DOS version and every other version of Doom are ports. The iPhone version is essentially on its native, original platform, probably utilizing the original code with some tweaks for the touch controls, etc.
I already have doom for my iphone. jailbreak! It's rater annoying and not wort playing. Actually I used have a linux on my ipod photo, and the controls for doom where way easier on that
Since iPhone has naive support for OpenGL, and Quake is written in C++ with a 32bit memory model far more compatible that DOOM with iPhone, wouldn't it make more sense to port Quake first, Mr. Carmack?
I guess it would be, since Doom wasn't even a really good game on a platform that did have a keyboard and mouse and an excess of processing power. Most overrated title in the history of gaming, a far greater example of "style over substance" than any more modern pixelshader-fests.
When will be ported Quake 4 on iPhone ?!?
JMule user : http://www.jmule.org