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Carmack & Mustaine Talk Doom Resurrection For the iPhone
themacgamer writes "Luis Sosa had a chance to sit down with John Carmack and Tom Mustaine of id Software and discuss Doom Resurrection for the iPhone: 'At the start we thought it was just a touch screen, so you'd tap to shoot the monsters, but it was never fun; it felt too clinical. It didn't feel like you were swinging your heavy gun around to bring down the monster before he chews off your head,' said Carmack. Mustaine added, '[The shooting mechanic] was definitely a trial-and-error thing. You said the word "distilled," and that's definitely a word we've been using. We really wanted to distill the visceral Doom experience into the iPhone.' He also said, '... we have P2P co-op play that's not in the shipping version, but will come later. We didn't expect the 3.0 OS out so quickly! Two players join together, they see each other's cursors, and they either compete or co-op for a score. We're hoping to patch it in down the road. We're also looking at additional levels and potentially some stat-tracking stuff as well.'"
And when precious Apple pull it for whatever reason, who has to refund the customer? Eh?
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Sounds awesome, but I just can't imagine this being better than playing with a keyboard and a mouse(optional).
I've tried some of the first person shooter type games for the iPhone and i just can't get into them like I can with a keyboard and mouse. I have the same problem with console games, sure I can play them, but there just isn't the same level of immersion than WASD has for me. I guess it's time for a blanket and rocking chair instead.
The biggest challenge is aiming, if they can do something clever and creative then they will have a real winner. until then simple games like doodlejump and ragdoll blaster seem to be taking my eyeball time.
Sheldon
From the original article:
And so that is the rub: Doom Resurrection lacks free movement. The devs would rather I stayed away from train references, but DR is essentially a rail shooter. (Oh, how our pampered gamer-hearts cringe at the word.) But the thing is, this is a really fucking good rail shooter that creates a sense of tempo and mood that is clearly remiss in other iPhone shooters.
To cram another analogy into this review, imagine watching a good sci-fi horror flick but at the scariest, pee-in-your-pants moment having full control of the character's Big Fucking Gun (yes, it is in the game) and then blasting the crap out of all the monsters on screen. It would be one hell of a satisfying moment, and I am fairly sure you would not be bitching about the lack of free-range movement.
"DRâ(TM)s graphics are nearly Doom 3 quality"
This: DR
Versus: doom3
Yeah right. Almost.
I bought Wolf3D for the iPhone on a whim, expecting it to be your typical iPhone game with stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls, but it really surprised me in how well it played.
I think it's easy to just think of Carmack as a genius programmer but he also really knows how to tune a game to be fun too, from reading Carmack's blog about developing iPhone Wolf3D it's clear he put a lot of thought and effort into streamlining the gameplay. He removed the high score from the game as it was fairly superfluous. He also dropped having a finite number of lives in the game so you can restart a level whenever you want. He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake). Best of all he added an auto-map to help make sense of the maze-like levels (using the old maze solving algorithm of hugging the left wall works well for most levels ;) ).
On top of all that he also wrote a game that maintains a steady frame rate and has very responsive and comfortable controls (which is very unusual in iPhone games). So, with all that in mind, I'm really champing at the bit to get his port of Doom Classic, but it still hasn't been released. I can only assume they're waiting for Doom Resurrection sales to drop off before releasing another Doom game to avoid cannibalising sales. Doom Resurrection is OK, but the tilt controls aren't that great and being on-rails it's missing the fun of being able to explore a level yourself at your own pace.
Apparently Duke Nukem is on the way as well. I hope they do as good a job of porting that as Carmack did with Wolf3D. Now if LucasArts could be persuaded to port Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.... ;)
Any hack can make a gorgeous looking 3D world. id has always led the pack by delivering that experience under real-world hardware constraints.
I downloaded this expecting a ported version of the 1993 Doom. I was pleasantly surprised and very impressed when a fully 3D environment with Doom 3 media loaded up.
NASA does super cool work, but they have billions of dollars and an army of PhD's at their disposal. We like MacGyver because he solves problems with whatever he's given. iPhone developers are given a 412 MHz ARM processor, 128 MB of RAM, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a touch screen.
I think John Carmack and Co. are excited about developing for the iPhone because it's a fresh technical challenge for them. DR is an impressive accomplishment. Given the hardware constraints, and the fact that the game needs to be fun, I'm not sure what I would have done differently.
I know you're trolling, but I'll reply quickly anyway - Google make no promises about what kind of hardware you're going to get with an Android phone, making it impossible to develop these kind of games. There's no guarantee you'll have a touchscreen, a keyboard, hardware buttons, etc. There are also no promises about the CPU/GPU you'll have available, making it even harder. Just read the docs for both platforms and you'll soon see that iPhone OS allows for a great deal more, mainly because you can make certain assumptions about the hardware. Writing a game for Android is like writing a game for the PC, you don't know how much RAM you have, or what your CPU, your GPU, or your input devices are. Writing a game for iPhone is like writing for a console - you know exactly what's on the other end, so you can optimise your code to the nth degree.
that this was news of some sort of new Doom game with a soundtrack by Megadeth. Oh well, a man can dream, can't he!
So develop for a particular type of Android phone that meets the requirements. There are plenty of them about (though we never hear about them on News For Nerds). And you'll know exactly what their spec is.
Btw, different versions of the Iphone have had different amounts of memory, as well as different processors (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone ), so what you say isn't true anyway.
When you publish something to the App Store, you set a target.
If you develop something for the 3G S, it'll only be available to people with a 3G S. Similarly, if you develop for the iPod Touch (which is the baseline reference), it'll be available to all the Cocoa Touch platforms,
I'm sorry, but you're gushing because Wolf3D doesn't suffer from "stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls" on a 400 Mhz device (with hardware FPU) and an OpenGL ES compliant GPU? Wolf3D was released in 1992, and designed to run on a 286! If it wasn't as smooth as silk then either Carmack or Apple would suck immensely. The iPhone can easily handle at least Quake 2 level engines, which is 3 generations more advanced than Wolf3D.
As someone who ported Wolf3D, Quake 1 and Quake 2 to Pocket PC over half a decade ago, I think Carmack is a bit late in entering the mobile arena with his engines. Back then everything was 100% software rendering with no FPU, requiring conversion to fixed point math to have a respectable framerate. I will say that first person shooters are right at home with devices with an actual D-Pad and touchscreen (classic PDA form factor, Nintendo DS). The D-Pad is used for motion (forward / backward and strafing), and the touchpad controls mouse-look. Firing can be an problem, but many of the Pocket PC devices allowed you to push straight in on the D-Pad for "Enter", this providing a perfect integrated fire button.
iPhone has some good capabilities, but it is also severely handicapped in certain areas, which is why Carmack produced light gun shooter, sans light gun, instead of an actual FPS.
Better known as 318230.
id Software:
Technical Mad Skillz: +10
Creativity, originality: what?
I will always pay them homage and due respect for inventing a genre that I loved for many years. I fully believe it's possible that they will be the first ones to figure out how to put the R in VR on home-quality hardware.
But Doom3 finally convinced me they've got NOTHING in the box as far as a single new idea under the sun for the story.
-Styopa
Dave Mustain on the iPhone?
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
You wish.
Keep listening to Lazytown feat Lil' Jon, "It's a peice of cake to bake a pretty cake."
I'm a big fan of Megadeth, but I can't help but wonder what if Mustaine stayed with Metallica.
He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake).
How does it handle secret doors? Ammo is a bigger problem in Wolf3D than in Quake, so you can't just spay the assault gun everywhere.
Secret doors work like normal doors, so accidentally triggering them does happen every so often even without looking for them. That said, I have fond(?!) memories of walking against all the walls hammering my space bar looking for secrets, so I think automatic triggering might just be an improvement.
So far ammo hasn't been too bad, I don't know if that was tweaked or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. Generally, I find myself short on ammo at the start of a new chapter where you get stripped of all your weapons but your ammo reserves soon build up again.
You're right that I shouldn't be too impressed with something as basic as Wolf3D running properly on an iPhone, but have you seen some of the other attempts at 3D games on the iPhone? ;) Some of them have really appalling frame rates and unresponsive controls.
Case in point, according to Carmack when Electronic Arts first ported Wolf3D to the iPhone they were just using the CPU for everything. It wasn't until Carmack took it on that the GPU was utilised. If you're interested Carmack talks about the development process here.
I probably played your Quake ports back in the day, as I used to enjoy putting all the games I could find on my Pocket PC. I remember enjoying Quake on there a lot, although the d-pads on the PDAs I owned were always a bit fiddly! IIRC there was a Casio Pocket PC with a d-pad that would only accept one direction press at a time! This port of Quake 1 on the DS works very well given the hardware it's on, with the stylus/touchscreen being used for aiming and the d-pad being used for movement.
You do realize that Dave Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica before they recorded a single note of Kill 'em All, don't you?
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno