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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.'"
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
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.... ;)
Your second link is bad, simple 'shopped promo material. This is how Doom3 graphics actually look like: http://i31.tinypic.com/28b4d3q.jpg
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.
He has a point as well though. Because of the popularity of the platform, there's been a huge deluge of 'crapware', much like with the Wii. You've got to check reviews, as there is an abundance of ... less than spectacular games. The lack of buttons is a limiting factor as well, although the touch screen does add capabilities as well. Personally, I think it would be a better gaming platform if it had a couple of hardware buttons. They'd be damn handy in many other situations as well.
My point was that if you say anything remotely bad, you are likely to get modded down. Check around on some other stories and I think you'll find it to be true.
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.
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.