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id Releases Open Source Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone

Posted by Soulskill on Wed Mar 25, 2009 04:58 PM
from the ach-mein-leben dept.
First Person Shooters (Games) Portables (Apple) Entertainment Games Hardware
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."
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Submission: Wolfenstein 3D Released by id on iPhone by Anonymous Coward
[+] Classic <em>Doom</em> Coming To the iPhone Next Month 90 comments
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."
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id Releases Open Source Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone 50 Comments More /

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  • So when you shoot that BFG...does your whole iPhone reset....or just melt?

  • That's pretty sweet.

  • a new index (Score:3, Insightful)

    by caffeinemessiah (918089) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @05:05PM (#27335789) Journal
    Plus 5 to the 'nostalgic games' index of computing power that is cheaply available.
  • note that the game costs $4.99 at the app store

  • Apple suckers drooling over decades-old ports (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2009, @05:05PM (#27335801)

    You guys always get shafted waiting for the ports.

  • .... original FPS that started the whole trend?

    • Re:Wasn't that the.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Medgur (172679) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @05:32PM (#27336071) Homepage
      Not quite, the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] 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]

    • Says the guy with the 151149 uid. You should know better!

      • Yeah, I remember worrying if I had the hardware to run Doom when it came out... Get off my Parallax occlusion mapped lawn.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TJamieson (218336)

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

          Yeah, I feel old too.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Zeio (325157)

              There was also a 486 DX 50, a fairly rare part which had a bus speed of 50MHz (not a DX2), and used to "OC" the VESA (VLB) local bus as well. This chip was seen in many EISA systems at the time and needed extra cooling.

              I had a buddy with a 486 DX50, and it was a fast system for the time, It was faster in a lot of ways than a 486DX2/66.

              The best was playing Wing Commander on these systems, it was way too fast :)

  • So what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hatta (162192) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @05:12PM (#27335865) Journal

    Doom already runs on Rockbox. If the iPhone were an open platform, this would have happened a long time ago.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by onefriedrice (1171917)

        but unfortunately it seems that Iphonedot, er I mean, Slashdot only covers the Iphone....

        Your bitterness is juicy.

        However, lest anyone get the impression that this is a first for the iPhone, 3D apps have been available since the store itself was opened (and probably even before that). This article is not so much about the iPhone as it is about id Software and John Carmack, so you see, there's really no need to get all rabid.

  • Graphics quality (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mprx (82435) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @05:40PM (#27336155)

    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.

    • Enlarging pixel art (Score:5, Informative)

      by tepples (727027) <slash2006NO@SPAMpineight.com> on Wednesday March 25 2009, @06:19PM (#27336481) Homepage Journal

      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 [sourceforge.net] 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 [hiend3d.com].

      • Re:Enlarging pixel art (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mprx (82435) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @06:27PM (#27336553)
        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:Enlarging pixel art (Score:4, Interesting)

          by tepples (727027) <slash2006NO@SPAMpineight.com> on Wednesday March 25 2009, @07:02PM (#27336881) Homepage Journal
          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.

  • why hasnt this been tagged johncisgod yet (Score:4, Informative)

    by Meshugga (581651) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @06:14PM (#27336445)

    - which would be the natural thing to do.

    i'm seriously losing faith in /. readers history education.

  • Carmack Rocks! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jcr (53032) <jcr@ma c . c om> on Wednesday March 25 2009, @06:23PM (#27336513) Journal

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sessamoid (165542)

        From the linked article [idsoftware.com]:

        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,

  • Finally... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bieeanda (961632) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @06:23PM (#27336517)
    The iPhone gets a killer app!

  • I think the Wolf3D Redux guy made a big mistake... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 7 digits (986730) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @07:01PM (#27336873)

    ...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...

  • aarrrggghhhhh (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eil (82413) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @08:13PM (#27337459) Homepage Journal

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cerberusss (660701)

      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.

  • Also available in Cydia for free (Score:3, Interesting)

    by modemboy (233342) on Wednesday March 25 2009, @10:30PM (#27338195)

    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 [modmyi.com]

    • Given the shit-poor reception that everyone with an iphone gets here in central florida I'd say they already have that in the form of trying to get a call through clearly.

    • Not sure, but the iPhone v3 SDK is supposed to have API's to make iPhone/iPod Touch to iPhone/iPod Touch connections easier, I can hardly wait for game devs to take that to town and create multilayer games. :)

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