id Releases Open Source Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone 232
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."
Hackers. (Score:0, Interesting)
Was the best movie of all time.
What about the gPhone? (Score:1, Interesting)
Any chance of this happening on Android? Someone step up to plate!
Graphics quality (Score:5, Interesting)
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.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Man, this 486/66 runs Doom so smoothly compared to my 33..."
Yeah, I feel old too.
No FaceBall? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite, the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] is quite thorough on the history
But apparently not thorough enough to link to MIDI-Maze or FaceBall [wikipedia.org], one of the first multiplayer deathmatch FPS games. (I have to reply here because Slashdot has less of a "non-notability patrol" than Wikipedia.)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Interesting)
What's more sweet? Something that pushes the hardware a bit more.
http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html [x-plane.com]
I think the Wolf3D Redux guy made a big mistake... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also available in Cydia for free (Score:3, Interesting)
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]
Re:Carmack Rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
From the linked article [idsoftware.com]:
Carmack is such a bad ass. "You guys are morons. I'll code this myself."
Not only that, but what the dev team estimated would take them at least 2 months, Carmack did in four days.
Re:aarrrggghhhhh (Score:3, Interesting)
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.