Carmack to Bring "Graphical Tour de Force" to the iPhone 105
Apparently developer John Carmack loves his iPhone and is still kicking himself for not having something ready to go at launch time. However, he has announced plans to bring a "graphical tour de force" to Apple's popular device. "But as for which one, the company isn't saying just yet, though given that the recently launched id Mobile division already has Doom RPG and the forthcoming Wolfenstein RPG to its credit, we wouldn't be at all surprised if Carmack will bring Quake or some flavor of Rage to the small screen as well. What's more, he's apparently considering the idea of tackling the MMO market on the iPhone down the line, though he admits that he's being 'conservative' and doesn't 'want to be in a bet-the-company situation' just yet."
Link to actual article.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link to actual article.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link to actual article.. (Score:5, Funny)
Here is a Wikipedia article about the joule:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule [wikipedia.org]
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Here's a the Google cache of the print version of the article: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=clnk&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2F64.233.169.104%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3AALncnayT_Y8J%3Awww.forbes.com%2Ftechnology%2F2008%2F07%2F24%2Fdoom-iphone-morris-tech-personal-cx_cm_0725doom.html%2Bhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Ftechnology%2F2008%2F07%2F24%2Fdoom-iphone-morris-tech-personal-cx_cm_0725doom.html%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26cd%3D1%26gl%3Dus%26client%3Dfirefox-a&ei=lq6PSPq8I5bSee79sbIH&usg=AFQjCNGJOL [google.com]
I don't see FPS being that fun with out a buttons (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see FPS being that fun with out a buttons. A RTS / TBS may work good but not MMO / FPS / driving games.
heroes of might and magic type games should work fine.
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As long as the developers can throw in meaningful persistence (most easily done with RPGs), I don't see any reason that an RTS or TBS wouldn't work as an MMO. Cavedog was doing something along those lines with their boneyard service for TA and the crusades for TA Kingdoms. Unfortunately, internet gameplay was still problematic and cavedog became an unfortunate casualty of bad management.
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I forget the term for it, but there is a variation of TBS where you have a certain amount of time to take your turn, and you are rewarded for making your choices more quickly (like rolling higher initiative or something).
Check out Bang Howdy for an example of this
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are the tilt sensors that precise in the iPhone? Is it as good as the wii? could we soon have the WiiPhone
Re:I don't see FPS being that fun with out a butto (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the tilt sensors are very precise, but you do get some random noise that you have to account for in your software. Current tilt-based games such as Labyrinth (marble table game) and Super Monkey Ball are very playable, and the motion detection is incredibly sensitive and quite realistic. An anonymous EA developer actually commented on the iPhone's accelerometer's characteristics as an input device in this story [gizmodo.com], where it is compared with the Wii remote minus the Motion Plus additions.
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Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D is available on the iPhone and works pretty damn well!
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Why? Carmack wrote his first games for machines that had much less power than an iPhone. I think it'd actually be really fun to make a game that's really complex and pushing the limits of the hardware, even/especially if the hardware is really constrained; one would have to do clever tricks instead of brute-forcing the solution ("Oh by the time I release this, the GeForce 1 hojillion will be out and everyone will have 128 cores at 10 GHz each, and I can actually do this!")
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A FPS could work quite well on the iPhone, especially if they look at how the Wii Metroid did it. In Metroid you aimed with the pointer and the more you moved the pointer from the middle of the screen the faster it turned in that direction.
You could do the exact same thing with the iPhone, always play with your finger touching the screen, and as you move your finger from the center look in that direction.
If you constrained an iPhone FPS to only allow horizontal camera panning then moving your finger up and
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I don't see FPS being that fun with out a buttons. A RTS / TBS may work good but not MMO / FPS / driving games.
heroes of might and magic type games should work fine.
They put touch sensitive virtual buttons at some spot on the screen. It works for me.
Finally a creative game from iD (Score:5, Funny)
I gotta say I really like the idea of a game that combines the Star Wars universe with the world's most famous bike race. If they can pull it off, that is, and I have to wonder if the iPhone is really going to be the best target for this... wait...
Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG? Okay, since I can't really imagine what that would look like ("you shoot the pinkie demon with the rocket launcher and hit for 100 damage"?), it does sound somewhat creative. Maybe, I guess. Not nearly as cool as "Tour de Force" though... :(
Re:Finally a creative game from iD (Score:4, Informative)
What I'd like to see. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What I'd like to see. (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a game like that for my Treo 650 called Arcade Reality. It was a FPS (First-Person Space) game, like Star Raiders (god, I just dated myself, didn't I) that used the camera as a) a backdrop for the ships flying at you that you needed to shoot and b) to determine what direction you were moving in, since the phone didn't have one of those new-fangled accelerometers which are all the rage with you kids these days. Nifty bit of coding, that camera-used-to-sense-motion bit.
Fun game, too. Got me some funny looks tho.
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It's not like anyone else would!
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I can see the headlines now... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I can see the headlines now... (Score:4, Funny)
School shootings are so last week. Didn't you get the memo, this week it's church shootings.
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You'd be arrested under the PATRIOT Act.
Best quote ever? (Score:2)
On a related note, where exactly would you play games on an iPhone? I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it. And if you just end up using it inside, you might as well play games on a PC.
Re:Best quote ever? (Score:1)
Re:Best quote ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Is it just me, or did you just divide the entire Earth into two categories:
1. Places where you're likely to get robbed, and
2. in front of your PC?
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On a related note, where exactly would you play games on an iPhone? I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it. And if you just end up using it inside, you might as well play games on a PC.
Is it just me, or did you just divide the entire Earth into two categories:
1. Places where you're likely to get robbed, and
2. in front of your PC?
I'm still wondering about what kind of tea leaf jacks your iPhone.
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You know, tea leaves - as in the tea leaves that are likely to get bagged.
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tea bagged?
That's what he's really afraid of happening while he's playing a FPS in public.
Re:Best quote ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn you once again, Earl Grey.
Re:Best quote ever? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it.
Haven't ridden a New York City subway lately? Like in, say, the last 5 years? Earbuds everywhere. And quite a few video iPods, iPod Touches, and iPhones with movies too.
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I know it's an insular place, and it's hard to keep a good handle on just how much of the world is outside it. But try to remember, please, that 99.9 % of people do not live in New York City.
Really. 99.9 % of people. Check my math if you care to.
iPhone Job Loss (Score:5, Funny)
How about a game where you stand in line for hours in front of the Apple store waiting to buy the new iPhone? You can watch your character sit for hours doing nothing in the hot sun looking at his other Apple gadgets. The more time that goes by, the more chance he has of losing his job because he played hooky from work to sit in line all day. When his "hooky" bar gets depleted, he loses his job.
"Oops. You just got fired!"
Play Again?
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Hey, that's a dirty lie.
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Yeah, $199 sure is a lot of money. Or maybe you should consider a getting a job that doesn't involve wearing a paper hat and asking people if they want fries.
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Yea...it's only $199.
Even if that were true, it is still a lot of money to replace a phone that already works.
Of course, I don't have a mobile phone. You have to be really important to pull that one off these days.
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They love their jobs, the prey to steve every day.
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In Soviet Russia, everyone knows Jobs has the iPhone Users. Oh wait...
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Well, you've got to get Common Sense running under Classic first before they do the port to OS X...
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In Objective C?? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Uggh, I'd hate to be the guy having to port all of that old C code to Objective C. That's cruel and unusual punishment if you ask me, regardless of how much money you get paid for it.
Re:In Objective C?? (Score:5, Informative)
The only part that needs to be converted to Objective C is the part that creates and manages the game's viewport. THe existing game logic and models can remain in C or C++ (or Fortran=Fortran+1, or "ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL"), and the user interface would be rewritten from scratch for the iPhone regardless.
Re:In Objective C?? (Score:4, Informative)
If you were porting something that's been written in C to Objective-C, you wouldn't need to change much. Only the points where your code absolutely must call objective-C library calls, really.
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You can't know much objective C (Score:5, Informative)
Uggh, I'd hate to be the guy having to port all of that old C code to Objective C
First of all, Objective-C is a pretty nice language with a lot of good features. It's hardly torture to use it.
But I doubt you'd know much about it, given that you do not realize you can mix C and objective C freely. Only the UI has to be objective C. Even that doesn't really have to have much objective C, just the bits where you make use of the UI frameworks... in a game you'd be doing mostly OpenGL anyway.
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I've looked at some of the old Quake code and saw a fair amount of assembly in addition to ancient C code that I'm sure would need to be modified to work on an iphone.
I seriously doubt you could just compile that old code without some fairly significant modifications to make it work correctly.
If you think it would be easy, try looking at some of the code they've open-sourced and try giving it a shot.
Re:You can't know much objective C (Score:4, Insightful)
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Further proof that this is possible: it's already ported [appleiphoneapps.com]. Jailbroken iPhone/iPod required though.
It's impressive to see it run that fast (30+ fps) on a phone, but quite honestly I find it unplayable due to the controls. Still, it's very cool :)
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Quake's already on the iPhone.
http://www.zodttd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2793 [zodttd.com]
It runs great!
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I don't know about you, but as a one-time C programmer, 12 year Java programmer, I HATE Objective C. The syntax is all fucked up, it has a whole lot of really weird design decisions that seem to be made simply to provide a workaround to some problem, and I find the documentation for the SDK lacking. Yes, there is a lot of it, but I've tried to use it, and it's been a complete pain in the ass.
For an example of a design "feature" of Objective C, you can extend/override a class. Any class. A class you don'
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I found writing some simple iPhone apps absolutely trivial. Of course, I used these new fangled thing-a-ma-jigs called them there tutorials and such. Yeah - I know. Crazy talk.
Re:You can't know much objective C (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about you, but as a one-time C programmer, 12 year Java programmer, I HATE Objective C.
I was a Java developer for about that long (or perhaps longer, I was doing some Java back around 1.0), and prior to that also had a lot of C and C++ and Lisp (mostly elisp) along with Scheme. The iPhone SDK is the first time I've done anything serious with Objective C, and I really like it.
For an example of a design "feature" of Objective C, you can extend/override a class. Any class. A class you don't even have source code access to. A class you don't even have package access to - it happens dynamically. Scary, important classes such as the base class. And you don't even do it IN the class, just another random file somewhere. Before anyone says that's useful, that rather destroys the whole concept of encapsulation.
This in NO WAY breaks the concept of encapsulation. It only enhances it. By being able to wrap ANY class in code of your own choosing, or adorn a class with new methods - you provide a powerful new range of composition abilities you don't easily have in Java (though you can do something similar with reflection trickery and interfaces).
It's also what allows for private method definitions that cannot be seen through your header file.
Yes it's dynamic. All of Objective-C is dynamic to the hilt, and that means there's a lot of stuff the compiler will not warn you about. But that can be OK, because the tradeoff is extreme flexibility and that is useful too. It means you can express some ideas in fewer lines of code and the less code there is the less room for error.
I'm sure the rest is that I don't like XCode either, but reading through the docs and writing some simple iPhone apps has been painful mostly because of the language and the lack of documentation (it really lacks a "here are all the tools you'll need to use to make an iPhone app", eg I completely found the UI editor by chance)
To me that says you are not reading the right documentation. I have found the documentation fairly extensive, and at least one of the introductory iPhone programming tutorials on the iPhone developer website builds a Hello World from scratch using Interface Builder. That aspect is well explained in at least a few documents, you have not read enough if you did not know about IB apart from accidentally launching it.
I would read ALL introductory material on iPhone development on the iPhone dev center, including the UI guide. You need those as a grounding. Skimming some books on Cocoa to understand the Foundation classes (which the iPhone also uses) is a very good idea to know of the capabilities of things like NSString or NSDateFormatter.
And if you use properties for a lot of stuff, even the syntax will not be so unfamiliar...
Also I would look around for introductory material on XCode. Try watching some of these videos [cocoaheads.org], especially the XCode ones (in fact probably only those). If possible, try to find an iPhone Dev Camp [iphonedevcamp.org] near you and attend (it's this weekend, there are seven satellite locations). There are also a number of books on using XCode, one of those might be good to go through.
Lastly I recommend totally understanding the retain/release model, and coming up with a set of procedures that you always follow. In my case for any class local variable, I always make a property for it and mark it as "retain". Then I always use that to set the value, even inside the class - that way I know dealloc can clean it up, and I'll never forget to call retain when I need to. There are times when you'll need to release an object as a result but it's better to leak a little memory than to have unstable references lingering in code - the performance tools can track down leaks pretty well. Just be consistent in your approach and you will not make many mistakes.
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To me that says you are not reading the right documentation. I have found the documentation fairly extensive, and at least one of the introductory iPhone programming tutorials on the iPhone developer website builds a Hello World from scratch using Interface Builder. That aspect is well explained in at least a few documents, you have not read enough if you did not know about IB apart from accidentally launching it.
I started on the iPhone SDK pretty early on, and didn't find any such tutorials. There was sample code (I learned what I knew by dissecting that), there were a bunch of videos essentially glorifying the sdk but not providing any real demos - called the "iPhone Getting Started" videos, and nothing that actually demonstrated what all the tools were and how they worked to build soemthing from the ground up.
Like I said, I only found the IB as I was trying to work out what the other files in the Hello World dir
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Like I said, I only found the IB as I was trying to work out what the other files in the Hello World directory were, and how I could affect layout and such with them. Nothing before then showed me even the concept of using the IB for laying out UI elements (and as someone new to Cocoa, I didn't know what the environment was).
The main document I was thinking of that mentions IB is "Creating iPhone Apps" [apple.com]
There's less in that than I remembered on using Interface Builder - but basically any book or article that
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Unfortunately, no one can publish any good iPhone development books or resources because of the NDA Apple has in place for the SDK, compounding the problem you bring up.
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Objective-C is C with some extensions. C++ is a language of it's own.
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Objective-C is C with some extensions. C++ is C With a lot of extensions.
Re:In Objective C?? (Score:5, Informative)
Objective-C is a strict superset of C [wikipedia.org], any C code will work just fine as part of an Objective-C project.
C++ is not a strict superset of C [wikipedia.org], although a lot of the incompatable C++ syntax has been added back into C as of late. Even with that there are still a lot of gotchas when switching between C++ and C code.
Honestly I've found Objective-C to be very powerful, intuitive, and easy to use. C++, although powerful, has a lot of tricky syntax and ideas behind it. It's a great language for experts and because it is a statically-typed language it is fairly quick, but I think Objective-C is a much better programming language overall. Oh and even though Objective-C is a dynamically-typed language you can still run it fairly quickly by "freezing" some of the method calls and making them static. This gives you the freedom of choice between the ease of a dynamic language and the speed of a static language.
Apple has also worked it so that you can use C, C++, Objective-C, and several other languages fairly transparently in a single project.
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Don't forget Objective-C++. All the best masochists use it.
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Only the low-level parts of the code that interact with the APIs need to be Objective C. Just like you can mix C and C++ together in a single app, Objective C can be mixed as well.
And BTW this is no different from Mac OS X development. A lot of cross-platform apps are C and/or C++ with thin wrappers for interacting with the Cocoa API.
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I guess you didn't know that Doom was originally written on NeXTstep? Or that the original level editor was a NeXTstep .app?
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Development_of_Doom [wikia.com]
And it's trivial to call pretty much any sort of code from Obj-C anyway.
William
Carmack, Empty Mayonnaise Jars, And You (Score:2, Funny)
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He was on "Celebrity Family Feud" last week, though he didn't give many (if any) answers. (That is, he was Xed when time ran out.) The prize money was for charity, but they may have gotten normal SAG money for appearing.
Tour de France? (Score:1)
A Graphical Tour de France?
Will Lance Armstrong be in it?
How about Neil Armstrong?
Maybe Stretch Armstrong?
I think the Hulk Should be in it too!
Does my mind wander? Sorry, I thought I was posting on YouTube!
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iOrcs and iElves (Score:1)
I wonder what Carmack thinks about the NDA fiasco (Score:2)
I was quite dissapointed that the article made no mention of that.
Graphical "Tour de France" (Score:1)
The iPhone? Ew... (Score:2)
Why keep wasting time on mobile telephones when Id Software could be pushing the Wii to its limits instead?
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Why waste your time pushing the Wii to its limits when Wii Sports has already done it!
*Zing*
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I assumed that he likes the challenge. Besides, Quake 3 was Id's last good game... maybe that has something to do with it. :P
" a graphical tour de force" (Score:2)
Finally (Score:2)
It will be good to see Quake finally running on a mobile device [slashdot.org]. Maybe someday they'll even have a go with Quake 2 [slashdot.org].
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quake is already available for iphone (Score:1)
I think im the only one to point out that with a jailbroken iphone 3g or 1st gen with 2.0 firmware the installer cedega has a quake package to download, its pretty cool. the controls are a little difficult mainly cause it doesnt support more than one touch at the same time atm but its pretty fun and runs at full speed. has a similar one on my old ppc device, they even had quake 2 and 3 for pocketpc, 2 was too slow to play though and 3 was a slideslow but still, thats pretty cool. you could also play multipl
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Cydia, not Cedega.