Doom on android

I stumbled upon this and gave it a go on my phone. Excited at first, it seemed great. But it is virtually unplayable. The controls are shitastic, and settings show an inbred hybrid of zdoom and pc setups for keyboard.

So are there multiple versions or is this seriously the one that was originally on the market?

I found two Android ports (here is a pic of one of them running on my Kindle Fire), but neither seemed particularly playable, especially on the Fire, which has no keyboard and very few buttons. I'd view it as more of a curiosity than anything else. Though I imagine with some practice you can make a fair attempt at playing with pretty much any control set-up.

Grazza said:

I found two Android ports (here is a pic of one of them running on my Kindle Fire), but neither seemed particularly playable, especially on the Fire, which has no keyboard and very few buttons. I'd view it as more of a curiosity than anything else. Though I imagine with some practice you can make a fair attempt at playing with pretty much any control set-up.

Simple movement was hard enough. It may be able to take getting used to, but after taking so much heat from simple zombiemen, I didnt want to go on fighting the big things, like imps and shot gunners.

It would be nice if they took advantage of the xperia play's gamepad

I want prboom+ on my Android-phone, so I can watch demos on it!

I never tried a Doom port but I did play with an NES emulator and a couple other games that try to use on-screen controls to emulate keyboards and controllers. They were all awful. Even on my original Droid, the keyboard buttons were so flat that they hardly gave any more tactile feedback than on-screen controls.

darkreaver said:

I want prboom+ on my Android-phone, so I can watch demos on it!

that would be the most useful application for doom on android too imo, since playing is a bit difficult.

Agreed, it could be fantastic!

Since there are (however rudimentary) Doom ports, what about an android/tablet port of Doom Builder? Could be a great mapping supplement (gimmick) for mobile use - imagine mapping on a train or flight. Question is how well would that work with the touch controls (apart from the probably more obvious question how feasible it would be code-wise).

prboom4android is what I use.

neg!ke said:

Since there are (however rudimentary) Doom ports, what about an android/tablet port of Doom Builder? Could be a great mapping supplement (gimmick) for mobile use - imagine mapping on a train or flight. Question is how well would that work with the touch controls (apart from the probably more obvious question how feasible it would be code-wise).

Trying to make a level on a touch phone sounds like a nightmare. The screen is simply too small for any detailed work. I could see it being useful for doing something like putting entities in levels while you're on a flight or waiting somewhere, but that's it.

Darkman 4 said:

Trying to make a level on a touch phone sounds like a nightmare. The screen is simply too small for any detailed work. I could see it being useful for doing something like putting entities in levels while you're on a flight or waiting somewhere, but that's it.

Well, on something bigger, say an iPad, it'd be more feasible, but I can't see any work being made on a small handheld either.

Quake 3 plays sort of well on tablet. Still movement and fluid aim is hard.

neg!ke said:

Since there are (however rudimentary) Doom ports, what about an android/tablet port of Doom Builder?

This does pop up once in a while.

In practice, the only editor that would ever be ported with reasonable effort and good cross-platform compatibility would be -gasp- Yadex, essentially a GNU-ified DEU using X server. Hardly the most usable of editor, I know.

The problem is that any other editors you can think off -SLADE3, Doombuilder, Doombuilder 2 etc.- are too tied to specific platforms, OSes and frameworks to be easily ported: SLADE3 requires WxWidgets, Doombuilder & Doombuilder 2 are Windows-only and use VB and C# respectively, so if the target platform doesn't have support for those development environments, then it's a no-go.

I had once proposed starting porting some essential tools into a truly cross-platform language (like Java) but the general consensus was that the old DOS tools running under emulation or cross-compilation were all that the Doom community will ever need, and in general such threads soon degenerate into Yadex and SLADE3 fanboys high-fiving each other over how awesome these tools are and how smoothly they compile on their setup.

Maes said:

In practice, the only editor that would ever be ported with reasonable effort and good cross-platform compatibility would be -gasp- Yadex, essentially a GNU-ified DEU using X server. Hardly the most usable of editor, I know.

andrewj is working on Eureka, a derivative of Yadex; hopefully it will be more usable.

Ah, I see. Had missed that earlier thread.

Of course such a thing would be more of a technical gimmick than actual 'competition' for PC editing.

neg!ke said:

Ah, I see. Had missed that earlier thread.

Of course such a thing would be more of a technical gimmick than actual 'competition' for PC editing.

I don't think so. Eureka may be useful for low-end computers with an old graphics card (as I believe andrewj's is).

tempun said:

I don't think so. Eureka may be useful for low-end computers with an old graphics card (as I believe andrewj's is).

Depends how far back you place "old" and how low you place "low end". Doombuilder 1 runs fine on almost anything that can run XP (and that means all the way down to a beefed up Pentium I), so in practice Pentium II and Pentium III machines have no problem with it. If you need to go below that on a non-Windows platform though, only then could a "better Yadex" be useful.

Like it or not, the best Doom editing tools ever made are DOS and Windows-only.