iDoom iNfo

[Kinsie]

John Carmack has posted a progress report on Doom Classic for the iPhone. Key mentions include improved audio quality from the original source files, aborted experiments with redrawing the artwork, and it being based off the prBoom codebase. Oh, and a bunch of screenshots, of course.

[kristus]

I wonder how accessible it'll be. IOW, will it allow mods?

[Scuba Steve]

I found it interesting that he wanted to hire someone to redraw all the artwork.

[Manc]

Scuba Steve said:

I found it interesting that he wanted to hire someone to redraw all the artwork.

YES I noticed that too, and he's using the "original" higher fidelity audio which is a nice touch. Overall his approach is sound and rational and, even though I do not own an iphone, I am certainly looking forward to another "id software" doom release!

John is registered on these boards as of recent - I'd love to see him comment further if any good discussion comes up in this thread.

[TheeXile]

I will probably have another update later with more technical details about the logic behind the new rendering architecture (rewritten for > 2x the speed of the original prBoom GL renderer), touch control issues, and so on.

"haha i can code this better than u."


;P

[ant]

Mancubus II said:

YES I noticed that too, and he's using the "original" higher fidelity audio which is a nice touch. Overall his approach is sound and rational and, even though I do not own an iphone, I am certainly looking forward to another "id software" doom release!

John is registered on these boards as of recent - I'd love to see him comment further if any good discussion comes up in this thread.

Higher audio qualities? Can we get those on PC ports?

[Kinsie]

ant said:

Higher audio qualities? Can we get those on PC ports?

When John released the Wolf3D Classic source code, due to the fact the assets were converted from the original Wolf into new formats, he included the game data in the code (with a polite request to buy the game, of course). Since this is an open-source port based off the prBoom engine, I'd imagine either the modified resources will be in the code release package, or someone'll figure out how to pull it out of the app in some way.

[Linguica]

TheeXile said:

"haha i can code this better than u."


;P

The prBoom hardware renderer has always been notoriously slow for some reason. At least compared to Doom Legacy, Doomsday, etc.

[Quasar]

This is exciting ^_^

[SoM]

Linguica said:

The prBoom hardware renderer has always been notoriously slow for some reason. At least compared to Doom Legacy, Doomsday, etc.

* SoM waits by the door for entryway to enter...

[Graf Zahl]

Linguica said:

The prBoom hardware renderer has always been notoriously slow for some reason. At least compared to Doom Legacy, Doomsday, etc.

Umm... What? I don't think so.

[entryway]

Linguica said:

The prBoom hardware renderer has always been notoriously slow for some reason. At least compared to Doom Legacy, Doomsday, etc.

Absolutely bullshit. The only fasted ports are GZDoom and GLBoom-PLus. Try to play nuts with DoomsDay. It's 0 fps instead of 12 in gzdoom 15 in glboom and 60 in glboom-plus. The same with other levels. DoomsDay at least 2x slower than GLBoom and 4x slower than GLBoom-Plus. 4x, not 10%-20%

[Csonicgo]

entryway said:

Absolutely bullshit. The only fasted ports are GZDoom and GLBoom-PLus. Try to play nuts with DoomsDay. It's 0 fps instead of 12 in gzdoom 15 in glboom and 60 in glboom-plus. The same with other levels. DoomsDay at least 2x slower than GLBoom and 4x slower than GLBoom-Plus. 4x, not 10%-20%

that stil doesn't hide the fact that the Mack himself made your code run faster than you ever thought possible.

NO offense, but.. I would take a look at that code....

[DaniJ]

I would try not to take it personally, entryway.

With respect to the Doomsday renderer; we are well aware of the speed issues and they will be addressed in the planned rewrite. Don't forget that the Doomsday renderer was originally designed for Voodoo2 era GPUs and hasn't really changed all that radically since (alright, it gained multitexture capabilities but never truly integrated). The renderer in the current beta releases is hamstrung by a fair amount of naive, JIT resource/texture search routines. These are only temporary so we can make public releases as we are still in the process of moving to a materials system.

[Scet]

Remember that OpenGL is a specification, not an implementation. What works well on a PC may not work at all on the iPhone.

[Gez]

Csonicgo said:

that stil doesn't hide the fact that the Mack himself made your code run faster than you ever thought possible.

NO offense, but.. I would take a look at that code....

Did he use as a base glboom+ or glboom, though? I mean, 15 fps in glboom and 60 fps in glboom+ is a 4x increase. In the latter case, Carmack's update means 30 fps. In the former, it means 120 fps.

[Csonicgo]

Gez said:

Did he use as a base glboom+ or glboom, though? I mean, 15 fps in glboom and 60 fps in glboom+ is a 4x increase. In the latter case, Carmack's update means 30 fps. In the former, it means 120 fps.

freom waht I read, glboom+

[entryway]

Gez said:

Did he use as a base glboom+ or glboom, though? I mean, 15 fps in glboom and 60 fps in glboom+ is a 4x increase. In the latter case, Carmack's update means 30 fps. In the former, it means 120 fps.

Generally (for common levels) the difference will not so big. ~1.3x - 1.5x (1.5x for Deus Vult). But sometimes glboom+ is extremely faster (3x on nuts and epic map05)

Currently, GL renderer is not bottleneck of glboom+ If you make it 2x faster, the common speed will not increase so much

[John Carmack]

The initial version will not support mods, but that is a very high priority for later versions. We are defining a URL that will automatically download wad files, which allows you to just click on something in Safari and have it launch Doom to download and play it, so it should be the best case ever for user maps. The renderer doesn't pay any heed to compatibility with software tricks, and overall it is still a long way from modern (or even not-so-modern) PC performance, so later and more aggressive maps probably won't be very appropriate for the platform. I hope that the community will make an effort to go back through the existing body of work and pick out things that play well on the iPhone. This should be very exciting for map creators -- it is very cool to pull out your phone and show a level with a couple finger taps, and the game should be going out to many hundreds of thousands of new people.

The source code will be out on day 1, so any iPhone developers can immediately begin hacking on it. There isn't anything terribly magical in the new work. The OpenGL driver overhead is very high on iPhone, so sorting and merging surfaces was very important. Since it was all depth buffered, complete lines could be drawn instead of segs. Sprites were culled to the occlusion buffer. All of the "deep water" stuff was causing a lot of overhead, so I pulled it. Using matrix ops to move floors and rotate sprites was less efficient than just duplicating the data for sectors and building the quad directly for sprites. It is still a lot less efficient than the Doom code that ran on the old consoles, because the structures have gained a lot of weight in various ways over the years, and some of the data isn't in the format that I would choose. I didn't want to rampage all over the code carving out features that I wasn't familiar with.

I expect this to remain a live product for quite some time, so there will be plenty of time for give and take between the evolved goodness of the modern Doom environment and the performance requirements on the iPhone.

Releasing the higher quality audio for other uses. Hmmm. That would probably be tough from a licensing standpoint. I'll think about it.

[Csonicgo]

John, your idea for pwads and add-ons is something the chocolate-doom project has considered. instead of running all those old deusf programs and dehacked programs, a program was proposed similar to what you are speaking of, to choose classic pwads and download/install/play them automatically. I'd like to see how this turns out.

[TheeXile]

Csonicgo said:

John, your idea for pwads and add-ons is something the chocolate-doom project has considered. instead of running all those old deusf programs and dehacked programs, a program was proposed similar to what you are speaking of, to choose classic pwads and download/install/play them automatically. I'd like to see how this turns out.

Hopefully moderated. :P

[chungy]

Csonicgo said:

John, your idea for pwads and add-ons is something the chocolate-doom project has considered. instead of running all those old deusf programs and dehacked programs, a program was proposed similar to what you are speaking of, to choose classic pwads and download/install/play them automatically. I'd like to see how this turns out.

Well, it's still on the Chocolate Doom todo list, but no one has really had motivation to actually do it (additionally, external programs like DeuSF and DeHacked have typically been not needed in source ports, Chocolate included, which have the functionality already built into the engine).

Also, big John, if I might have a total geek-out moment of an opportunity to ask a celebrity, do you know if there's any further plans to release id games on the iPhone? I would imagine that the system is powerful enough for up to at least Quake II, although even a Commander Keen re-release can be cool. (I don't have an iPhone but these ports tempt me to buying one, haha.)

[Manc]

Csonicgo said:

freom waht I read, glboom+

From what I read, it's the original glboom renderer, as he says precisely in the article. I don't think he used prboom+ because that is a fork of a fork really, and he said prboom, not prboom+ anyway, so it's probably safe to assume it's not entryway's work. Nevertheless, Carmack's work will be an excellent contribution that could be taken advantage of by others.

John Carmack said:

Releasing the higher quality audio for other uses. Hmmm. That would probably be tough from a licensing standpoint. I'll think about it.

There have been other community efforts attempting to do this, but licensing probably also plays a part here.

[John Carmack]

MikeRS said:

Also, big John, if I might have a total geek-out moment of an opportunity to ask a celebrity, do you know if there's any further plans to release id games on the iPhone? I would imagine that the system is powerful enough for up to at least Quake II, although even a Commander Keen re-release can be cool. (I don't have an iPhone but these ports tempt me to buying one, haha.)

I expect we will see all the way up through Quake Arena, although that will need some higher performance drivers for acceptable play. It does remain to be seen how well freelook is going to work with the touch/tilt controls.

We also have some brand new titles coming, and the best of our java/brew mobile RPG titles will be moved over. Lots of stuff coming for iPhone.

John Carmack

[Szymanski]

John Carmack said:

I hope that the community will make an effort to go back through the existing body of work and pick out things that play well on the iPhone.
it is very cool to pull out your phone and show a level with a couple finger taps,

Sounds cool. Would the maps have to be formally verified? and would their be restrictions on content eg user sounds and textures. Could uploading demos be possible?

[Naked Snake]

John Carmack said:

I expect we will see all the way up through Quake Arena, although that will need some higher performance drivers for acceptable play. It does remain to be seen how well freelook is going to work with the touch/tilt controls.

We also have some brand new titles coming, and the best of our java/brew mobile RPG titles will be moved over. Lots of stuff coming for iPhone.

John Carmack

Will this iPhone Doom be a package set of the commercial Doom releases (Ultimate Doom, Doom II and Final Doom) or will we have to buy the games piecemeal?

[mewse]

John Carmack
Newbie

heh

[TheeXile]

Naked Snake said:

Will this iPhone Doom be a package set of the commercial Doom releases (Ultimate Doom, Doom II and Final Doom) or will we have to buy the games piecemeal?

Plus what about people using their existing IWADs and simply copying them to the iPhone?


Or has Apple implemented measures against stuff like that?

[Use]

Scuba Steve said:

I found it interesting that he wanted to hire someone to redraw all the artwork.

It would be the coolest thing in the world if it was taken that far, or if any new art was added. I imagine most of the forum would be buying iphones. The new sounds are enough to get me excited, although I'm itching to see the renderer in action too.

[Blzut3]

John Carmack said:

We also have some brand new titles coming, and the best of our java/brew mobile RPG titles will be moved over. Lots of stuff coming for iPhone.

I'm hoping this includes the Doom RPG. I've always wanted to play it but it seems impossible to get a compatible cell phone (not to mention that fact that I would have to have it serviced to even get the game). I would definitely buy it if I could play it on the iPod touch.