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Kinsie

iDoom iNfo

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The initial application for iPhone OS 2.0 will ship with the Ultimate Doom dataset.

The second release that will target iPhone OS 3.0 will include the ability to purchase additional commercial datasets from inside the application. There will not be separate Doom / Doom 2 / Final Doom applications.

The third release will support user wads. It will support maps and graphics for sure, and probably sounds. Demos might be nice, but would be a lower priority. There will be no verification process, you just hit a URL, either on a web page or emailed to your iPhone, and it goes and gets it, and puts the maps into the main map list. Users beware. I hope that there will be some web pages that check and review wads for the iPhone specifically.

Updates to newer releases are free on the App Store, so I think there is value in getting the App out earlier and easing in the new features.

John Carmack

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John Carmack said:

The third release will support user wads. It will support maps and graphics for sure, and probably sounds. Demos might be nice, but would be a lower priority. There will be no verification process, you just hit a URL, either on a web page or emailed to your iPhone, and it goes and gets it, and puts the maps into the main map list. Users beware. I hope that there will be some web pages that check and review wads for the iPhone specifically.

Maybe Doomworld's own /newstuff could accommodate this?

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Wonderful news. More than anything else I wanted support for user wads.
It would be fun if General Mills chose to reinvest in Chex Quest.

There is something I would like to suggest.
I would like to see more creativity put into the Menu. Maybe call in an extra graphic designer.
The Wolfenstine 3D Menu screen was very efficient but I felt that your games deserve something more lively to match the trendy nature of the iPhone.

I think Edge is a good example of a cool and efficient menu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqcTSk9Adk
and in-game Edge has a drop down menu which I think is a very smart feature.

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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.


Just a thought, but you might get around lisencing issues by releasing them as a "semi-patch" .exe that looks for un-modified Doom/Doom2/Final Doom IWADs and then drops a PWAD with the files in the folders containing said IWADs.

I'm not a lawyer, though.

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John,

"There will still be a couple tiny tweaks, but nothing radical is changing in the basic play. It would be fun to take a small team, permanently fork it, and make a "Doom++" just for the iPhone, but that wouldn't be the best first move. Maybe later."

Care to enumerate on your ideas? :)

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Scuba Steve said:

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


It would be even more interesting to see if it can successfully re-capture the charm that made Doom so memorable..

Quasar said:

This is exciting ^_^


If only I had an iPhone...

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SoM said:

John,

"There will still be a couple tiny tweaks, but nothing radical is changing in the basic play. It would be fun to take a small team, permanently fork it, and make a "Doom++" just for the iPhone, but that wouldn't be the best first move. Maybe later."

Care to enumerate on your ideas? :)

I'd like to know too, sounds interesting.

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Kaiser said:

If only I had an iPhone...

I don't have one, but I still never imagined we'd see Carmack working on Doom again, so I find the whole process interesting. Plus since it's PrBoom, there's probably some of my code in there, and that's just cool ;)

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Quasar said:

I don't have one, but I still never imagined we'd see Carmack working on Doom again, so I find the whole process interesting. Plus since it's PrBoom, there's probably some of my code in there, and that's just cool ;)


I always told you before, you will make a great addition to the idMobile team :)

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Wow, now John Carmack has a Doomworld account? Neat.

By the way, if you do happen to have an iPhone or iPod touch, please get in touch with me. (AIM is in my profile, AlexMax on OFTC or QuakeNet IRC)

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Typical celebrity shock.

MikeRS said:

I would imagine that the system is powerful enough for up to at least Quake II


The iPhone is capable of running OpenArena (the processor's there and the powervr-based chip is known to be supported), but it's just the freelook-ness of the later era FPS games makes it not feasible for the control scheme of the iPhone. Their levels would have to be completely redesigned, or the autoaim would be to beyond the extreme. Otherwise, playing them would be the most uncomfortable experience ever.

Heretic and Hexen are good candidates though, though Hexen may need an overall brightness adjustment.


Would FreeDOOM work on the iPhone port? :)

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AlexMax said:

Wow, now John Carmack has a Doomworld account? Neat.

By the way, if you do happen to have an iPhone or iPod touch, please get in touch with me. (AIM is in my profile, AlexMax on OFTC or QuakeNet IRC)

I have an iPod Touch, and I've already purchased Wolf3D. I'm quite glad to hear that a version of Doom is being released! I've tried a homebrew port, but I was quite unsatisfied with the fact that it's controls are terrible :/

I am on DalNet IRC AlexMax and I've already sent you a PM, when you get around to it send me a message

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leileilol said:

Would FreeDOOM work on the iPhone port? :)

it's based on PrBoom, so I would imagine that it will. Plus the engine is free software of course, so you wouldn't need to buy the port from the App Store (which will include Doom itself) just to play Freedoom.

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John Carmack said:

Sprites were culled to the occlusion buffer

I have tried that. It is slower. On nuts.wad (10k sprites) it draws about 30%-40% of sprites, but it is slower. glBeginOcclusionQueryNV/glEndOcclusionQueryNV are slow

http://pastebin.com/m54a1f9a0

What is wrong?

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I meant testing against the 1D occlusion buffer inside the game, not testing with occlusion query, which doesn't even exist on the iPhone. Using hardware occlusion query would almost certainly be a net performance loss for sprites, because it would rasterize all the empty pixels to see that it is visible, then draw the textured sprite. Even when using queries for complex objects, you need to at least double buffer your queries so that you are using the query from the previous frame to determine if you are going to draw the object. Failing to do that makes the query result call into almost a glFinish, which may make things half the speed.

John Carmack

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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.

Well in the mean time we don't have Christian but we have Perkristian.

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Occlusion checks and PowerVR hardware never has a positive mix anyhow. Cube used it for gunfire, and it just ends up discharging your own shots into your eyes, which sucked and made the game unplayable.

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Do you have some user created wads in mind that you want to include on the download list already, or are you interested in getting people to create some new content specifically for this new version?

You should be careful with a lot of the custom wads you see out there because a lot of them, even if they have some good gameplay, have graphics and sounds ripped from other games (sometimes even TV shows), poorly made graphics and definitely won't have the same quality sound effects as the iPhone version.

That being said, a lot of user made wads are ridiculously difficult and would probably be insanely tedious to play with the iPhone controls (I hope those are good).

I think getting some people to create a few new wads for you would probably be a good option, but it depends on how quickly you want to have this version of Doom shipped by. You should definitely consider including a new commercial version in the vein of Final Doom with some new graphics and levels.

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Quasar said:

I don't have one, but I still never imagined we'd see Carmack working on Doom again, so I find the whole process interesting. Plus since it's PrBoom, there's probably some of my code in there, and that's just cool ;)

Heh, shouldn't you get royalties? :p

I think Commander Keen 1 and 4 should be ported to the iPhone. In fact, I played a very good user created episode for CK1 (pro quality) several years ago. If Keen goes iPhone, I think the user mod episode should be considered as well. Or, alternately, I know Tom Hall wants to make more keen games--he'd prolly be keen to make one for the iPhone.

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After looking at this video, I have an idea for a control scheme that could work really well for DOOM on the iPhone. Tilt the iPhone in a direction to move in it, and rotate the iPhone left or right to turn. This could provide finer and more intuitive controls than using the touch screen, though it might be best as an optional control scheme rather than a main one. Actually, I'm not sure, I've never used an iPhone. =P

Or, maybe movement forward, backward, and strafing could still be based on the touch screen, where as turning could be based on tilting or turning the iPhone, since turning often requires more of a precise and intuitive control scheme to be convenient for the player.

One other thing to decide would be whether the player will turn while the iPhone is turned or tilted (like with an analog stick), or whether the player will turn as the iPhone is being turned or tilted (like with a mouse).

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