New from Id, IWolf!

John Carmack has released an open source port of Wolf3d to the Iphone. There's an interview up over at Voodoo Extreme with Carmack talking about the project and what his motivation was. Over at Id Software.com there's also an official page up.

It's especially interesting to check out John's article documenting the development. The last line in particular will be of interest to some here!

EDIT: John Carmack has added the source code for his iphone port to idstuff! Read, vote and download on the dw/idgames portal. Thanks to JacKThERiPPeR for the find.

I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.

lol

Man, I forgot how breathtakingly awesome the Wolfenstein 3D boxart was. A lost art, that's for sure.

The Voodoo Extreme link (that site is still around!?) is just John's development article copy-and-pasted.

I still don't see how FPS controls on the iPhone would be all that great. Using the same surface for input and visuals seems a bit problematic. I saw a video for that Quake3 based game (microtransaction weapons LOL) and it seems like your thumbs would significantly obscure the view.

No sign of it on the app store

Now I actually have a good reason to buy an iPhone...

Scuba Steve said:

Man, I forgot how breathtakingly awesome the Wolfenstein 3D boxart was. A lost art, that's for sure.

Too true. Bulletproof mullet for the win.

Scuba Steve said:

Man, I forgot how breathtakingly awesome the Wolfenstein 3D boxart was. A lost art, that's for sure.

I agree completely. Also this is neat to have id revising their old games and doing some new ports. Maybe a new Doom for DS?? :D

Extremely interesting article, this submission is most appreciated!

Cool read, thanx.

He's gonna do DOOM next. Finally, Carmack will optimize the clusterfuck that is the Doom source code for modern hardware. This can only help the community, folks!

Interestingly, he used a community source port to start off from... and long live the automap!

I also had to make one last minute hack change to the original media -- the Red Cross organization had asserted their trademark rights over red crosses (sigh) some time after we released the original Wolfenstein 3D game, and all new game releases must not use red crosses on white backgrounds as health symbols. One single, solitary sprite graphic got modified for this release.

Heh. I guess they'll do that to DOOM, too.

I kinda find that weird since the red cross still represents that one last beacon of hope, but whatever. I also find it weird that it was trademarked in the first place.

Bought it this afternoon during lunch hour. It's a great port; runs quickly and the controls are extremely well thought out with lots of options.

Dont bother paying for it, you can download it legally on Cydia.

It runs really well and the controls are great.

Hmm, interesting. I may just have to get myself setup with an iphone development environment. Or is there an iphone "emulator" available yet?

amberleaf said:
Dont bother paying for it, you can download it legally on Cydia.

Apple doesn't seem to think Cydia itself is legal, but, more importantly, are you referring to the shareware or the full game?

Csonicgo said:

He's gonna do DOOM next. Finally, Carmack will optimize the clusterfuck that is the Doom source code for modern hardware. This can only help the community, folks!

Pretty sure he'll end up using a source port version as a base, like he did with Wolf3d.

Also iPhone development sucks.

Csonicgo said:

I also find it weird that it was trademarked in the first place.

I don't see why it wouldn't have been trademarked. The red cross is an organisation and their logo, as with many other organisations, is theirs. What I am surprised about though, is the fact their claim to it was upheld after they had let the wide and varied use of it slide for so many years. Their neglect of their rights, as has happened in other cases, was such that it should have allowed the logo to slip into free public use IMO. But hey, I'm not the legal system so what do I know?

So what did he do to the first aid things? Just wipe the red crosses off?

DuckReconMajor said:

So what did he do to the first aid things? Just wipe the red crosses off?

Replaced it with a heart.

AlexMax said:

Replaced it with a heart.

Heh, how ironic.

Enjay said:

Their neglect of their rights, as has happened in other cases, was such that it should have allowed the logo to slip into free public use IMO. But hey, I'm not the legal system so what do I know?

Was this even handled by a court? Only a court can decide what trademarks are truly genericized.

If Enjay is to answer, who, as he said, is not the legal system, he'll likely consult Google to do so.

In related news, Wolfenstein 3D has been listed by the ESRB for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I can't direct link the entry, but you can see it for yourself at http://www.esrb.org/

Cool. I hope it's for XBLA and not part of a collector's edition for this new Wolfenstein game.

Original post has been modified - get the sauce!

Mancubus II said:

Original post has been modified - get the sauce!

I found it on idgames passing by the /newstuff centre. :P

DaniJ said:

Hmm, interesting. I may just have to get myself setup with an iphone development environment. Or is there an iphone "emulator" available yet?

Apple provides one but there's a whole complicated process to be in the apple developer network and so on, whereas RIM offer things like the Blackberry Storm simulator just by going to their website and downloading it.

Mancubus II said:

Apple provides one but there's a whole complicated process to be in the apple developer network and so on, whereas RIM offer things like the Blackberry Storm simulator just by going to their website and downloading it.

The major difference being that

a) other manufacturers don't control the software being available.
b) the Storm being a piece of crap hardware wise...