John Carmack
Rocket Scientist
Posts: 5
Registered: 03-09 |
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.
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