John Carmack Talks Doom iPhone

Keane Ng

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Sep 11, 2008
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John Carmack Talks Doom iPhone



Some people start stamp collections as side projects to kill some time. John Carmack takes classic id Software games and ports them to iPhone. And then he talks about them in extreme detail.

The iPhone is the biggest thing since rocket jumping for id Software mastermind John Carmack. He singlehandedly programmed and released a port of Wolfenstein 3D for Apple's phone a couple months ago, but as he writes [http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-doom-classic-progress/] in a blog, that "was just a quickie project to satisfy my curiosity and test the iPhone waters." The iPhone port of Doom, on the other hand, is a "more serious effort."

"Making Doom run on a new platform is only a couple days of work," Carmack said. "Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort."

The biggest hurdle he faced, Carmack wrote, was the question of handle the game's art. In addition to some technical issues, Carmack noted that there was significant backlash against the new graphics he'd put in the Wolfenstein remake. Ultimately, he decided not to do anything to the source art.

That's not to say this is just Doom as it was. Carmack seems to think it's a lot better than the original, which he'll admit doesn't exactly hold up in spite of all the nostalgia. "With the speed...the audio, the resolution, and the rendering quality, it is Doom as you remember it, which is quite a bit better than it actually was," he wrote. "A lot of people remember it as 'The best game EVER!', but 'ever' has sure moved a lot in the last decade!"

Doom iPhone will support Wi-Fi multiplayer, and, after the iPhone's 3.0 firmware is released, Bluetooth-supported battling. Carmack tried out online multiplayer over 3G, but said it just didn't work out because of crummy latencies. It should be out next month.

And it seems this isn't the end of Carmack's love affair with the iPhone, not by a long shot.

"The fact that people are downloading Myst on the iPhone is heartening -- I have ideas for leveraging our high end idTech-5 content creation pipeline for a future iPhone game, if people will go for a few hundred meg download," Carmack said.

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Therumancer

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Honestly I am less impressed by ports than I am by the development of entirely new games, even ones based on old franchises.

I mean if he made a whole new game in the Doom-verse for the Iphone I might be going "hmmm, coool" but simply porting a game that you used to be able to DL the first episode of off of BBS systems (complete with shareware concept to pay a fee to register for the other episodes), which means that we're talking pre-mainsream internet here,
 

atv_chic_18

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Giving Skynet a new creator...

But I would totally check the game out and see what it was about. I loved the old school computer version of it.
 

scotth266

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Jan 10, 2009
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DeadlyYellow said:
Is there any platform this is not on? Seriously.
A platform that doesn't have Doom on it? Madness!

...Wait. The Wii... does it have Doom?

This is a bit of cool news. I wonder how the controls were adapted? Anyone know?
 

300lb. Samoan

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Therumancer said:
Honestly I am less impressed by ports than I am by the development of entirely new games, even ones based on old franchises.

I mean if he made a whole new game in the Doom-verse for the Iphone I might be going "hmmm, coool" but simply porting a game that you used to be able to DL the first episode of off of BBS systems (complete with shareware concept to pay a fee to register for the other episodes), which means that we're talking pre-mainsream internet here,
scotth266 said:
DeadlyYellow said:
Is there any platform this is not on? Seriously.
A platform that doesn't have Doom on it? Madness!

...Wait. The Wii... does it have Doom?
That's because Carmack is a techhead. He's interested in opening up the technical possibilities of the iPhone first, then creating new software once the platform is understood.

Getting Doom to run on new platforms is a sort of acid test for new tech: if it can play Wolf3D and Doom, you can bet that Carmack will find a way to get modern idTech running on it. Porting the original game is just a great way to garner support for the development by catering to people who are fond of the original game. I never would have thought of the iPhone as a gaming platform before, but now that I've seen this I'm damn intrigued by it. First Doom, then probably Quake 1 and 2, then Quake 4, then maybe Doom 4? Quake 5?

btw the Doom-verse is pretty backwoods fucked-up retarded as it stands anyway. Doom 3 was meant as a retread of Doom 1 but the premise was tweaked to make it more scientific and less occult... I'd rather see them stick to the classic as far as that is concerned.
 

Vern

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John Carmack is a god of programming. He's not great at coming up with original ideas, that's what the rest of the Id team is for. But when it comes to doing things that programmers never thought possible, and excelling at them, he's amazing. How many other video game programmers have founded a company dedicated to amateur space flight, and have helped create the third self controlled rocket to take off and land by itself? The man's a frigging genius. And the fact that Id is working on Rage/Id Tech 5, and Doom 4, which is possibly Id tech 6. And he still has free time to port Wolfenstein and Doom to Ipod, and make rockets, it makes me wonder if he lives in another dimension where time doesn't exist. Plus the fact that they made Quake 3 Arena, one of the first games I can remember that actually required a 3D card playable on a browser is also impressive. Now I only wish they would make a really fun game again.