Carmack Releases Wolfenstein for iPhone, Says Doom Next
John Carmack, the rocketman (and Id head honcho), has just recently released an open source version of Wolfenstein for the iPhone and claims that a doom version is also on the way. There's a huge paper he wrote that you can read about this over at VE3D where we found this bit of news.
Quote:
I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone.
I especially like the bit about how their mobile games developer quoted id Software 2 months of work, and Carmack got it done by himself in 4 days.
There is a big difference between getting something working and getting something polished. The former is a demo, the latter is a shipping product. The 80/20 (or 90/10) rule definitely applies here. Now if that developer only claimed to get that same amount of functionality done, then you may have something, but I strongly suspect there is some exaggeration going on here.
For comparison, on Orcs & Elves DS, Carmack did the core engine in a few days, but it tooks months of additional development (handed off to his wife's team) to actually make a product that could be shipped.
I couldn't follow all of the programming specifics, but that article was still FASCINATING! I love reading about the challenges with programming games and specific platform idiosyncrasies.
There is a big difference between getting something working and getting something polished. The former is a demo, the latter is a shipping product. The 80/20 (or 90/10) rule definitely applies here. Now if that developer only claimed to get that same amount of functionality done, then you may have something, but I strongly suspect there is some exaggeration going on here.
For comparison, on Orcs & Elves DS, Carmack did the core engine in a few days, but it tooks months of additional development (handed off to his wife's team) to actually make a product that could be shipped.
No offense, but did you read the article?
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Carmack
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. And I had fun doing it.
Yep, I did. However, it's still not clear what that third-party developer was asked to do (and quoted two months) versus what Carmack did in four days. Is it the same or not? That's why I said "if that developer only claimed to get that same amount of functionality done, then you may have something."
Are you able to tell this from the original text? It's not written very clearly, so I am not sure.
Are you able to tell this from the original text? It's not written very clearly, so I am not sure.
OK, I read it again, and it looks like he asked the Wolf RPG developer to switch to OpenGL on the iPhone instead of the software rasterizer. The software rasterizer was already using a GL-like abstraction layer (what he called TinyGL), so this should have been a relatively easy task.
So indeed, two months for someone else to do it was a bit much, even without being fully familiar with the code. At the same time, four days for Carmack to do it is not a big deal at all, not because he is a good programmer, but mostly because he wrote the original code and is thus very familiar with it.
In other news... Wolf 3D is now in the app store for $5. (the above comments are all about Wolf RPG, a different product not on iPhone yet)
Doom has to one of the games features on most platforms.
