Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
With a version of Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone under his belt, John Carmack (Technical Director with Id Software) has decided it would be nice to bring some demons to the popular platform.
Over at the id software site , Carmack gives some insight into his latest project, that of bringing a version of the iconic Doom to the iPhone platform.
“I have been spending the majority of my time working on iPhone Doom Classic for several weeks now, and the first beta build went out to some external testers a couple days ago.” Carmack says.
Carmack is currently working on Rage at Id Software. Rage is a complex modern title, featuring the latest in game-play and technology. But Doom on the iPhone would surely pull enough nostalgic heart strings to shift a bundle of units in the iTunes App Store.
“The toughest question was the artwork. Since [Wolfenstein 3D Classic] was selling well, I had planned on paying contractors to upscale all the Doom graphics to twice the original resolution. When I pulled all the graphics out and tallied it all up, it looked a lot more marginal than I had expected. There were over two thousand individual pieces of art, and it was over ten megatexels in exactly bounded area, let alone atlas fit or power of two inset.” said Carmack in his technical posting.
Seems there was a dilemma, Carmack would have liked to improve the graphical feel of this Doom iteration, but according to him; “I was also a little taken aback by some of the backlash against the updated graphics that I put in for [Wolfenstein]” he said, “In the end, I decided not to do anything with the DOOM source art. With the GPU accelerated filtering and 24 bit lighting it looks a lot better than it ever did, and with floors, ceilings, and lighting you don't seem to notice the low resolution as much as with Wolf.”
But what of the all important multiplayer? It is a common IT joke that spare servers on an office LAN have Doom (or the other id Software favourite franchise Quake) placed on them. But on the iPhone multiplayer will be a different experience.
“The initial release will be for OS 2.x, and support multiplayer over WiFi. A later release will be for 3.x only, and support bluetooth multiplayer. I looked into the possibility of 3G multiplayer, but the latencies just aren't good enough -- I see 380 or so pings from my phone to local servers.” Carmack said.
”I am moving back on to Rage for a while, but I expect to be able to finish it up for submission to the App Store next month” he concluded.
David Bass
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