John Carmack surprises fans (and his CEO) with Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

John Carmack surprises fans (and his CEO) with Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone

venturebeat.com

23 pointspeter12314 comments

Not only does Wolf3d run beautifully on the iPhone, the controls (and options for modifying them) actually make the iPhone a viable platform for 2.5 dimensional FPS games.

I'd like to see what he can come up with for Quake (a fully 3D shooter - which adds aiming up and down)

You'd need some kind of giro for the z-axis. Right now the iphone can only tell if it's facing uyp or facing down, but can't tell by what degree. Maybe in later edititons they will make the z-axis giro like the others. Alternatively, you could make a device you can attach to the iphone that tells it its position along the median plane.

Great interview, this guy makes a good publicity person. Watch how he stays on his point throughout the questions, the list of products you (the consumer) should be watching out for at the end is superb.

People thought you couldn’t do 3D games on the iPhone but here it is running.

Who thought that? Todd never looked at Apple's App Store.

PS: Wolfenstein 3D doesn't have a real 3D engine anyway.

3D is not "real". The output of 3D apps are projected onto a 2D screen (VR goggles not withstanding, but even then, there are simply two outputs projected onto two 2D screens).

Wolfenstein has rasterization, just like a "real" 3D engine does. Its engine happens to be optimized for certain viewpoints, which makes it "2.5D", but it still gives a crude approximation of 3D, just like every other "3D" game.

"which makes it "2.5D""

You wasted all those words to say what I said... it's not 3D. :)

PS: I know very well how 3D games work since I co-wrote a commercial 3D engine in 2002-3 and used to teach computer graphics course at a university.

I think your comment underestimates developments in 3d hardware and software in the last 15 years or so.

Woosh

Why? What I said and what you said are unrelated.

This particular version of Wolfenstein 3D is actually rendered using standard 3D techniques in OpenGL. It's just low on detail and the ability to look up/down.

How is this a surprise? He's been blogging about it for months...

Do you have a source on that? Carmack rarely updates his blog. The only info I've seen about Wolf3d on the iPhone are the development notes released a little over a week ago.

Edit: The dev notes are here: http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopme...

It's just an angle to the story--and a clever one, too! Would it have showed up on HC if it were just "Wolf 3D Launches on iPhone" versus "Carmack Made iPhone Wolf 3D Without his CEO Knowing"?

Later in the interview: "How did the launch for Quake Live [the free browser-based version of the circa 1995 ID Software game]..."

Way to do your research; Quake 3 came out in 1999.

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