Re: Castle Wolfenstein 3-D for IIGS

[philip@labtam.oz.au (Philip Stephens)]

Mitchell Spector quotes an ID Software programmer:

>The most time consuming parts of the program are the clearing of the
>screen, the scaling of the walls, and the copying to the video
>memory.  The SNES can do all of these thing faster than the GS.

  This is a fair comment.
  Think about what Wolfenstein 3D is: a full screen 3D view that
moves around in perspective as your character moves.  Even on an
accelerated GS, just copying a predrawn full-screen frame from
a buffer into the video RAM can't be done at more than 12 frames
per second.  Add to that the processing that needs to be done to
create 3D graphics like Wolfenstein 3D (and frankly I don't know
how it's done) would likely mean you'd have to shrink the window
size down just to get it running at an acceptable speed on an
accelerated GS--never mind a GS running at 2.8 Mhz!

>The SNES can do the clearing and copying with DMA, which is about
>four times faster than the tightest possible pea/pei stack tricked
>code.

  And that's the rub.  The 1 Mhz bottleneck on the video RAM is
a right pain in the ass.  It really limits what the GS is capable
of doing animation wise.  And there is no DMA available for
copying stuff around in the GS by software (only peripheral cards
can do DMA, and only one at a time as I understand it).

>You couldn't reasonably use more than 16 colors in a scaled GS game,
>which would require ALL THE ARTWORK TO BE REDRAWN.

  Another good point!

>2: (the market)  A runaway hit in the GS community might sell a few
>thousand copies.

  And that's the real bottom line, isn't it!  Nowadays software
developers for the GS must contend with the fact that they aren't
going to sell as many copies than if they were developing for
another platform like the PC or the SNES or Genesis.  So unless the
software companies have a love for the GS or have the resources to
devote to some GS projects, we can't expect them to invest the time
and money into supporting our machine.  It's a pity, but the simple
truth.

>Another idea is to have someone else do the port with ID's permission,
>if they themselves refuse.

  That's the most likely way you'll ever get a Wolfenstein 3D on the
GS.  Since ID Software doesn't feel that they will make a profit
from developing it themselves, they may be willing to allow someone
else to do the GS port.  That's how The Tinies got written, after all.
-- 
=========== Philip Stephens, Systems Programmer, Labtam Australia ============
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