Quake Ported To Palm Pre

I think that Doom ran better on the old Palms then they do on the iPhone - because the controls were decent. You just had to map them to use the D-Pad for movement and other buttons for other game functions. Not good for landscape (pity...) but the playability in portrait more than made up for it. I played through all the Doom 1 and 2 levels and many many custom mods on my Palm T3. I think it could be the same here: keyboard setup could be great for Doom. Might also be interesting to make use of the touch area below the screen - additional advantage over 'on-screen only' controls as it at least wont get in the way of the display - though to be honest i'm not sure how.

Now Quake is another issue entirely - as with all vertical / 'freelook' games (i.e. most first person shooters that came along after Doom 2). Some games were kind of 'in between' like Duke3D (was playable because it doesn't require free-look and not true 3D).

I cant see any full-movement 3D shooter being playable on anything that doesn't have dedicated gaming controls. But Doom is perfect for mobile devices with sufficient hardkeys as movement is much more limited.

What, if anything, prevents the screen orientation from being changed in the same way it was changed with the email app patch? It would make the field of vision in the game narrower, but that's a decent trade-off for being able to type in the right position with the keyboard, isn't it?

Tim Carroll wrote:
dtzWill has already figured out a way to reverse the landscape so the keyboard is on the left (which makes more sense to me). Portrait is a little trickier though and would require a patch to webos-sdl, so that's a bit further off.

The real problem is that all-touch devices like the Pre kinda suck for fast-paced shooters. I keep trying to think of some way the gesture area could be used as well, but the fact is that these games are meant to be played with controls in both hands - be it console controller with dual sticks or a kb + mouse combo.

Still, once tilt control is figured out, it should alleviate matters somewhat. Mainly I just wish O2 would hurry up and push out webOS 1.3.5 for GSM so I can play them myself...

Actually, back in the day I was pretty good at controlling Doom with just the keyboard. Of course I didn't have it turned on its side. I think that what we really need is something like the official iPhone version of Doom with good on screen controls for landscape play and screen rotation for a keyboard play.

http://gizmodo.com/5394312/the-iphone-now-officially-runs-doom

The money quote from the above blog post for me is,

In a blog post from May, Carmack says he loves that players port Doom to every device imaginable, but he's disappointed that there's rarely any real effort to build a new, functional control scheme on platforms without a keyboard and mouse. In other words, he'd rather that instead of everyone stopping at "Does it run Doom?" they ask "Does it play Doom?"

I have to say that I agree with Carmack. I can count on my fingers the number of times I played Doom on my Treo or Palm TX, largely because the game was hard to set up and didn't play very well on PalmOS devices. Doom runs pretty well on my Pre right now and it's just a few UI tweaks away from being as much fun as the original.
Palm Apologist
Shouting down the PIC Faithful Since 2009
Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

Nasty framerate; he prolly just did a quick build and link and saw it worked, without investing a lot of time into it yet.. but thats running worse than on the old Tapwave Zodiac, T|T3, etc. Mind you, those were pretty fast machines all things considered, and didn't have to back a phone and other apps, but still, after all these years it better run _better_ :)

Big shout out for him though, bringing Q1 to a platform is a coming of age for a device :)

jeff
The Shadow knows!

yeah, glquake would be pretty spectacular on there :)

Does Palm let native-ARM compiled code go up in the app store yet? (sure, it would push folks towards lowest common denominator code, or dynamic cpu-selected routines during runtime, or multiple bins per package, but no biggy .. all things done before on Palm platforms :)

jeff
The Shadow knows!