Hacking Doom 3 Source released, chances of a Wii port?

[T.Kuranari]

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question (which most likely is), but as many of you know (or don't know yet) id Software recently released the source code of Doom 3 under the GPL v3 license (link). I'm curious whether it's possible to make a Wii port. I know the Wii doesn't have enough power to render the game, but what if one optimizes the game big time specifically for the Wii so that it becomes playable?

 

[Snailface]

It would require so much modification to get it to run that I don't think anyone will consider it worth their time.

 

[tueidj]

It would be doable minus some of the complex effects like advanced lighting and/or shadows. I hear dhewg knows the code pretty well...

 

[ficarra1002]

But doom 3 sucked.

 

[Category]

It would require so much modification to get it to run that I don't think anyone will consider it worth their time.

Directly for the Wii, it would. But Linux devs will probably port it to work completely with OpenGL like every other id engine has been.

Then from an OpenGL version to a Wii version is a much smaller step to take. But it would still be a long time until a wii release.

 

[Taleweaver]

but what if one optimizes the game big time specifically for the Wii so that it becomes playable?

Yeah...have fun with that.

 

[Hielkenator]

But doom 3 sucked.

most important point, and there are better engines I think to get games developed on Wii.

 

[Lucif3r]

Lets just port skyrim to Wii *nods*

 

[JonnyPoots]

Did Doom2 ever get ported to wii?


edit: just checked, it did

 

[Bladexdsl]

this will never run on the wii

 

[killplaystation]

doom 3 on a console? It's already officially on Xbox (a haven for homebrew) and playable on Xbox 360. Try one of those

 

[T.Kuranari]

It would be doable minus some of the complex effects like advanced lighting and/or shadows. I hear dhewg knows the code pretty well...

That's good to hear. Do you know if dhewg at least played with the thought of porting it to the Wii or did he just look at the source for the fun of it?

 

[ficarra1002]

Did Doom2 ever get ported to wii?


edit: just checked, it did

OP, why would you play doom 3, when 1 and 2 are available?

 

[Taleweaver]

It would be doable minus some of the complex effects like advanced lighting and/or shadows. I hear dhewg knows the code pretty well...

I'm just curious...are you being cynical or not?
(no offense...I really can't tell)

Doom 3 was all about being in the dark with just having a flashlight. By removing the lighting and shadows, wouldn't that just suck all the tension out of the game?


(@ficarra1002: I agree with you...doom 1 & 2 were far more fun that that game that was doom in pretty much nothing but the name).

 

[killplaystation]

It would be doable minus some of the complex effects like advanced lighting and/or shadows. I hear dhewg knows the code pretty well...

I'm just curious...are you being cynical or not?
(no offense...I really can't tell)

Doom 3 was all about being in the dark with just having a flashlight. By removing the lighting and shadows, wouldn't that just suck all the tension out of the game?


(@ficarra1002: I agree with you...doom 1 & 2 were far more fun that that game that was doom in pretty much nothing but the name).

a "nothing but the name" comparison would be like the Resident evil games and the movies. But Doom 3 I feel had enough influence from the first two and was a decently scary and startling experience. Though it took me years to complete it since it's so boring

 

[Lucif3r]

It would be doable minus some of the complex effects like advanced lighting and/or shadows. I hear dhewg knows the code pretty well...

...By removing the lighting and shadows, wouldn't that just suck all the tension out of the game?

He wasnt actually say to remove the lightning and shadows, he said to remove the advanced lightning and shadows. I remember having to use a hack for the leaked beta that came out like 2 years before launch to disable those effects, and it was still pretty much the same as the final titel.

 

[DRS]

Sort of useless bump of thread. But here it goes.

I think a port is interesting, but instead of worrying about graphics, start worrying about memory requirment. Linux version of Doom needs 256MB RAM to run. How to fit such a chunk of data in 24MB SRAM and 52MB available DRAM on the Wii? Simple answer: you can''t!

As for graphics, easy parts:
- per pixel light attenuation can be done using either 2D or pseudo 3D texture,
- diffuse and specular normal mapping can be emulated by a 2D algorithm in TEV indirect texture unit
- and stencil shadows can be done by using RGB6 framebuffer and render to alpha buffer.

hard parts:
- Wii doesn't really support cube maps (would be very slow), so other kind of projection must be programmed.
- Disadvantage of rendering to alpha is that the buffer has to be exported to texture first before it can be used to perform stencil compares. It also requires an additional texgen to calculate projected point on stencil texture. Exporting stencils for 8 lights at 25fps in 640x480 takes about 61Mpix/sec and then 61MTexels/sec to use them. A good percentage of the wii's total fillrate (thus gpu cycles).
- Need compression to reduce the amount of texture memory needed
- It's a damn 3GB game.... It will be slow from SD card

Porting the XBox version would be a lot easier I guess. It's already suited to 64MB of RAM and low end GPU/CPU. However, a complete team was assigned to do that, not one or two homebrew coders. I might give it a try once other people have downed the memory footprint a little Besides, TenebraeGX is fun to finish too.

 

[Rydian]

I'd assume simply downsampling the resources (lower-resolution textures, lower-poly models, etc.) could take out a noticeable chunk of the requirements.

 

[DRS]

My Tenebrae port currently can't even load all default Quake textures and (generated) normal maps. Most quake textures are 64x64. I already ditched mipmapping, downsized model lerping and shadow caches, maximum lights per map and maximum active lights per frame. If I could use the complete 64MB of DRAM somehow it would help a lot.

Therefore, really, downsizing the textures and models does reduce mem requirements a lot as you say, but it most likely won't be enough; my guess is that Doom uses at least 128MB texture cache and 128MB for map, shadow polygons cache, model caches, program code etc. Since Doom animates the model's vertex meshes, I guess models don't use much memory anyway (Quake models use a mesh per pose which requires much more memory) . So downsizing textures and models would likely still require >80MB of total memory. I guess the XBox version ditches more stuff than people credit it for.

I think the proper way to go for a simple port would be downscaling all textures, bring it back to it's essence (basically resembling Quake with portal culling instead of PVS culling) and then see how much memory is left for shadowing and normalmaps. Will be a long way to travel!

 

[tueidj]

If you know PowerPC well enough you could implement virtual memory, using a file on the NAND or SD as backing storage (USB is possible too but would be slow). It wouldn't really be usable for textures but could hold everything else.