Wolfenstein 3-D port for NeXTstep?

[marvin]

Hi dear NeXT experts.

In a book about computing milestones I read that Wolfenstein 3D was first developed with NeXTstep, then ported to MS-DOS.

Thinking this is wrong and was just confused with DOOM and Quake development, I started to search archives and the internet.

Indeed few websites state Wolfenstein 3D was developed with NeXT(step), but also there is doubt like in this 12 year old Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rh2ms/how_did_carmack_use_his_next_to_develop/

Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D removed reference to NeXT which it had in 2013.

So I am quite sure that NeXT(step) was not involved in the development of the game.
Or do you have maybe other (insider) information?

Anyhow, in my search I found this Usenet post, which caught my interest:

From: ***@darkwing.uoregon.edu (***)
Subject: Re: Games -Castle Wolfenstein on NeXT??
Date: 8 Nov 93 05:30:15 GMT
Message-ID: <***-081193133015@mpp-quadra800.uoregon.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc

Article-I.D.: mpp-quad.***-081193133015
References: <2bjv3i$evr@runner.uucp> <2bm2a0$32d@bcars64a.bnr.ca>
Followup-To: comp.sys.next.misc
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Oregon
Lines: 34
NNTP-Posting-Host: mpp-quadra800.uoregon.edu
In article <2bm2a0$32d@bcars64a.bnr.ca>, ***@bcarh775.bnr.ca (***
) wrote:

> Can you post any responses here?
> Wolf3D for PCs kicks!

This was posted a while back by ID SOFTWARE guru, John Carmack:

----------8<----------8<-----------

There will be a cool game coming out for NS soon:  Wolfenstein 3-D.

I simulated the super nintendo port under NS, and the simulator is being
cleaned up for general release.  It isn't exactly the same as the PC
version, but it is still a top notch game.

It will be released as pure shareware -- if you enjoy it, sedn us some
$$$.  We don't expect it to be a real income stream for us, but it is just
the right thing to do.

Doom (which is almost done!) has been developed entirely under NS, so
there will propably be a full shareware release of that early next year.

John Carmack
Technical Director
Id Software

----------8<----------8<-----------
- ***

As a former admin I am sure that this port never reached the Peanuts archive.

Do any of you know about such shareware Super Nintendo port of Wolfenstein 3-D for NeXTstep, John Carmack is (supposedly) writing about?

[Rhetorica]

Question 1: How much Wolfenstein development happened on NeXT?

Romero's autobiography, Doom Guy, Chapter 11, establishes that the first NeXTstation Color was purchased by id sometime during a winter break that started in Dec 1991. The total cost was around $11,000. This is a bit higher than the list price for a color slab mentioned here. Presumably the additional cost is accounted for by developer documentation, hard drive upgrades, et cetera.

The system would likely have shipped with NeXTSTEP 2.1, which was mastered March 25, 1991 and not replaced with 2.2 until February 20, 1992. NEXTSTEP Developer was not a separate product until version 3.1 (April 30 1993), perhaps because black/white fat binaries bloated the install CD beyond what could fit on a single disc, and of course to keep costs down for new Intel customers.

It is possible this first machine was a Color Turbo. We don't really know when it arrived. The normal NeXTstations (mono and color) had launched in Sept 1991, and the Turbos were launched in January 1992, so it's entirely possible that Carmack's first machine ended up being a Color Turbo running 2.2. This would also explain the higher price.

It is true that Wolfenstein's development happened contemporaneously with the team having access to NeXT computers, and in a very minor way, we can see the result of this in the final product:

This asset, hidden in Episode 2 Level 8, references Webster.app—or perhaps its assets—which has an aardwolf as the first entry with a picture:

(This could plausibly be discovered a couple of ways—either by typing "aa" into the search bar in Webster.app, or by looking at the files in /NextLibrary/References/Webster-Dictionary/pictures/.)

Joe Siegler reports that it was Tom Hall who was obsessed with aardwolves, which is very much on-brand for him—he was the team's goofball, and every project he touched, from Marooned on Mars to Anachronox, is stuffed full of secret jokes and extras. (Anachronox's debug menu has an alarm clock and a random game name generator. No wonder it took so long to finish production!)

However, that all being said, Wolfenstein 3-D's engine and level editor were still firmly rooted in DOS. The engine was an iteration of Catacomb 3-D, and the editor, TED, was a battle-tested holdover from their Softdisk days. There are no mentions in Doom Guy of the NeXT being used to work on Wolfenstein directly—when Kevin Cloud starts development of a hint guide (later, the manual) using a NeXTstation, Romero considers it noteworthy enough to mention, and remarks that it was higher quality due to being able to preview it WYSIWYG with Display PostScript.

NeXT machines aren't mentioned in Doom Guy again until circa November 1992 (Chapter 12), when the team ordered a fleet of them for everyone else to use after the revenue from Spear of Destiny's commercial release had come in. We can presume these newer machines probably came with 3.0, and were probably NeXTstation Color Turbos also. The machine that Romero has retained is definitely one of these.

So, basically, Carmack had a whole year of a new toy to play with, that mostly goes undocumented. During the level development for the commercial release of Wolfenstein, the machine was available for others to use (at least a little), but we have no real report from Romero either way on how it was used during the intense period of development before that. Even if Carmack does most of his work on DOS machines, he's basically got exclusive domain over the NeXTstation in early 1991, which would be prime time to use it for experiments. Indeed, Romero's final clue is:

DOOM's development started in January 1993. This was to be our first game developed fully on NeXTSTEP machines.

Which implies there was a game that was partially developed on NeXTSTEP machines, and I highly doubt typesetting the manual qualifies as "development"!

So, in all probability, yes, it seems that Carmack used the first NeXTstation to do some of the Wolfenstein 3-D code work during its original development. As far as I know, this never yielded a NeXT binary.

Question 2: What's the Super Nintendo version got to do with it?

The wording in the statement by Carmack should be read very closely:

I simulated the super nintendo port under NS, and the simulator is being
cleaned up for general release.  It isn't exactly the same as the PC
version, but it is still a top notch game.

The SNES port of Wolfenstein 3-D was, according to Romero, completed in three weeks, in 1993 after a contractor failed to make any headway. The team had to rush it, and they were all very frustrated that they had to suspend work on Doom to get it out the door.

This supports the idea that if there was any Wolfenstein 3-D development on the NeXTstation, it was cross-compiled to x86 DOS only—otherwise Carmack would not be talking about the arrival of a NeXT port in this post. The work was done in March 1993, which fits with an April 2 notice from Doom 0.4:

Yes, it's the DOOM ALPHA!  (Actually, we're just try to release these
every two weeks or so.  This WAS going to be a pre-beta, but a certain
person let us down Super-Nintendo-cart-programming-wise, so it's just an
alpha.  Nonetheless, here 'tis.)

This is probably the only time in my life I'll get to flex my knowledge of the Doom pre-releases that occurred around this era—they are, crucially, witnesses to how much progress id made on Doom around the dates when the SNES Wolf port was made.

There were two pre-alphas in February (0.2 on the 11th and 0.3 on the 28th), none in March, and one at the start of April. So the Wolfenstein 3-D SNES port, even though it didn't come out until early 1994, was programmed in this timeframe. I have to assume that the Usenet post from Carmack being reposted was from this very narrow period; from the dates it's clear that the team at id were itching to get back to work on Doom. The next pre-release is dated May 22, 1993, and it's clear that the team had a month and a half more to work on it; the game binary has doubled in size and the IWAD has grown by around 40%. Most of the engine was hammered out over the summer months, as the October 4/5 press release demo has all of the parts in place, minus the sounds. Tom Hall left id in July or August, having been depressed by a mixture of factors and personality conflicts with Carmack.

As best as I can tell, Carmack abandoned the Wolf port for NeXT in order to focus entirely on Doom. The team resented the SNES Wolfenstein port intensely, and felt they were doing important work; no one acted moreso this way than Carmack, who eventually became so tyrannical during Quake's development that even Romero was ready to resign. They were also rather avaricious: numerous times Romero mentions that all of them were excited about the money they were making, and with Doom on the horizon, a NeXT port of Wolfenstein would have seemed like a serious step backward for revenue in an era where immersive graphics drove sales.

[Rhetorica]

Precedent

I should underscore also that the id Software guys were unafraid of announcing unfinished projects:

This is a teaser about a game called The Fight for Justice starring a protagonist named... (drumroll) Quake. It was included with the in-game documentation for Marooned on Mars (Nov 1 1991). Other abandoned projects include the third Commander Keen trilogy and Tom Hall's Doom design bible, which would have resulted in a much more narratively-involved game similar to Half-Life or Doom 3, in which the protagonist is present for the initial teleporter accident that unleashes undead/demonic hordes on the research facility. The Doom Bible even mentions using "extruded shapes" to sculpt NeXTstations in the game (!!!!!), a feature that was definitely cut (although one can argue about HeXen's polyobjects and Shadow Warrior's portals eventually providing similar technology within the same 2.5D milieu...)

The Doom Bible was frequently raided for content in later Doom games. The Unmakyr of Doom 64 is listed as the "Unmaker" on the Bible's weapons/equipment page.