Greetings All!

Yes another long delay in updates, but I am confident that it was well worth the wait!

Here is a list of what has been implemented since the last update:

Statusbar - Nice brushed metal style status bar with big clear font.
Weapons - All entities in the game have their own weapon inventory and weapon manager routines encapsulates all operations relating to weapons, i.e. picking them up, firing them, etc..
Status Manager - All entities keep track of their status, i.e. their health and ammo levels.  Status management routines keep track of all this data.
Projectiles - Proper rockets and other things can be fired just like they did in Doom complete with very satisfying explosions to top it all off!
User Interface - More work has been done on this including a nice intro screen.
Artifical Intelligence - All enemies have their own particular traits and behaviours which are all controlled by the artifical intelligence engine.  This works a treat!

Not much left to do now, on track for an end of March release!

In a mass programming session, I implemented doors completely.  They work perfectly and look great (in my opinion anyway!).  They have not reduced from the frame rate in any way.  My beta testers have given very positive comments about the doors.  A start has also been made on the artifical intelligence.  I'm also doing exams as the moment, so i actually should not be programming at all but anyway!

Hi! The time for a progress update has come (i've been practically mailbombed by people wanting to see one!) so here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for...

If you check the Progress Monitor above you will see exactly what is now implemented and in development, however shall elaborate more here and provide some screenshots.

Texture Mapping has had a lot of work done to it - it now renders at a tremendously high definition.  Massive numbers of textures can also be loaded simultaneously.  This allows great variation and style to levels.
Extended Memory Manager - One day during development, when I tried loading more than 2 textures, I bumped into big problems.  After 2 weeks of intensive coding, I wrote an extended memory manager which not only allows massive structures to be loaded into memory safely, but also keeps track of everything so as accidental memory loss will not occur.  This was a major and essential enchancement in which Doomling would not be possible without.
Sprite Engine - this was actually one of the hardest parts to implement and also to get operating at a high speed.  But, it is complete and works perfectly.  Objects can be picked up and everything looks just great.
Word Physics - I did say this would be implemented in some form, and a good start to this has been made.  When you move about, the screen bobs up and down just like it did in Doom, if you can remember.  This produces a very realistic walking / running effect.  Also different parts of the level can have different surfaces, like an "ice" effect for example.
Movement Controls - These are now fully implemented, however they will be configurable in the preferences dialog when I get one written.  Strafing is also included to add to the completeness of the gameplay.
Doomling Resource Compiler (DRC) - This is a crucial program which was written for the actual PC.  It takes an input text file describing all things relating to a game episode, such as all the textures, levels, enemies and the level names, etc.  It arranges all the information, compresses it and places it in to a .pdb file ready to by HotSynced to your PalmPilot.  Doomling can then select from a list of episodes you have uploaded.  This will allow users to create their own levels.  This program is always having features added as Doomlings capabilities grow.
EDling (Windows level editor) - This is basically a user friendly frontend for the DRC.  It allows users to create their episodes graphically, by selecting bitmaps for textures and simply "drawing" their levels.  This program then produces a text file which can in turn be compiled using the DRC.  This program is always having features added to it.
User Interface - The game now starts up with a episode selection box and a simple menu.  This is the base for all of the user interface of the game.  This part is relatively straightforward to program and is always being added to.
Enemy Artificial Intelligence - This part should be fairly simple and require little processor time to implement the way I have planned.  No real work has been done on this to date.
Doors - This is very simple to implement and will require a few changes to the 3D engine.  This is not a high priority at present.

and now for the best bit :
Multiplayer Deathmatch via IR - I know it sounds insane, but I have managed to get realtime communication between to PalmPilots via IR.  This means that multiplayer mode can fairly easily be added to Doomling.  Imagine having a deathmatch on a PalmPilot!!  The mind boggles...

Do I hear people wanting a release date???  I'm not 100% sure yet.  If I hit no big problems, I would expect a release date of Febuary or March 2000.

Here are some screenshots of the current state of development:

Hello again everyone!  I've been heavily involved with my actual job recently and also in a new Linux Users Group that has started up in Northern Ireland.  But, this doesn't mean I have not been working on Wolf3D in my spare time.

Textures are now rendered in twice the resolution they were in the last update, this looks really great, check the screenshots.
Player controls are implemented, you can walk around anywhere you want and you can no longer walk through walls!!

I have been working on the world physics, this is most obvious in the player movement at the moment, i.e. when you walk, you actually accelerate properly and when you turn it starts slow and speeds up.  If you don't really know what i mean, check out Doom on the PC and note how the player moves - i will also be implementing the bobbing up and down that Doom did also!!

It's really turning into a very fun game already and the enemies arn't even in yet!!

In the last update earlier today, I got the texture mapping going but it was rather blocky and was hard to see any detail in the texture when moving through the level.

I said that I had an idea that would double the texture resolution without dropping the speed.  I have implemented this idea now - it worked first time and not only doubles the texture resolution as i thought it would, it also has brought up the frame rate to 19 frames per second.

Here are the screenshots of the high resolution texture rendering:

Behold - texture mapping is implemented!  It looks great and now runs at 17frames per second. I have in mind a technique to improve the appearance of the texture mapping without losing any speed.

Here are the shots of my palm running it:

Hope you liked the screenshots!!  I took them of the real Palm just in case you thought they might be fake!!
The picture of me at the bottom shows that this project has not killed me just yet...

Well, today we have more than doubled the frame rate again!!!!
I am now getting  . . . . .

This is very pleasing and darn impressive to watch, believe me!!  I'm heading out tomorrow night for some serious partying and will be in no fit state for anything - especially coding, believe me!!

I will do the texture mapping when i recover on Saturday or Sunday...
I'm also going to work on the player movement engine - this will contain world physics, i.e. accelerated movement and rotation, making it VERY smooth movement.

Oh and just in case you people were wondering, the .PRC file is currently 23k - this is all you need, no extra .PDB file or anything else.  It's standalone.

In the next progress update, i will make a complete summarised list of all completed features and also one of things to be done.  This is just so everyone knows exactly how far I am into the project and how much there is to go.

Something incredible has happened - yesterday it was going at 3fps on the Palm.  Today, it's going at 10FPS!!! I'm amazed at my optimisations and now it doesn't require MATHLIB anymore...it's standalone at last..

However, i expect to get upto about 15~16FPS in the next few days with texture mapping..

Also, I have no need to interlace anymore so you don't get the horrid lined effect like you seen in the last screenshots.

Here is a comparision of what it did look like and what it does now without the crappy interlacing.

After completely rewriting the raycasting engine to remove some annoying bugs which were lying around for a while, i decided to start getting it go on the actual Palm Pilot for the first time.  Frighteningly, it only took one day to get it to actually work on the Palm.  I had a friend round at my place called Duncan, he very willingly sat at a debug console while we discovered many unusual traits of GCC for the m68k - like it can't multiply and add on the same line of code 8-))

But, we perservered and have achieved an reasonable initial speed of 3 frames per second.  Since this only day 1 on the actual Palm Pilot, and we are at 3 frames per second, this baby will be out forming Quake in about 2 weeks 8))

I haven't implemented the texture mapping on the Palm version yet, because I want to concentrate on optimisations to the engine for now...texture will follow soon - don't worry.

Here are the amazing screenshots of it actually running on my palm III.

I'm sure you'll all be glad to here that Wolfenstein 3D is back on the move again... After a long delay doing the first half of my A-level exams, it's now the summer holidays and I have time to work on Wolfenstein again.  Even though I have a job, it's only 3 days a week usually!

This evening I was re-familiarising myself with the code I began to write a few months ago and I did more work on the function for writing to the screen in grayscale.  Before it was going VERY slowly but now its going much much faster!

Yes!  I've completed the 3D raycasting engine!  It does full texture mapping also!  I have designed only one wall texture at the moment, but it's very easy to add more.

It's moving around VERY quickly, but it can go much much faster when I remove all floating point operations over to fixed point operations.

And just in case you think all this is a stupid joke, here's two SCREENSHOTS of it running:

I'm deadly serious about making this a reality....

The 3D engine is turning out to be quite simple to develop.  It's currently producing a recognizably 3 dimensional room.  I can walk around in the room using VERY simple controls.