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As a side quest from my Quake III: Arena port using the id Tech 3 engine, I have ported Return to Castle Wolfenstein to iOS and tvOS for Apple TV.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein for iOS and tvOS for Apple TV
https://github.com/tomkidd/RTCW-iOS

Castle Wolfenstein is a 55-level add-on scenario for the original Wolfenstein 3D. It features new walls, objects, projectiles, and enemies, including Gremlins, Patrols, and Death Knights. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Mac at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Blazkowicz, a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments.

Back when I first looked into the possibility of doing an id Tech 3 port, I at first thought that I would need to do some sort of single player game using id Tech 3, like RTCW. When I was poking around on the Internet, I discovered that there’s a project called iortcw which is more or less a feature-parity copy of ioquake3 that’s designed to run RTCW. At some point after working with the Quake III port and getting the latest ioquake3 code in there I got the idea to basically make a copy of it, copy over the iortcw files to it, re-graft in the dwindling number of iOS-specific changes, and have it up and running in no time. And as usual, this was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Of course it was.

There’s this concept of an “id Game” and up until a certain point it was straightforward: a game that id Software developed. At some point it got a little squishier. They briefly got into the publishing game, with the games Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic and Hexen II being published by id Software (through GT Interactive), so those games had the id Software logo on them but they weren’t explicitly “id Games”, both because the label “a game by id Software” hadn’t been coined yet and also because id didn’t own the Heretic/Hexen IP. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was, as near as I can tell, the first “id Game” that they did not develop directly but was based on their IP. It was at this point that id and Activision had decided they had enough franchises that they could farm out some of them and have games released more often. By this point Carmack had revealed that they were working on a new DOOM game (which would go on to be DOOM 3) so having just come off a Quake game it made sense to do something with their other tentpole franchise.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein was titled like a sequel to either Wolfenstein 3-D or Castle Wolfenstein/Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (the Apple II games the IP was based on) but in reality it was essentially a remake/reboot of the original games. The single player portion was done by Gray Matter Interactive (later absorbed into Treyarch) and the multiplayer was done by Nerve Software. It came out in 2001 for Windows with a Mac OS X and Linux port releasing the following year. There were also ports to the (original) Xbox and PlayStation 2 with slightly different names and content. An expansion pack was planned but that’s a whole different story.

I believe the mod source code (so, the game rules code interpreted by the engine) was released but I’m not sure when. Probably shortly after the game’s release. The source code for the full game was released under the GPL in 2010, five years after Quake III‘s source.

Like I said I had discovered the iortcw project, which appeared to be a more or less feature parity copy of ioquake3 but with the differences required to run RTCW. The first thing that darts out is that there are two different copies of the code, one in a SP directory for single player and a second in a directory called MP for multiplayer. This is how id chose to distribute the original source, and the final game consists of two separate executables. To this day when you launch the game from Steam, you’re prompted with a choice as to whether or not you want to run single player or multiplayer, and when you’re in one executable, if you choose to play the other way (so, you launched the single player executable but you want to switch to multiplayer), the executable launches the other one and then exits.

There’s some logistical reasons for this – for one thing, separate teams did the single player and multiplayer portions of this game. Another advantage this has is that if the multiplayer game needs to have security and anti-cheating concerns that wouldn’t apply to the single player game, you can avoid needing to have that in the single player executable. But on top of all of that, RTCW posed a somewhat unique challenge: the use of nazi imagery.

In the game you’re fighting nazis and so it only makes sense that there be nazi imagery on the walls of, say, the prison/castle you’re escaping from initially. However, something that’s always plagued the series is when they want to sell the game in countries that outlaw nazi imagery – namely Germany. The original Wolfenstein 3-D game was banned for sale in Germany and actually caused certain laws regarding nazi imagery in video games to be created.

For RTCW, Activision wanted to sell the game internationally, including Germany, so they created a version of the game that omitted references to nazis directly and doesn’t feature the swastika, but rather a “double iron eagle” symbol which is reminiscent of Third Reich imagery without actually being Third Reich imagery. So American audiences got the nazi version and German audiences got the “wolves” version (their substitute name).

However one of the anti-cheating maneuvers the id Tech 3 engine had in place for Quake III was to institute the concept of a “pure” server. Namely: everyone has the same game files. They had run into issues with previous Quake games whereby people would replace models and textures within the game to make enemies easier to see and hit. Quake III‘s pure server concept ensured everyone was running the same files. However, this wasn’t compatible with the concept of a separate non-nazi version for Germany.

So the compromise was: the multiplayer executable loaded up its own, separate set of pak files, and everyone saw the “double iron eagle”/”wolves” version of the bad guys, and only the single player version would feature the nazi imagery in the regions that allowed it.

That’s a handy reasoning for why RTCW in particular used separate executables, but other id Software games since then have also done the same thing, including 2016’s DOOM. That game also had the multiplayer farmed out to a different developer so perhaps there was similar reasoning but I wonder if part of it is that id believes there are tech advantages to having the two split out. Even when you switch modes in DOOM on the Xbox One or the Switch, it’s really launching a separate executable, causing the whole screen to freeze up briefly.

So my plan was to make a copy of the Quake3-iOS structure, rename directories within it to reflect RTCW, and then start grafting. I made a directory called RTCW-SP and one called RTCW-SP-iOS, since this whole separation of concerns meant that my port, too, would need separate apps. I copied over all the files, then went through and did a diff of the base ioquake3 code with the Quake3-iOS code, and re-making those changes to the RTCW-SP-iOS code as well. This was actually pretty simple. And almost nothing else about this project was even remotely close to being as straightforward.

When I tried running it for the first time, it didn’t get far because it couldn’t load the .qvm files from the PAK files. Something I mentioned briefly in my Quake article was the “rules” code for these games gets compiled into it own separate file. This allows the game to load in the rules and game logic dynamically, the practical upshot of which is it allows for mods – they can release the mod source code and people can make their own mods to load in the game.

With the original Quake, since its original shipping platform was

Return To Castle Wolfenstein Fur Mac