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If you want something to check your favourite servers with, I suggest XQF CVS.
You also might want to peruse the Linux Wolfenstein FAQ while downloading.
If that doesn't help you, check the Linux Quake 3 Arena FAQ for similar problems.

I'm downloading it from ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/wolf/linux/.

Happy downloading. I can't post a mirror right now, but I'm sure someone will soon :).

Some companies are doing things for linux gamers. Bioware is releasing Neverwinter Nights, which could arguably be the best rpg ever released, is going to be released for linux as well as windows, and most likely it will use opengl(is there another graphics api that does 3d in linux?). Nvidia is giving full OpenGL support in their chipsets. And let's not forget the guys at ID love opengl as well. Even if their numbers are few, there are people who still want to keep OpenGL alive, and they are pretty big names is the gaming industry.

PC game development is a marginally profitable endeavor anyway. For every iD, there are lots of losers. Aside from Wal-Mart specials like Deer Hunter and Millionaire, PC game development is a risky proposition at best. Retail software in general is an incredibly competitive business; the retail game software business is brutal.

Linux gamers, as a group, are willing to pay for games, but only for mega-elite titles. These are games that are already successful on Windows. In particular, multiplayer games are only successful with a large gamer population, most of which will be running Windows.

Console gaming is the only profitable market for most game companies. The margins are higher, the technology is simpler due to uniform hardware, losses to piracy are low, and there is significant revenue from rental outlets.

To those of you unwilling to dual-boot to Windows, do what I did - buy a cheap second (3rd/4th/etc) machine and a KVM switch. Or get a game console and rent software. Don't let funky OS advocacy blind you to reasonable alternatives. Hey, I love my TiVo, but the fact it runs Linux means diddly to me.

http://www.orangesmoothie.org/downloads/beta/osp-q uake3-0.99v3.zip

by unzipping it in your Q3 directory, with file paths preserved. Then, install

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/win32/q3po intrelease_129h_beta.exe

by running the executable and telling it where your Q3 directory is. Then, if you want to view the demos really easily, install

http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/index.pl?downl oad=http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/download/g eekplay-29-1.0b1.zip

by running the installer from any directory and telling it where your Q3 directory is.

Then, all you have to do is download the "demo" files from

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/s coreboard_0_0.html

By clicking on the "stats:1" link, and then scroll down, and download one of the demo files, like the file

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/d emos/fatal1ty-vs-ZeRo4-pro-q3tourney4-(ZeRo4)-g1v2 _1.dm_66.zip

for instance. Be sure to note that there are two files for every match - one from each person's point of view. Getting the file from the winner is more fun! Then, all you have to do is unzip the dm_66 file, and then double-click the dm_66 file in order to view it.

Note that these instructions worked for me, and are not necessarily going to work for you! All of this of course on a Win box.

Take a look at id software's corporateQuake engine licensing page. Second paragraph under 'The GPL'd Quake Engine'.

Remember this engine is the foundation for what Valve did with Half-Life, and the software and OpenGL rendering is still as fast as it ever was.

It is an important point because Counterstrike, a mod of a game based on a five year old engine, is the most popular online 3D shooter (based on number of servers).

Just as long as id doesn't forget about those of us who dig good, fun, singleplayer gameplay, as opposed to ho hum multiplayer. Don't tease me with release date shenanigans or release yesterday's product without doing something interesting to it.

Oh, and I ain't suckin' nothing down, neither.

DD

Just as long as id doesn't forget about those of us who dig good, fun, singleplayer gameplay, as opposed to ho hum multiplayer. Don't tease me with release date shenanigans or release yesterday's product without doing something interesting to it.

Oh, and I ain't suckin' nothing down, neither.

DD

I think you have made a couple very good points, particularly about the customer base. We have seen this time and time again from companies, particularly game developers and those with close relationships with MS. Many times gaming companies will quote statistics by other's experiences with linux games and say that "based on previous research, we have decided not to support linux." Although some developers (Dynamix, ID Software, and of course Loki) have started to move away from this trend, the majority have not not. I think that in the future we will see more of these companies move toward linux if for no other reason than being tired of MS.

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

"Unfortunately, after doing a some testing and analyzing the results, it appears that SMP Quake3 under linux isn't running at 100%. And when I say that, I mean it doesn't run at all. After trying to enable it with a "r_smp 1" command and a restart, I noticed this error message in the console log: "Trying SMP acceleration... failed". Not good. So, off to Google Groups I go to see if anyone else has had any success. After browsing through what seemed like hundreds of message board posts and pages, we were not able to find anyone who had this working successfully If someone knows how to get this working, we'd love to hear about it!"

You were not able to turn on SMP in Quake III Arena linux .. simply because it is not available yet. Id has never released a linux binary of Quake III Arena with SMP support. That's why you get the "trying SMP acceleration .. failed" message. We have in-house binaries though, and it's on the TODO list ... "when it's done"

TTimo

--

Linux Quake III Arena / Quake III: Team Arena

Id software

"Unfortunately, after doing a some testing and analyzing the results, it appears that SMP Quake3 under linux isn't running at 100%. And when I say that, I mean it doesn't run at all. After trying to enable it with a "r_smp 1" command and a restart, I noticed this error message in the console log: "Trying SMP acceleration... failed". Not good. So, off to Google Groups I go to see if anyone else has had any success. After browsing through what seemed like hundreds of message board posts and pages, we were not able to find anyone who had this working successfully If someone knows how to get this working, we'd love to hear about it!"

You were not able to turn on SMP in Quake III Arena linux .. simply because it is not available yet. Id has never released a linux binary of Quake III Arena with SMP support. That's why you get the "trying SMP acceleration .. failed" message. We have in-house binaries though, and it's on the TODO list ... "when it's done"

TTimo

--

Linux Quake III Arena / Quake III: Team Arena

Id software

"The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"

Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer you can just leverage the Power of the .Plan... ;)

"I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest .plan update, before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops. :)

I remember first playing Quake: it seemed to me like just another Doom clone, a "genre" that was very popular in the time.
Took me some time to realize that Quake was by id, then playing it again 'cause "if it's id, it's good".
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Quaker, but I agree - The original Quake wasn't a really big step from Doom.

I like work. I can sit and watch it for hours.

Where was I?

I was working at Best Buy at the time. I remember clearly counting down the hours to when the shareware was released.

When did you download it?

I hit the net the hour id said it was released. I was at work, so I had to improvise. Well, BB had a tech center that wasn't being used at the time, so I mentioned I was going to do some paper work at the front of the store (I was a Product Specialist at the time). I went into that room for about an hour and a half.

How did you download it?

I tried over modem first, as that is what everyone had at the time. FTP sites were slow, and there was none of this FilePlanet B.S. as we have it today. I tried to go direct to my machine, but the FTP site would have none of that, so I telnetted into an university account I had at the time I was admin, and did a FTP session there.

How long did the download take?

To the university? Oh, about a minute and a half. Seriously, back when only the select few had broadband, it rocked. To get it home from there, oh, I would say about two hours. But, not much outbound traffic at that university ;-).

First impression?

My computer really that slow? Damn, I need some new gear!

That is exactly what id software did with Quake. They released the DOOM, Quake 1, and Caste Wolfenstein source code under the GPL. You can also pay to license the Quake 2 and 3 source code.

That is exactly what id software did with Quake. They released the DOOM, Quake 1, and Caste Wolfenstein source code under the GPL. You can also pay to license the Quake 2 and 3 source code.

If MS had adopted OpenGL and stayed the course, hardware/software would be much farther along today

in a word: bullshit. what has gotten hardware and software to the point it's at today is the games. it's the games that push the hardware, not MS's adoption, it's the games that push the operating system and the libraries, not MS's adoption. and if you really think about it, it was The Carmak's company that pushed harder than anyone. and they've used OpenGL since '96, noless.

Tom Hall was the other original id programmer. Adrian Carmack (no relation to John), an artist, was also part of the original group. At the time they founded id (which, for some reason, prefers to spell its name in all lower case), they were working for Softdisk, then a publisher of monthly diskmagazines (now an ISP and web developer as well as online software seller), based in Shreveport, Louisiana. I know about this because I worked there at the time, and hence was a co-worker of the original id crew; I still didn't know they were working on the side to found their own company until they all quit at once -- the boss was really angry!

Has anyone noticed this problem with EA Games? A small, successful company comes up with a really well designed game (Ultima IV, Ultima Underworld, Thief, etc). EA buys the company and starts wrenching the life (money) from the franchise. A few years later the company gets funding cut by EA.

To me this is yet more evidence that makes me believe EA knows very little about how to run businesses. They exude the mentality that "Lots of Hype for a well known Franchise makes oodles of money." Witness Daikatana... The fact is that only fun games can make serious money.

Would you kill a cow for $100 in meat today, or milk it for $1000 in the coming year? EA's Business practices are not geared towards the long term health *or* profitability of the Computer Game market!

One more reason to buy id software games. They're not owned by EA-- it's just a bunch of guys who like making extremely vicersal games.

-Ted

here on gamedev.net. It is an interesting overview of the special characteristics and constraints of developing games for the PocketPC, making the case that PocketPCs are one of the best handheld game platforms currently extant.

Personally I think licensing debates are just about the most boring possible topics of discussion. Still, I think that in some cases they're warranted. In the article (on the last page), the author says something to the effect of the quake and doom engines are available for free under the GPL, so you can use them in your games. True, but he doesn't mention the source-release clause(s) of said license, which I doubt many game developers will want to abide by. OTOH, the author does provide a link to id's technology licensing page (interesting reading in of its own right), where it states that for $10,000 you can use a non-GPL (i.e. normal, closed-source) license. I'm not exactly sure from reading their page if you could use the engine unmodified along with your own non-engine code and content (maps, characters, et al.) and be abiding by the GPL while releasing a closed-source, commercial game (maybe if you said it uses the engine and where to get the source?). Maybe they mean the LGPL? Either way, $10,000 is a pittance compared to some other costs a (commercial) game developer faces.

Long after Descent and Quake have been forgotten, Marathon will live on via its source code.

Except a quick Google search tells me that Quake is released under GNU GPL and so are Descent, Descent 2, and a Tetris clone that gives you motion sickness like Descent. But the mission pack in many games (required for the game to run) is written by artists and level designers and is not GPL'd. This is why open source is thought not to be able to produce professional quality games: how do the artists and level designers eat?

For those of you really interested in 3D games such as Quake, you may want to check out id's collection of source code. There you can find the source to Quake, Linux Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.

For those of you really interested in 3D games such as Quake, you may want to check out id's collection of source code. There you can find the source to Quake, Linux Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.

All I have to say is, when the hell are they going to update their website?? I mean, c'mon, Quake II is so 1990's!
---
evil adrian

as if any major game manufacturers besides id want to port to Linux

You forgot Loki. <ot>(Too bad Tribes 2's online registration is an invasion of privacy similar to that of MS Office 2000; the program accesses the manufacturer's server when the app is first started, possibly sending personal information.)</ot>

Anyway, the goal of any for-profit corporation is to make a profit; that's where the term "bottom line"[?] comes from. If a game house can release games for Dreamcast without paying Sega royalties, the company saves several dollars on every unit shipped. This. Adds. Up. Big. Time.

The Quake engine is gratis - including for use in commercial products. The whole source code has been released under the GPL by id. Or, you can get a non-GPL license for $10,000.

I just thought I'd mention that, since I think it's quite possible to make a pretty nice commercial game using the Quake engine.

Q2 is $125,000 and Q3 is max($300,000 , 8% royalty).

Here's their licensing page.

Of course, the Quake (I) engine has been GPLed. But you're referring to Quake II and Quake III, which we recently learned are $125,000 and $300,000 respectively.

Offtopic, but id Software is selling on eBay the powerful SGI Origin 2000 system that they used to process all of the map data for Quake II and Quake III Arena.

• eBay action for SGI Origin 2000
• more pictures from id Software

...the impression I get is that he's saying "censor yourself, or be censored."

I haven't seen or intuited any kind of ultimatum in any of his statements, interviews, etc. I may well be overlooking them (not intentionally, I can assure you), but I just haven't felt like any kind of active threat or remediation is there in his responses. He feels strongly about what he considers appropriate, and he feels that games that reward "death and dismemberment" and that teach a moral detachment are bad, but he doesn't seem to be proposing gov't action of any kind. He recounts examples of media industry self-regulation, hypothetical and real, effective and not so, and would like to see private companies and whole market shares play by such rules.

Granted, I'm not sure I know exactly what he thinks true "encouragement" of the industry would be, and even effective self-regulation would have an effect on what we, as adults, could buy. (After all, if you remove the bottom half of the age-based bell-curve of gamers, then maybe iD won't have a large enough market for the next Quake to be worth the millions sunk into such games. Marketing suits say "Time to make games that pay the bills - why don't we crank out another Commander Keen? There's family stuff that we can sell!")

It still comes down to some old guy in a suit feeding "for the children" lines to the public to try and get elected. This one is just trying to pander to those of us who value certain civil liberties. Which one is really important? Probably neither - it's campaign talk, and we all know what that is worth.

The more posts I see from you, the more I find myself given over to the idea that you, sir, are a big dumbass. A big, pompous dumbass. Your views are so egocentric I nearly shit myself. The jargon file? Since when is my understanding of the english language supposed to be influanced AT ALL by this document? Is this a shrink-wrap liscense kinda deal?

Besides, the jargon file, much like modern dictionaries, have changed through the ages. Even webster adds new shit occasionally, or changes definitions to previously defined words.

Things change. You can either accept the changes, or live in the past and be regarded as an out-of-date hippy. If *YOU* don't mind people misunderstanding you, thats your deal. Don't tell me how to talk.

I realize that you are simply a karma whoring troll, but please, pull your head out of your ass for five minutes and realize that *you are wrong*

If you have anything intelligent to say, please feel free to email me. If not, please go fuck yourself.

PS - I *am* the real John Carmack

John Carmack

There is no such thing as a viable non-enforceable payment plan. Just ask makers of shareware.

You mean like the guys who made Doom? Somehow I don't think that Carmack got his Ferrari by downloading it for free and not getting around to pay Ferrari the shareware fee. I bet he paid for it, and that money had to come from somewhere.

id

Here is one of the .plan anouncements that first pointed to it, and
here are a few pictures of the actual machine.

--

I was pretty sure Cash came in during Quake... so I found this page with old press releases, which unfortunately doesn't have the whole text, but only a headline: "JOHN CASH JOINS id SOFTWARE AS "NETWORK GUY" - Cash Brings his Networking Expertise to id's QUAKE".

I'm almost positive that Cash came in towards the end of the Quake project to work on the networking.

--

--

--

--

I was pondering just the same thing. Doom wasn't the first 2.5D FPS, Wolfenstein was! None the less an id game. So yes, I think id then has ownership rights on every FPS?

Considering that id Software are creaters of Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D (basically all the good FPS games, except Halflife which runs on the Quake Engine and Unreal which does not) I doubt that we will be seeing a lawsuit based on clones of First Person Shooter's anytime soon (Carmack won't do it).

Think for a minute about how this would be bad. You have to grow a computer right? Well then you would most likely have to do all sorts of very precise measurements and set up conditions. These are going to require a massive lab to get to work properly. Also there is a high degree of failure possible. If people are having a hard time getting organs created via cloning and the like how likely is it that a computer is going to be created?

Also AI for the most part is still a plaything and something that one really can't easily study or actually get a job in. Sure you might learn something but getting money is top priority for survival.

I run a fairly large EverQuest-related humor site, so I've been following this issue since it started (even if only to make fun of it).

What's happening here is a thorny problem where individual "privacy" headbutts with everyone's best interests.

A quick background for those not in the know, Verant Interactive produces and maintains EverQuest, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. Thousands of players connect to Verant-administered servers and play alongside other players in a persistent world. It's the second major-market title in the MMORPG genre started by Ultima Online.

The way these games work is centralized servers store all the state information about the virtual world. To be general, nothing is stored client-side. This is required, because unlike games like Quake, the world is persistent. An early incarnation of this type of game was Diablo. The main difference between the newer games (UO and EQ) and Diablo is that with Diablo, all your character information was stored client-side. This became a major problem for the game, as it was only a matter of time before the file formats were reverse-engineered and people started modifying their characters to be super-powered.

By storing the information server-side, this type of cheating is avoided. No matter what you do, there will always be people who want to cheat, and if the information is stored server-side, people will try to exploit the server to cheat, or will "enhance" their client software in order to give them an unfair advantage in the game. Ultima Online has had a long history of dealing with this type of problem. Many security weaknesses in the UO servers were discovered (and fixed), but at the same time, these weaknesses were exploited by people, most often to do devestating things to other players of the game.

Recently, EQ has had the same things happening to it. A program known as "Show-EQ" has been around for quite some time, which simply gives a player an unfair advantage in the game. Verant has dealt with this in a subtle manner, changing their client/server data stream every so often to set back development of the utility.

In the past couple weeks, other programs for EQ have begun to pop up, with more nefarious purposes. The EverQuest servers have been crashed on more than one occasion by these programs. This is what brought Verant to suggesting drive-scanning. It's one thing if someone is just cheating, but it's another thing completely if they're maliciously trying to crash the game.

They took their first countermeasures not too long ago, by adding a feature to the client software that scans your Windows task list and looks for these "external utilities". If it finds one, it flips a "I'm a cheater" flag on your account and you end up with a cancelled EQ account.

They proposed to extend their search to the hard drive, to see if any of these programs even exist on your system... and this is where people started to get upset.

Verant has been very open and forthcoming about the proposed changes, keeping active discussions regarding the issue on the various websites dedicated to EverQuest, offering reasoning and explantions of the scanning process, and they even required all users to answer a poll question regarding the issue on login to the game (which turned up 80%+ in favor of the scanning).

Even with the overwhelming support of the scanning by their playerbase, they responsibly decided to back down on the issue.

Now granted, what they suggested could be a huge tool for abuse and privacy intrusion, but they did not try to "sneak" it past their users in any form. What they were proposing was nothing compared to some of the things that people thought they were planning on doing (there have been some heated arguments about it the past few days).

In short, its not really that they intended to intrude on people's privacy, but that they were seeking to increase the quality of their service and actually have a way to enforce their "no cheating" rules.

Verant should be commended on their responsible handling of this entire incident, not trashed in the court of public opinion based on reports that only tell half the story, like the one posted here on Slashdot.

Even our highly clueful friends at id were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Carmack later went on record as saying that leaving the back door in the finished product was a dumb idea, and that he regretted the decision.

Dave Taylor (formerly of id, founder of crack.com, currently at Transmeta)'s crack.com game Abuse (now open-sourced, I believe) uses LISP as its scripting/scenario engine... That was *really* cool, but couldn't survive the onslaught of the first-person shooters and real time clickfe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H strategy games during 1995 or so...

I emailed Robert Duffy at id and asked about repackaging the source into a tarball/zip for those without Windows or Wine. He replied saying:

Zoid will be releasing Linux based stuff soon.

So hold out people. :)

ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/sou rce/q1source.zip ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgam es/idstuff/source/q1source.zip ftp.3 dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsuppor ted/q1source.zip ftp2 .3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsupp orted/q1source.zip

(PS: my corporate nanny firewalls their site and tunneling out and lynxing from elsewhere gives me "Eeek, No frames support. Please upgrade your web browser" --- don't do that).

Actually, it's good advice...more recent versions of Lynx list the links inside of the frame, as well as the idiotic message the too-lazy-to-write-HTML-4 webmaster put there instead of doing the right thing. Not that it applies in this case, as http://www.idsoftware.com/ doesn't have any frames on it, and it perfectly navigable with Lynx. Of course, the webmaster should have put in alt=" " on all the non-linked gifs. But for the most part, the Id team seems to understand the value of not turning anyone away...or at least that some people are going to get Quake for a new platform even before they get a web browser. I mean, there have priorities.

ID software (the people who brought you quake, doom, etc.) also have a 5000 user limit on their FTP servers. To get around this, rather than clicking on a link in IE and getting a too many users message, I use CuteFTP. It says too many users in the log and tries again. It tries forever (unless you quit or stop it) and I can usually get in to any FTP server after about 2 minutes. Much easier than clicking on the link 100 times like a monkey would...
mduell

mduell

This hidden subsection - www.idsoftware.com/pr0n - at idsoftware is probably the funniest umm...hidden subsection of any major web site. AFAIK, it wasn't pimped by id either, but in the spirit of things, it started circulating among die hard quake players.

Warning - R rated, but NOT advisable for office viewing. OTOH, nothing too....well, just see it for yourself. :)

Wooly Mammoth.

This is the first milestone release where where the gif's on idsoftware's site don't look broken and out of position. I don't know what the problem was before - maybe the site was off-standard and happened to work in netscape/i.e., or maybe it was just Mozilla bugs... the point it, it works now. Obviously, development is going fine. I found one site that didn't load text correctly, but I'm not panicing. This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer. Hmmm, I'm looking into my crystal ball, and I can see a whole lot of programmers, myself included, jumping into the Mozilla project in the near future. Gotta scratch those itches, you know, and who would pass up the chance to lay a claim to having a part, however small, in building the new lizard?