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Virtually ALL game designers have .plan files. As far as I know, it's the only place they're used still. :-)
Check out http://finger.planetquake.com/ for PlanetQuake's game designer .plan file browser.
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Chris Dunham
http://www.tetrion.com/~chameleo/index.html

I too received a "Forbidden" error on the original URL. Are we under-privileged in some way?
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It's already in progress as per John Carmac's 5-19-99 plan file:

I know SMP is a que for all the BeOS folks to ask about ports, so I'm going to head that off: Be has all the code for Q3 (and Q2, for that matter), and a version of Q3test should be available by the time they ship a release OS with OpenGL hardware acceleration.

A quote from Andrew Kimpton, the fellow doing the BeOS port (from an email to the BeUserTalk Mailing list 5-28-99):

On the matter of release dates it's important to remember that what has currently been released for Linux, Windows, MacOS et al is Q3Test this NOT Quake 3: Arena. It's a test program to explore hardware compatibility issues and the like. The final release date for Quake 3:Arena has not been set (to the best of my knowledge) however I believe it's expected it to be later in the year perhaps late Summer/Fall or there abouts. By which time Genki will have been released and undoubtedly installed in many a system.

Quake 2 has been released (gotta have a 3dfx video card though). Genki's shiped but the buzz is Q3 won't be released until Be's OpenGL supports multitexturing.

> Hmm, or a JNI-based Java bindings for Doom ... could see that ... :)

Actually there is a project that's done exactly this with Quake II. It's available at http://www.planetquake.com/q2java/. They are also now including some interesting XML based game config stuff. Neat.

The part that is not generally available are the maps from the game itself. The engine is available, but you have to download and put together your own information. With the proliferation of doom and quake sites this is not a problem.

John's original intent was to release the source code for each game engine a year after the game was released or when the next game engine was released. Doom and DoomII use the same engine, more or less and when quake was released John released the Doom code, actually a bit later since they had to have someone go in and clean out the third party software and clean up part of the code.

And now for some URL's

PlanetQuake probably the formost user site online for quake and doom related material. Any player of these games should not miss this site.

Quake 2 coding list.

id Softare id software's main website

id's source code archive

planetquake's finger information Latest .plan files from the gaming industries top game designers.

Where to find the Doom source

Cdrom and more files, look for various id titles

Lando

The part that is not generally available are the maps from the game itself. The engine is available, but you have to download and put together your own information. With the proliferation of doom and quake sites this is not a problem.

John's original intent was to release the source code for each game engine a year after the game was released or when the next game engine was released. Doom and DoomII use the same engine, more or less and when quake was released John released the Doom code, actually a bit later since they had to have someone go in and clean out the third party software and clean up part of the code.

And now for some URL's

PlanetQuake probably the formost user site online for quake and doom related material. Any player of these games should not miss this site.

Quake 2 coding list.

id Softare id software's main website

id's source code archive

planetquake's finger information Latest .plan files from the gaming industries top game designers.

Where to find the Doom source

Cdrom and more files, look for various id titles

Lando

Read this nice article from PlanetQuake on fillrate, pixels and texels.

This was fixed a long time ago.

Yeah, one beta release was just great for Quake 2. Got all those bugs right out of there. That's why it had to be patched from 3.05 to 3.20 over the course of the next year. Because it was enough beta testing.

When a company officially finishes a game just under a year after they release it, and then tries to do more beta testing for thier next game, that's called 'learning from ones mistakes'. Quake 2 was a mess out of the box. Hopefully, all this playing and drooling over Q3Test will make it actually in good shape out of the box.

Let me get this straight. You think that a *2D* RTS like C&C2 will do well in the market of RTS games with the likes of BattleZone 2, Metal Fatigue, Force Commander, etc looming on the horizon? (I saw BZone2 at the Beatdown and it looked awesome)

Westwood is beating a dead horse (the C&C 2D engine and interface) and trying to get as much $$$ for it while they still can.

Why not just help the Golgotha team finish their poject? At least that's open source.

Personally I'd rather see BattleZone 2 on Linux.

We had this problem at the Beatdown, and had to run our tournament on Q3Test 1.05 because of it. Silly id Software. You'd think they would have tested the dedicated server before releasing it. Ah well, hopefully it'll get fixed soon (i'm just suprised it didn't get fixed in 1.07)

http://finger.planetqu ake.com/plan.asp?userid=ridah&id=12643

Ok, so first guy is blabbing on and on to second guy about this awesome new PC he just got. First guy is leading second guy through his house, and obviously can't wait to show him it. So, he's going on and on about the 6x DVD player, and the speaker set with the surround sound and the huge subwoofer, and the 19" monitor, etc, and how it is the ultimate PC available at any price.

Now, we arrive at the computer, and switch to a point-of-view-shot of second guy, who is obviously meant to be the computer expert of the two, looking over the machine. His eyes finally come to rest on that little Intel Inside logo.

Second guy: (stifles a chuckle) "Whoops."

Cut to black; parade of benchmarks--SPECs, WinBench, etc. and just about every 3D game known to man, comparing the K7 to the PIII--after all, assuming Q3 is a good example, they should all have the K7 walloping the PIII--followed by quotations from every publication imaginable declaring the K7 "The fastest x86 chip on the planet," or words to that effect (and again, these should be quite forthcoming).

The basic idea is, turn the Intel Inside logo from something to be proud of on a new computer into something to be embarrassed of. Of course, Apple tried to do this (with moderate success I suppose) with their early iMac and G3 ads--they were, of course, horribly misleading (they used the ancient Bytemark benchmark, which has almost no relevence to the way modern CPU's work), but I seriously doubt very many people found this out.

Still, when comparing two x86 CPU's, the only thing that makes one better than the other is price/performance--with the G3, you're inherently comparing entire platforms. And if AMD can successfully convey the fact (and, barring huge supply problems, it will be a fact) that they have superior price/performance in every possible performance metric on every mid to high-end price point...well...perhaps Intel Inside will start to be interpreted as Ignorant Buyer Outside.

Of course, this all assumes AMD still has enough money to make ads. And that they aren't written by the genius who picked the name Athlon...

Check out the full plan here: http://finger.planetqu ake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=12549

"AMD K7 cpus are very fast."

What Linux needs is more developers. It has a never-ending thirst for them. The more you get, the more gems you get, the more likely the tough, killer apps, drivers, and infrastructure are developed.

well i think the third-party tools developers are also hoping for this as well. not long after the Linux is Not Red Hat (red-hat/codewarrior) article, i got an email from mark of metroworks customer service asking a few questions and agreed to a comment i made about the 'new breed' of application developers that will eventually flood linux.

... linux distributions such as 'rh', suse and caldera (and i single these distro's out because they are targeting the business market..) gain more market share the developers will more likely be 'application-developers' rather than the traditional hard core system hackers typified by the comment, 'true coders used Debian and Slackware'....

it was good to read another ddt rant (informative and easy to read with a bit of a chuckle)..things got pretty boring on finger.planetquake after he left.

Here is an old PlanetQukae interview with Hook...has a bit more of his background.

And here is an interview on bootNet with Carmack and Hook....it's got pica and opinions.

linux q3 notes

"It worked fine under a light load, but once people started pounding on it, the entire system slowed to a crawl and it took about a minute to process the CGI http requests, resulting in a really bad cascading effect of backed up processes. Lesson learned: WinCGI (using VB6 to create CGI's) just doesn't cut it under a heavy load. Each CGI process consumed about 4 megs of memory due to the VB6 overhead. Gross and completely unnacceptable. (hardware: Dual P2-333 w/512 megs of RAM, NT4 SP4)"

Javascript turns out to be really suitable. It's easy to pare down, has a good native interface, can compile to bytecode at runtime, and supports multiple contexts.

BTW, also worth a look are tinyscheme (which is a nice small embeddable Scheme), Python, Lua, and the fairly obscure ICI. ICI is a very nifty C dialect for scripting but it doesn't seem to be intended for embedded applications.

Nothing wrong with rolling your own, though. Especially if you've got a lot of scripters to support. I'm interested in seeing how Q3A's plans for scripting in ANSI C (using lcc) turns out.

It's not on the Quake 3 engine, but the Generations Q2 mod is as close you'll probably get for a while. Generations is supposed to have been out in January, than Feb, than March, but I'm sure it will eventually come out.
It adds BJ from Wolf 3D, the Doom Guy and the Quake 1 guy to Quake 2. You will be able to play single player with them and THEIR weapons, or even better, play deathmatch with your choice on converted Wolf 3D, Doom, and Quake levels. It's not perfect, and no I'm not involved in it, I've just got high expectations.. do yourself a favor and check it out.

schmoko

Those who had chance to do so could spot his explanation on how he tried to make rendering faster on two processors, I don't want to repeat what he did, but he failed. It seems one can't make real time rendering faster on few processors, it's too slow because of shared memory. Grr...

You forgot the part where he said that what he did was a quick hack, and that he would actually be making an explicitly threaded renderer for Q3 instead of just threading the game..

You can read it again here...... http://finger.planetqua ke.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=9801

Bob Black