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I agree, Halo (the whole series) is good, not great. It has done so well because of extensive marketing to people with relatively limited FPS horizons. It really hasn't done anything new I can think of, it just decently rehashed things that were important at the time of its release. Nothing else (on a console) provided the majority of what any Halo game has provided. In other words, I've never liked Halo much and only play it when several friends want to play with me.. but I respect Bungie for their work because it seems to always be an excellent example of a successful game release.

In regards to sibling, I'm looking forward to learning more about Forge, which, afaik, is new to console FPS games. The earliest level design I remember was for an NES racing game. As for FPS's, in general, it's laughable; doesn't every PC FPS have a complete, free level editor? They didn't even come up with an original name. They just did a great job of including a decent feature in a piece of software when that softwares platform and audience are unaware it exists. And with all that new exposure, there will be very interesting things coming out of it.

Yup. And they've been under active development ever since in projects like Quakeforge, Darkplaces and Twilight.

There's other OSS engines out there, too, such as Crystal Space.

Instead of taking a day to compile a complex map, it could be done in the time it takes to brew a jug of coffee :)

I don't know about other people's experiences, but I've had no trouble at all getting Quake 2 to run in XP, as long as I used the "setup.exe" installer on the CD instead of the Autorun frontend.

Also, there's two native Windows executables on the original Quake CD. "Winquake.exe" is a win32 native software rendered Quake (which I've never tried in XP), and "GLquake.exe", which uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL, and worked just fine for me in XP.

Of course, there's also other modifications of the GPL Quake/Quake II sources that you might try out if you have a fast-enough machine. I like JoeQuake, Tenebrae, and QuakeForge for the original Quake, and Quake2Forge for Quake II. These Quake engine ports are available for Windows and Linux. I don't know about OSX though, because I never bothered to look into it.

I don't know about other people's experiences, but I've had no trouble at all getting Quake 2 to run in XP, as long as I used the "setup.exe" installer on the CD instead of the Autorun frontend.

Also, there's two native Windows executables on the original Quake CD. "Winquake.exe" is a win32 native software rendered Quake (which I've never tried in XP), and "GLquake.exe", which uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL, and worked just fine for me in XP.

Of course, there's also other modifications of the GPL Quake/Quake II sources that you might try out if you have a fast-enough machine. I like JoeQuake, Tenebrae, and QuakeForge for the original Quake, and Quake2Forge for Quake II. These Quake engine ports are available for Windows and Linux. I don't know about OSX though, because I never bothered to look into it.

This might be a troll, but I'll bite.

Don't like GNOME? Use windowmaker. If that's still too fat for you, use oroborus. Still too big? Try setting your window manager to "twm".

Don't like OpenOffice? MS Office isn't much better...maybe you'd better stick to HTML and CSS with Bluefish. Or maybe vim or Emacs.

FireFox still too slow? As long as you're dropping features by moving away, try w3m or lynx...two very capable text-based browsers.

Don't have a 3D accelerator? Play software-rendered Quake. Or (using that same project) use the SDL's aalib target.

Loki (the company) was popular around here because they worked with game developers to port their games to Linux.

One of the developers there also (and still does) works on the QuakeForge project.

It's in C. I had to check though.

The Build engine has a certain feeling that Quake and Doom couldn't replicate. Just let them port it and leave the Quake hacking for the QuakeForge guys. (Yes, I know the site is down at the moment. Google if you care.)

There's certain things you can do to make it harder to cheat, even with open source Quake.

For example, you can monitor the speed at which player objects are moving. When Neo says, "There is no spoon," the server can say, "Ooooh yes ther is."

I was thinking about making a fps called Godmode/PK. ... I'd even open-source the code and let everyone behind the Magic Curtain to write whatever hacks and bots they wanted.

Oh, you mean this little open-source FPS that, if I'm not completely mistaken, got a "few" more cheats after it was open-sourced? =)

I remember playing Team Fortress some time after the source release and for some reason one thing in the game seemed to have a ridiculous amount of frags. Must have been a lousy day to play =)

My online game of choice? Classic Mac's Tank Bolo. I wonder if anyone has made any cheat proggies for that, yet.

Hrmm, wonder if anyone's been lifeless enough to write cheats for bzflag... =)

Icculus Quake2
Quake2Forge

Both work with slight tinkering.

quakeforge has done a good job of updating quake 1.

I just downloaded the source, and this patch, a few hours before the slashdotting (woo), but it looks like id's quake source is trying to use Mesalib version *2* (we're up to 4.0.3 now), and is still full of stuff for those damn non-standard 3dfx cards.

Times change, and the source with it... Debian uses QuakeForge version, and it works just fine with X11 software rendering and GLX.

True, but so what? When id released the Doom, Quake and Quake II engines as GPL (thanks John!), nobody complained. Just look at what the QuakeForge project has done with it.

The reason I made the fix optional is while bunnyhopping unbalances games like TeamFortress, it's considered to be a perfectly acceptable skill in other mods.

Just a point, only 6-7 years? Where have you been?

Bunnyhopping has been around so long it is now an accepted part of the game by the general community. QaukeForge, one of the longest running client/server projects for quake and quakeworld, does hear you if you are a server admin and can't bunnyhop, they let you just turn off the "bug" that allows bunnyhopping.

We need games where the game engine is open-source, but the art isn't. Hell, even a Minix-style license would be fine (i.e. you pay for the game, but you get non-redistributable source with it, but you can distribute patches).

I don't find it too difficult to imagine a constantly evolving open-source game engine, where various companies periodically grab a version of the engine and sell art for it. This is where QuakeForge might be in the future.

Perhaps some enterprising programmer will take the Quake 3 engine and make it more easily configurable?

You bet your ass. Over at QuakeForge, we've already got a tree for it up and running. Look for more stability, among other things, to come from this.

Oh, we'll be porting code from our own source to the Quake II codebase, and vice versa -- so some really neat things will be happening because of this. Thanks, John!

Quakeforge, a project improving the original quake, already has the quake2 source in CVS.. you can find them in #quakeforge on OPN.

I did some work on quakeforge a while back, did some cool things.. but I've moved on, however.. myself and others have come back, although I may or may not make any changes.. as I am busy with some other small project at the moment.

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.quakeforge.net:/cvsroot/qua ke login (no password)
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.quakeforge.net:/cvsroot/qua ke co quake2

You can find the code in the quakeforge cvs:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.quakeforge.net:/cvsroot/qua ke login (just hit enter)

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.quakeforge.net:/cvsroot/qua ke co quake2

It would be nice to see a project like Quakeforge try to replicate Dynamix's design for the Quake engine and implement linking.

As for levels, they would be created the way they have always been and how it should always be: in a 3D level editing program.

But then, that's just me fantasizing :-)

No, Loki did port QIII. ID ported Quake 1 & 2, and those ports sucked. The Linux port of Quake 1 sucked so badly, the quakeforge project is working on fixing it up and making it work right (and they've done an excellent job so far!!)

I play Quake...Heck, I even try to help develop it. But I would love to see a game without goals.

I recently became interested in Dungeons & Dragons(r), and I noticed in the Dungeon Master's Guide that a bad DM leads his players around by the nose to the goal. Unfortunately, this is what almost every game designer does. Any game that doesn't put a ring in the player's nose tends to be branded as a puzzle game, aimed at those "more brainy."

I would absolutely love to see a game that didn't have a goal, even if it was proclaimed "pointless" by the gamers' tabloids.

A QuakeForge developer.

Bill - aka taniwha
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Yeah, I'm a QuakeForge developer.

Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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OpenQuartz came about because shortly after QuakeForge got started, we realised we needed free content for QF to be truely usefull to everybody, and so a few people (including Seth Galbraith) hanging out in our started the OpenQuartz project, though I believe Seth had some data from before Quake was released.

OpenQuartz's point is to allow you to play quake/quakeworld without having to go out and buy quake (though it can be had at a reasonable price from http://www.hartsunlimited.com/quakofforlin.html) Sure, it's nowhere near complete, but for only a little over a year of part time development, I'ld say it's doing well.

Bill - aka taniwha
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So, how long until this gets integrated into QuakeForge?
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Quakeforge, the next-generation QuakeWorld engine has SDL and SGL targets, and they run almost as fast as the svgalib target. They're certainly playable.

Also, check out New Breed Software, as they use SDL in pretty much everything.
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.

Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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try quakeforge.net

QuakeForge is a 3D graphics game engine based on id Software's legendary Quake and QuakeWorld game engine. Our purpose? To improve the state of the game by improving the engine and making it accessable to the largest number of players we can.

Quake 1 was GPL'd by Carmack himself.

Ways that newbies can contribute:

• give bug reports (the more detailed, the better and this is good practice for debugging)
• provide help testing (kinda goes with above)
• find a small, simple thing (eg, displaying a clock) that you want to implement and don't be afraid to ask for help.
• as you become more familiar with both the programming language and the project, work your way up in complexity.
• providing documentation is always a benefit and a good way to become familiar with the project. ("Oh, what does this cvar do?" grep study "oh, ok":)
• Just hang around with the crew in IRC. Just because we live in our basements in front of our computers doesn't mean we're hermits. A friendly smiley is always nice to see, especially when that heisenbug has been driving you crazy for a week :)

There's probably all sorts of other things a newbie can do to contribute, and I was not being facetious with that last item: never underestimate the value of morale support.

Bill - aka taniwha
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BTW, with 0.2.99beta3 of quakeforge, you can use gzip to compress the file and shorten downloads (not that decss.c is big in the first place). (0.2.99beta2 quakeforge qw clients and servers can transparently handle gziped files (even with the .gz extension) and in 0.2.99beta3 they have a reliable way of communicating this ability to each other).

member of the QuakeForge developement team

Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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A little bit of info on the cheat protection that has been implemented in QuakeForge can be found at http://www.quakeforge.net/speed_cheat.php theoddone33

As a member of the QuakeForge project, I'm almost glad to see this on slashdot, though I'm also saddened to see that it has had to go this far. We (QuakeForge, and the other groups like QuakeWorld Forever) have been struggling to get the word out of what "Slade" has been pulling for the past month.

QuakeLives in general, and Slade in particular, have been trying to violate the intent and letter of the GPL any way they can. It's a great insult to work diligently on improving the Quake source, doing all our damn-good merge work, only to see somebody try to do an end-run around the community process by keeping their source secret and making alliances to ensure that their secret source version becomes the de facto standard.

Yes, as well as Warcraft II BNE, Starcraft, Police Quest, and, of course, the Dungeon Masters.

What would really be cool is a multiplayer version of Dungeon Master I or II, possible using the newly-GPLled Quake engine.

You have the axe, he has the lightning gun, but then you mumble MON FUL IR, and he bursts into flames. Very cool.
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"I already have all the latest software."