QuakeForge And QuakeWorld Forever Merge

knghtbrd writes: "QuakeForge and QuakeWorld Forever, two of the largest projects based on Id Software's GPL'd Quake source, are teaming up to bring the world what we believe is the best Quake1 engine on the planet. The result for die-hard Quake players? QWF's cryptographic cheat prevention (which stop speed cheaters and auto-aimers cold) combined with QF's support for a zillion different operating systems. Here's a look at what can be expected along with press release. "

Comments

Some general answers

[Bill Currie]

First: I'm one of the quakeforge developers (taniwha), so this is basicly from the horse's mouth:), though I will probably miss a lot :/.

All files (exept for the work being done for the merge: it isn't ready yet) can be had from our downloads page. This includes the olde QuakeForge 0.1.1 release (source only), current CVS source snapshots, and Win32 binaries (both VC++ and Borland C++ 5.0 (?), but the latter is offsite). Anon Cvs accass can be had with:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.quake.sourceforge.net:/cv sroot/quake login
no password
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.quake.sourceforge.net:/cv sroot/quake co quakeforge

As to cheat protection: Quakeforge currently has a speed cheat protection mechanism, and QWF has cryptographic protection (I don't know the link, sorry), that we will be ported to QF during the merge. I'm not sure how QWF implements it (though I believe it involves blessed binaries), but I do know that the exchanging of a secret that becomes part of the checksummed packet (but never transmitted) in a manner similar to APOP was discussed. With just this combination, almost all cheats will be rendered difficult if not impossible.

Some interesting features in that have been implemented in Quakeforge are the ability to separate out the game data directories and your game save directories which also results in being able to run the game from any directory once it's configured correctly, native ALSA 0.5.x sound support (Linux), lot's of GL eye candy, the speed cheat fix and lots and lots of bug fixes to both quakeworld and the original single player game.