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Id Software and Activision Wolfenstein Source
An enthusiastic Anonymous Coward writes: "Id Software and Activision released the
sources of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Single-player and multiplayer included. Unbelievable! Another great surprise from Id Software!" Update: 04/14 15:19 GMT by T : Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.
Don't be surprised in a month when suddenly people start missing a lot less often in multiplayer mode.
What's your damage, Heather?
Another low-water mark in terms of Slashdot content quality.
/. access. Stuff like this posting really brings down the average content quality big time.
"Developers: Id Software and Activision Wolfenstein Source" - English is not my native language, but surely, this is a fairly crappy headline. "Developers: Wolfenstein Source Code Released" or something similar would have been way, way better.
Second, the posting itself is shit, written by an "enthusiastic anonymous coward" who is apparently about 13 years old. Who the hell is reviewing these news items before they hit the front page? Whoever posted this one (hi tim) should have done some creative re-writing, or better yet, picked another submission about the same thing (surely there must have been a couple about something this well-known).
In its current state, I am very glad I'm not paying a cent for
The .pak only contains the game code in byte-compiled form.
It is not easily modifiable on it's own, although there are utilities to convert it back into something like it's original source. ID released the actual QuakeC sourcecode a little later, along with a byte-compiler etc for it.
it's good to see ID keeping with their tradition of slowly opening up their source code. how many other gaming companies out there do this ? many still freak out when you try to play w/ their 20 year old roms. quake 1 is still a great game, fast, and can be run on nearly any machine still operating, of course i don't think they're giving away the NiN tracks, the RIAA would have a fit !
ID is definately one of the best software companies and definatey at the top of game companies. They're a business, they make money, & they give back to the community.
so they keep the code for 3+ years, at least they won't go broke and stop having code to give us.
it'd be nice to see other companies doing this !
way to go ID Software, thanks for continued good deeds.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Team Fortress was a Halflife based mod.
Guess again.
Team Fortress Classis was a Half-Life mod, the original TF was a Quake 1 mod.
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
It's a shame to see good people making good comments get bad karma for posting useful information, but it's also a shame to see a message board filled with 30 people all saying the exact same thing. How many checked to see whether someone else had posted regarding the code being just game source and not engine source before repeating that fact? Not many, seemingly. 30 people can't have all posted that comment simultaneously. It looks like slashdot is all soapbox and no audience, especially seeing as virtually everyone seems to be well aware of the existing policy on releasing source, anyway.
Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.
Speaking as a professional game player, the game-level code is the interesting part. Graphics engines get pretty boring after you've worked on a couple of them. Go back to a graphics book from 15 years ago, back before PC gaming took off, and that's pretty much how graphics engines still work. Game-level code, though, now that's interesting. There are many more open problems in that area, or at least problems that can be solved in hundreds of ways, as opposed to three or four.