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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.
Already has information on how to play with the source code.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
ID always release the game logic portions of the game shortly after retail, to allow mod makers to start hacking on it (it's been this way since Quake 2 - Quake 1 came "source included"). The quake 3 engine source won't see the public light of day till probably Christmas 2003, maybe even later.
The license agreement (included, and clicked on in order to install), says, under "2. Prohibitions": "j. prepare or develop derivatives based on the software".
Clear enough for correct people - and if think different, maybe the whole GPL/Open Source concept is flawed...
-- No sig today
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
I managed to get in the ftp sites that wasnt slashdotted already and got a copy of it, you can get a copy from: wolf_source.exe
Now how long until there's a Gentoo portage thingie?
And I'll just shut up now...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Do you REALLY think this is the engine source ? HELLO ?! This is source for the "game" code, that enables mod makers to create the all-popular MODs for the game, like Team Fortress and Capture the Flag for the original Quake. ID Software's policy has always been to: "Make game1. Make game2. Start making game3 and release the source for game1. Finnish game 3. Start working on game4 and release source for game2".
That way the engine licensees can take their time to release their ID Software engine-based games without losing any profit due to all these custom engine modifications people do in their spare time with games like Doom, Quake and Quake2. You can expect Quake3 Arena (and NOT RtCW) engine source some time after ID starts working on a game AFTER Doom3 (their current project) is released.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions when ID does this is that they are releasing the engine. Why would they do that? ID never would when the engine is still being sold. Would you pay 300,000 for an engine you can get for free? Hardly.
-Vic
Oh, goody. This means the market will soon be flooded with significantly more advanced and realistic deer-slaying simulators.
--saint
All they have is an EXE file so far.
Windows self-extracting archives tend to run quite well on Wine, the most popular application binary compatibility layer for FreeBSD and GNU/Linux operating systems.
Or try Info-ZIP Unzip on it; <crime violates="DMCA">it sure helps when dealing with Microsoft documentation archives</crime>.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Last time I checked, about 50% of the 1.3 servers in GSArcade claimed to have PB on and running. And the other thing that I've noticed from playing it is the first 2 or so minutes of playing are typically a bit choppy due to the security tests, so it's not very intrusive.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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
Meant to include this in the parent post.
A less hopeless attempt at cheat prevention would be to integrate a "web of trust" system into gaming communities.
This is all doable through cryptography, but I'll explain the protocol without the implementation details:
Players take a vow to play cheat free. They get their friends to confirm that they play cheat free. Friends confirm other friends. The web develops. This relationship is published to a well known repository and linked to other webs of trust submitted by other groups based on common participants.
Alice and Bob have never met before, but they can be pretty sure that niether is cheating because Alice trusts Frank, who trusts Trent, who trusts Eve, who trusts Andrew, who trusts Bob. This many levels of displacement is probaby enough to cover the population of the United States.
When you join a server to play, the server checks your position in the web of trust to that of others on the web, and tells you their trustworthiness. By playing against people who are trusted by people you trust you can play with higher confidence. You could set policies to only allow players who meet a certain trust level.
Someone who is actually confirmed to be cheating could damage the trustworthiness of a huge set of players, and would motivate the participants to quickly distance themselves from the cheater or be classified as cheaters themselves.
A lot of the attacks against this model are based on the implementation, but it sounds more promising to me than pursuing ridiculous anti-cheat clients.
Licensing the quake 3 engine costs 250k, there's your reason for not releasing the engine.
-Reid
So basically in a web of trust, I'm fucked. Every lamer out there will mark me as a cheater.
Liberty.
Players take a vow to play cheat free. They get their friends to confirm that they play cheat free. Friends confirm other friends. The web develops. This relationship is published to a well known repository and linked to other webs of trust submitted by other groups based on common participants.
At least one pitfall to this system is that it hinges on social interaction between participants.
It basically mandates that logging onto a random server and playing for an hour or so every couple nights isn't "good enough". Now you have to engage in moronic chit-chat with the dozen
retards on the server in order to can gain their trust. No thanks.
I play CounterStrike because the game is fun. The last thing I want to do is be forced to integrate myself into some "clan" of immature jackasses just so people can be sure I'm not cheating.
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.
"Source code" in an exe from a complete stranger! Let me rush out and get that!
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.