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FreeDoom, OpenQuartz Help Recreate Classic WADs
Toddd writes "Everybody knows that the Doom and Quake engines are opensourced. But the game data (such as graphics, sound, and maps) are not. Therefore, if you want to check out the quality of today's source ports like Doomsday for Doom or Tenebrae for Quake, you either need to download the shareware versions or buy the retail boxes. However, what is less well-known is the existence of projects like the recently updated Open Quartz, offering 'GPL-compatible content - including models, maps, sounds and textures - which are required for a fully GPL game using the GPL Quake source.' FreeDoom also does similarly for Doom." We recently covered a new release of Doomsday.
Are these games even sold anymore?
I don't see Doom around much any more, but almost every game store that still sells PC games has a copy of Quake (full version) laying around for $5 or $10. Hardly the kind of money to justify piracy, even for those that can justify pirating games in the first place.
If you're going to buy the game then WTF is the point of using FreeDoom or some other version when you have the real thing?
The primary purpose of most of these releases is to extend the engine in one way or another. Often they add improved graphics and modifications to the control capabilities (especially with Doom ports, which may add mouselook and jumping, for example). In many cases you'll want to replace much of the original content anyway to take advantage of the additions to the engine.
Then, of course, there's the fact that both of these games were originally written for DOS. Although Windows (and Linux, and Mac) versions were released, they can often be harder to find, while a source port may run better anyway.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
No offense to the artists and developers of FreeDOOM, as I'm sure they work very hard, but I saw this a few weeks back and just thought it looks terrible. Personally I think some of the artistic concepts are pretty cool and interesting, but overall they just aren't professionally executed (at least not up to par enough to compete with DOOM and DOOM II, which I've seen on sale for 20 dollars or less at some places.)
This is a pretty consistent problem with "free" software, though. Most of the time the graphics just aren't up to snuff enough to compete with professionally developed games. While the coding seems pretty solid, it's obvious that the art needs some work. It'd be interesting to get some input from artists who use computers as a medium: why is quality art in open-source or free games so lacking? What draw isn't there for good artists to pick up a project and help out? Inspiration? Income concerns? Inquiring minds want to know!
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Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
yeah they're around. i picked up a Doom Collection at walmart for $9 two weeks ago, its Doom, Doom2, and Final Doom with win32 frontends so you can network em and whatnot without havin to revisit the archaic days of ipxsetup.
but yeah they all work with Doomsday so it was a pretty good buy IMO. not sure about Quake1..i see Quake2 in stores still, sometimes in bundles. but havent seen the first one in a while really.
That's impossible. The shareware version doesn't have the datas for the other chapters.
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.