Carmack Discusses Delay of Q3A Source

Time Doctor writes "John Carmack moved to a blog format, and updates everyone with his thoughts on graphics and why licensing delays the (still) inevitable Quake 3: Arena source, when it was expected before the end of 2004."

Comments

He knows the market at least.

[NashCarey]

He wrote in his blog, "I'm not quite sure what the tone is going to be - there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks."

Uh, Yeah....

Well at least he has a good point.

[garcia]

Just be thankful that they DO release the source for these games. It keeps them alive. I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.

By releasing the code for these games it increases their worth and their life for quite some time.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Apathetic1]

Doom II is still my favorite deathmatch game. I'm glad iD is committed to opening the source to their older engines so that they can still be played. I wish more game companies would do this.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[HeghmoH]

Bolo, from about 1987. Of course, the Bolo-playing population is vanishingly small, but it does live on today. I'm sure somebody else will come along with more examples shortly, but people playing eight-year-old network games isn't that remarkable.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Peter Cooper]

The thing with Quake is that there are no other games from 1996 which even compare to today's games. Quake (deathmatch) can still just about hold its own even against today's titles like UT2004. The graphics are scrappy but all the elements are there, and Quake 1 is still as fun as hell.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[paithuk]

How about this? http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/26/ 2314244&from=rss

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[djdavetrouble]

Just curious, why is doom2 your fave deathmatch ?

-Dave

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[TheRaven64]

The original Quake looked hideous in comparison to modern games. The OpenGL version was a considerable improvement, as was QuakeWorld (which, sadly is not supported by all mods). Projects like QuakeForge have continued to improve on this. I still consider Quake 1 to have been the most fun of the Quake series, and the fact that I can play it on about any (relatively modern) platform I've used due to the source code being available is a huge bonus.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[jackbird]

It's not my favorite, but I can see why he thinks so - balance.

Every move has a countermove (even more so in Heretic, which is my nominee for perfect deathmatch, because of the items). 2 highly-skilled doom2 players can continuously battle for 10 minutes or more before a frag is scored on a small map like Dead Simple, throwing every weapon in the game at each other along the way.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 1 is still as fun as hell.

I thought that the point of hell was that it's not fun. So do they play Quake in Hell and Tetris in Heaven? Watch out Satan! Hell is going to get Slashdotted once the news break free.

This reminds me of a tombstone in Nethack describing the possible downsides of being an atheist/agnostic:

Here lies an atheist.
He's all dressed up,
With no place to go

------------------
Anonymous Agnostic

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Apathetic1]

A few reasons...

It runs on everything. There aren't very many games I can play with my housemates because my Windows machine is the only one in the house.

The level design is great. Maps like Entryway or Dead Simple are the perfect size for two to four players because there's room to run but not so much that you never see anybody else.

I love the weapons, the plasma gun in particular.

Don't get me wrong, I still fire up Quake 3, Tribes, C&C Renegade, etc. occasionally but I always find myself coming back to Doom.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

In high school my teacher had that installed on all the computers in our computing class, amazing game :-). This wasn't that long ago by the way (I'm still at university at the moment).

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

people still play Myth, from 1997.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[SiO2]

Umm. Nethack. How old is that? While it might not be a network game, it still has a very strong following and a vibrant development community.

SiO2

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

people playing eight-year-old network games isn\'t that remarkable.

What? Why? Because you could think of an older one? Congratulations, but that doesn\'t justify your statement.

The vast majority of PC games, online or not, are forgotten within 2 years of release. 8 years is quite remarkable. The only game I know of whose popularity has survived that long, outside of the already-mentioned Quake, is Subspace. Even the MUDs I used to play 8 years ago are all gone, and MUDs are notoriously long-lived.

From the way it\'s looking now, Counter-Strike will be this generation\'s legacy, and possibly Battlefield 1942. Also Everquest.

Of course, the Bolo-playing population is vanishingly small, but it does live on today

If mere survival, rather than actual # of current users, is your criterion... then Bolo isn\'t that remarkable, either. Dig up any old 70s or 80s game from any platform and I\'m sure there\'s someone playing it somewhere.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[HeghmoH]

If mere survival, rather than actual # of current users, is your criterion... then Bolo isn\'t that remarkable, either. Dig up any old 70s or 80s game from any platform and I\'m sure there\'s someone playing it somewhere.

How about games you can play over the internet? Netrek might be older, but I can't think of anything else.

On a completely unrelated topic, why do all of your apostrophes have backslashes in front of them?

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Mechanik]

I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.

Your point, in general, is taken, but there are those of us that still enjoy a game of Netrek now and then :-P

Shit, now I feel old...


Mechanik

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about games you can play over the internet?

If there are only a few people still playing does that characteristic really matter?

Some games are based on game mechanics which predate that specific presentation of the game. Is it the game that matters, or the con/persistency? e.g., does \"Chess\" or \"blackjack\" count, or must a specific version of online chess or blackjack have survived for it to matter? Or perhaps more controversially, how old is \"Neverwinter Nights\" supposed to be? A large part of the old NWN community migrated to the new version, but the games are nothing alike save in name; does the community persistence matter at all for measuring longevity?

How about games which have retained consistency of code but whose connectivity options have evolved? e.g. Empire, or BBS door games which are now available through telnet or HTML?

What about PBEM games?

What if the universe is a game? Wouldn\'t it itself set the standard? Bolo isn\'t very impressive by that yardstick.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially if they're stuck on a Macintosh.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it looks hideous. Then again I never owned an expensive 3D gfx card and don't plan to. Doom and Quake 1 run at *very* nice framerate using software rendering on my Duron. They have thousands of levels and total conversions, and there's still more coming out every week. Not to mention some improvements that have been done in the src code (eg, increasing max linedef limitation in Doom.)

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Guspaz]

I used to play Bolo on my mac back in the mid 90s. Singleplayer though, I had no net connection.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Peter Cooper]

Hideous compared to Half Life 2 ramped up to 1280x1024 with 4xAA, sure. But not like a 1988-1996 jump. Bear in mind Quake 1 was pretty much full 3D, so it sits on the same platform with modern games bar the physics and lighting.

If you run Unreal Tournament 2004 in 320x200 mode (I know I've done it with one of those new UT games) it doesn't look much/any better than Quake which used that res by default.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Urthpaw]

People still play Warcraft II. I don't think that open-source has had a significant impact on the longevity of Id's earlier games. The fact that they were solid games that many see as still worth playing is far more important. The original half-life, released a year after quake II, has orders of magnitude greater online presence, despite being closed source.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[otis wildflower]

I can't see much point in single-player Bolo, though I had a hell of a time when I'd leave my computer lab open after hours and me and my buds would hijack the Mac LCs..

I had even designed the north campus of the University at Buffalo as a giant Bolo map.. Ran it at UBCon one year..

Then I discovered Netrek and lost a couple of semesters there...

AAh good times..

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphics are scrappy

The great thing is, my computer is way better than the one I ran the original Quake on - so I can run it at much, much higher resolution. Also it's older, so I can run it at much, much higher resolution than I can newer games. The upshot is, the graphics aren't that bad. Better than console games...

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could play WinBolo if you don't have a Mac. http://www.winbolo.com/ / http://www.winbolo.net/

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

As regards many Quake mods not supporting QW, FTEQuakeWorld is a Client/server that has a staggering list of abilities, including running Quake-only mods perfectly (it translates the progs on the fly) http://fteqw.sourceforge.net/

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Guspaz]

I seem to recall there being computer-controlled players, at least in the vesion I played. However this was all ten years ago so my memory could be faulty.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[DashEvil]

Not sure if you, or anyone else here is aware of this, but there is a client/server port for Doom/Doom 2 called ZDaemon. (www.zdaemon.org)

Which in itself is a great example of how the community updated and rewrote the network code.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Sigma 7]

The thing with Quake is that there are no other games from 1996 which even compare to today's games. Quake (deathmatch) can still just about hold its own even against today's titles like UT2004.

While it's true that no other game in 1996 is memorable off-hand, Quake's deathmatch can be consdiered obsolete:

1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.
2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry.
3. The crosshair is slightly off center.
4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps.
5. The Grenade launcher balance is debatable - while I might agree with it, it was classified as an overpowered spam weapon.
6. The Rocket launcher balace is also debatable - it can do a long-range instant kill.

But other than these minor issues, I still see people going for the nostalgic gameplay - whether in QuakeWorld, or DMC under Half-Life.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Apathetic1]

There's a few ports out there now... I use Doomsday for Doom, Doom II, Heretic and Hexen. I'll have to check out ZDaemon.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[NormalVisual]

Wow, that takes me back. My Bolo experience is limited to playing the Apple II version back in 1983, though. No network or multiplayer, but still a hell of a lot of fun. :-)

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't answer his question: Why do your single and double quotes have backslashes in front of them?

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, your link is busted (probably because of the backslashes in your href). The actual link is here.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's low MAX_EDICTS

"its".

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's true that no other game in 1996 is memorable off-hand...

A million Chrono Trigger fanboys would beg to disagree with that assertion.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[plague3106]

1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.

I never thought so...just having quad doesn't mean you can hit your target any better. In my CTF 4 days, quad + str rune usually was more dangerous to yourself then anyone else.

2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry.

I never experienced this...is it common? I never heard of it, and i was playing quake in college for years (96-99). Such a bug would go around the dorms pretty quick I'd think.

3. The crosshair is slightly off center.

I'll give you that, but only b/c myself and no one i knew ever used the crosshair. Not sure why that would be such a huge deal though anyway...

4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps.

I run a dedicated server w/16 players on a P90 w/32mb ram and never had this problem.

5. The Grenade launcher balance is debatable - while I might agree with it, it was classified as an overpowered spam weapon.

I've had fun with this before, myself having the haste rune + a friend using the GL also...but i never heard anyone say it was unbalanced. Again, you were more likely to kill yourself as an enemy.

6. The Rocket launcher balace is also debatable - it can do a long-range instant kill.

Only if the other player is injured already (or you had quad or a rune). But so will a Halo rocket under those conditions.

But other than these minor issues

If these issues are minor, why do you say Quake's DM is obsolete?

I still see people going for the nostalgic gameplay - whether in QuakeWorld, or DMC under Half-Life.

I agree here..been playing doom from DoomsdayHQ. Now if only i could get mortal kombat and Metal & Lace (an old anime game) working...

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[plague3106]

I think it does...I have alot of games that just won't run on XP (since all my older games are DOS/Windows), but if they were open source someone could port them to linux or even XP.

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[AlexMax2742]

Plus there are active communities of people who play Doom 2. Although, pureists still prefer to LAN doom2.exe, for a quick Doom 2 internet fix, you can use one of the many internet-centric source ports.

The most popular one is ZDaemon at http://www.zdaemon.org and is probably the best place to start, however it's running on top of an old version of ZDoom, and lacks some of the features that other source ports use. It is open source, however the next version will close parts of the code off to prevent cheaters. Chat room is at irc.freenode.net channel #zdaemon

Skulltag, at http://www.skulltag.com is the second most popular, which means that hardly anyone plays it. It uses a more current ZDoom as its base, though, and it does have loads more game modes than ZDaemon. The next version will contain great bots and lots of bugfixes for Oldschool mode to make it more like doom2.exe. It is 100% closed source, but the one person maintaining the code does a bang up job of it, and shouldn't be discounted. It has a chatroom at irc.oftc.net channel #skulltag if you are interested in playing a game.

There is also a doom playing service called Doom Connector found at http://www.codeimp.com, which allows you to use any internet ready source port you wish (ZDaemon, Skulltag,vanilla ZDoom, Doom Legacy, and more) , plus adds extra features (chat rooms). If you just want to play ZDaemon and Skulltag and don't want the extra fluff, you can use Internet Doom Explorer located at http://nfdfn.jinr.ru/~bond/csdoom/ to browse servers.

Also, integrated into ZDaemon's server browser, IDE and Doom Connector is a neat little program called GETWAD. If you do not have a certain map that is required to play on a server, it will search through all major doom map repositories and find it, download it via HTTP/FTP, and unpack it into your map directory, AUTOMATICALLY. Kinda like Steam's download map from URL, but requires no server input. (It will not however, find doom.wad, doom2.wad, plutonia.wad, tnt.wad or any other of the resources associated with the store bought games, but you can get all of them for real cheap, just pick up a copy of Doom Collector's Edition or find your old doom or doom2 diskettes and update your version of doom(2) to 1.9.)

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Sigma 7]

1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.

I never thought so...just having quad doesn't mean you can hit your target any better. In my CTF 4 days, quad + str rune usually was more dangerous to yourself then anyone else.

It's true that Quad doesn't improve accurracy, but it makes certain weapons extremely powerful. For example, the basic shotgun can usually kill in 4-5 hits, but when quadded does a 1 hit kill.

It's next to placing an insta-gib weapon in a match using normal weapons.

2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry.

I never experienced this...is it common? I never heard of it, and i was playing quake in college for years (96-99). Such a bug would go around the dorms pretty quick I'd think.

It was mentioned in the 1.06 patch. You won't see this bug at all unless you play either on a 1.01 serever or on one of the two mission packs.

4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps.

I run a dedicated server w/16 players on a P90 w/32mb ram and never had this problem.

It won't be a problem in most cases, mainly because not many players will all use the nailgun at one time in an attempt to reach the maximum limit. However, TF needed to change the nailgun code to produce half as many projectiles because of it's greater use.

Even if you don't directly have the problem, you can till get affected with it if you use the original Quake server or client - it puts a limit on how complex a map can become (e.g. TF's Canalzone stated in the readme that some features had to be scaled back because of that limit).

I've had fun with this before, myself having the haste rune + a friend using the GL also...but i never heard anyone say it was unbalanced. Again, you were more likely to kill yourself as an enemy.

Were would be true - but given that the world skill with these games has improved, players shouldn't have to worry about accidently hitting themselves as often with the GL. Although it's a bit harder to master than the other weapons, it's still quite dangerous.

Wasn't as bad as the multi grenade in DoE - it was too powerful in the CTF game mode as it prevented persuers. Servers that enabled runes made it worse - Multi-GL + rune = guarenteed flag capture.

Only if the other player is injured already (or you had quad or a rune). But so will a Halo rocket under those conditions.

Acutally, a direct or near hit does do an instant kill from the starting 100 health (it does 120 radius damage from about 1 player width away). Given that vertical aiming was a slight shift from Doom, it did feel as if it were one of the most powerful weapons - and naturally caused rushes to be the first rocket launcher user.

This isn't saying that it was too powerful - as the players learn how to use the rocket launcher, they also learn how to dodge it as well. However, it did seem to be quite powerful when it was first encountered. It's sort of like the Panzerfaust in RTCW:ET - it is balanced, but it still draws a lot of "panzer whore" messages.

If these issues are minor, why do you say Quake's DM is obsolete?

Quake DM is obsolete because it's been replaced by newer games. This doesn't mean that it's bad, even if it might appear that way.

I would have played

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Minna Kirai]

I've had fun with this before, myself having the haste rune + a friend using the GL also...but i never heard anyone say it was unbalanced.

There was no haste rune in Quake, so you must mean threewave CTF. But the GL was unbalanced in certain situations in original Quake, because it could make a narrow passage completely impassable due to bouncing indirect shots. (Most DM maps were circular and had multiple entrances to each room, so that's not a problem).

Only if the other player is injured already (or you had quad or a rune).

No. A direct hit from the original Quake rocket launcher did 120 damage, out of a basic 100 health. They are unfailingly lethal unless the target has picked up armor or super health.

Sounds Fair to me

[BoomerSooner]

I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later too. Carmack has to keep his clients happy first, the free/gpl scene can wait. The fact that he/id is one of very few that release anything related to old software means we should hold him in very high regard.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[jamiethehutt]

You still have to pay to use ID engines commercially even when they have been open sourced.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[reidbold]

Nope, so long as you supply the source code as required by the GPL you don't have to pay any license fees.

Quake 2 post:
http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=john c&id=15753/

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[MrHanky]

Maybe, but for many commercial game developers, the GPL isn't an option anyway. Sure, you can keep the game art proprietary and the engine GPL, but I don't think (for instance) EA would do that. They want to keep their modifications of the engine to themselves.

OTOH, a developer may be pissed off if she buys an engine licence just to have id release the source before she has released the game.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[jonwil]

no, you can use the engine alongside commercial content for it as long as you comply with the GPL for the actual engine source code.
This means that things like data files, code written in the quake 3 scripting language, maps, sounds, 3d models, textures and whatever else could still be released with a commercial no-copying-allowed EULA attached.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

She?

Wtf?

Fucking feminist piece of shit.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Reality Master 101]

I'd be pissed if I paid a wad of money, only to have Carmack post in his blog that if I hadn't given him the money, then he would have released it for free.

Not the smartest thing Carmack has ever posted.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[AvitarX]

Yeah, because it is a total shocker that Carmack was releasing the source?

The customer should haave seen it coming.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the "full unrestricted" not GPL nature of the release quoted.

Unless his customers are planning on GPLing their derivative, there only concerm is likely to be competion from GPL'd derivatives, a matter Carmack addresses very forthrightly.

Their buying a full licence has pushed back the planed date of GPL'd source release.

On the contrary therefore I suspect Carmack's customers are entirely happy with this outcome.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[k_187]

Yes, but they dual license it dont' they? So if you want to use it in a commercial game, then ID still charges you. Not as much as they do when they haven't released it GPL, but they still charge.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

motion seconded.

grandparent is a piece of shit. a very confused piece of shit actually.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Paralizer]

The company could have saved some money by researching this before purchasing the license. It was fairly common knowledge, or at least easy to find on the net, that Carmack had been planning on releasing the code under the GPL for quite some time. If the company was willing to wait (and they may not have been), they could have used the GPL'ed version to create their commercial game, and before releasing it purchased and moved to a commercial license from id. It's free development time, but at the expense of giving the whole world the opportunity to create free games using the same technology they want to profit from.

On a side note, I admire id and Carmack for their open source efforts.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're supplying the source then it's not commercial dipshit.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[xenocide2]

Its not like the 2004 release date goal was held secret in some clandestine fortress of the FSF. I'd hope the buyers discovered this relatively easy to find fact, and continued anyways. In all likelyhood, this is the first step in releasing the source. By quietly discussing this with the community, the liscencee is in a much worse position to fight a GPL release. Its entirely possible that a month from now they contact Carmack and ask him to release the source under the GPL, and ask him to drop their name or something (once they're ready to show the public their product).

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Satertek]

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'

Type mismatch: '[string: "15753/"]'

/plan.asp, line 47

Interesting post.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Red Hat would be interested in your opinion on that subject.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell support contracts. Maybe you could point out all the game companies living it large off of support contracts.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that Carmack has found some suckers willing to pay $500K for software he considers now so behind the curve that he's prepared to publish for free.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Apro im]

If you're supplying the source then it's not commercial dipshit.

Well, that's blatantly not true, since many companies sell the source to their product along with the product (or separately).

However, taking it in the spirit it was meant - that is, if you supply the source under the GPL, it cannot be commercial. This is also not true - it's just hard not to find competition. A lot of people, perfectly legally, sell GPL'd software - the only reason it's a problem is that unlike most software, you're implicitly giving your end user the right to redistribute. Except: you don't have to give them the right to redistribute the executable - you must give them the right to at their option access the source code, compile, it and redistribute their own binary, but that's less than convenient for the majority of people, particularly if the software is cheap.

In fact, the GPL has specific clauses that only apply to non-commercial applications of the license, implicitly allowing for the fact that it can be used in commercial settings.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

so the easiest way to work around the gpl is, put a scripting engine in and do you extensions from now on in the scripting language which you can release as binary?

thinking of that, what if i put a module loader in, I can then write the modules in non gpl?

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[JFitzsimmons]

They also sell binaries. You may not think this is much, but compare the install/upgrade time of something like RHEL to something like Gentoo. And usually, the binaries Just Work. I'm sure a vast majority of Enterprise IT workers feel like learning how to bootstrap their own Linux environment, from scratch, using sourcecode. Or, if they do, they probably don't want to do it in the enterprise setting.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Dwonis]

Except: you don't have to give them the right to redistribute the executable

Actually, you do. See section 3 of the GNU General Public License:

You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also...

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[caino59]

yup - this is one reason why open source works so well.

one company puts time and moeny into a great product, which they reap much-earned benefits from. time passes, and said company is into the next cycle of development and pretty much done with the old product. Released free and commercially available - so someone that doesnt have large design/development resources can pick up and pay for said product - modify at will and if worthwhile - profit legally. Or, us geeks in the basement can tinker at will for free, and give our friends something to try out (for no profit) at the next lan party.

Benefits all around. End-user too: they get not one, but many possibilities, both free and paid for, depending on which flavor they want.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[CanadianCrackPot]

Hey! That's my OSS business model, open the source, charge like the RIAA for the content.

Waaaiiit, I really should rethink that now.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[patternjuggler]

I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later

But everyone knows it was going to be released soon after Doom3, I'm sure Carmack has said it here on Slashdot multiple times. If the other company didn't like that I'm sure they could have paid ID a whole lot more and written into the contract exactly when the code could be released.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[ezzzD55J]

An URL that works is http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=john c&id=15753.. Hmm, that error message suggests a rather nasty lack of input validation.. I wonder .... :)

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you modify the engine to load binary modules, you can license those binary modules however you like, as long as the engine modification required to load them is GPL.

At least, I believe that this is how it works. Anyone with a greater understanding of the GPL is more than welcome to correct me wherever necessary.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[tunah]

Come on, he'd posted about the timeframe before, it wasn't a secret. If the company didn't know, then they didn't deserve to know.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Dr. Spork]

The question is, did they pay the money after Carmack announced that the code will be GPL before 2005? Because if they did, they'd have no right to complain if he did what he said he'd do. I have a feeling he's not telling us everything, and that there were some clauses in the contract, in exchange for some extra money maybe.

You're right that we should be happy with whatever we get, but as an excuse, this seems pretty weak. It sounds like "oh, I thought that code was worthless, and only if it is will I release it (in - perhaps - a publicity stunt for mindshare and good will); so long as people are willing to pay for it, OSS people don't get it. They only get our trash" This is a pretty mercenary attitude. Not dumb, maybe even shrewd, but also not OSS-altruistic like some may have thought.

Re:Sounds Fair to me

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're supplying the source then it's not commercial dipshit."

Whether or not dipshit is commercial has very little to do with whether or not it's open source.

Admin has a funny sense of humor

[t0qer]

I think its so slashdotted you can't see the humorous message anymore, something like.

Too much traffic
probably slashdot.org
email somedude@idsoftware.com

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Richard_at_work]

its:

Too many users... blah blah blah

Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org

Try again in a few seconds...

-xian@idsoftware.com

As you say, at least someone over there hasa sense of humour :)

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[inu_maru]

er... text here. Welcome, Q3 source, Graphics December 31st, 2004 | John Carmack's Blog December 31, 2004 Welcome I get a pretty steady trickle of emails from people hoping for .plan file updates. There were two main factors involved in my not doing updates for a long time - a good chunk of my time and interest was sucked into Armadillo Aerospace, and the fact that the work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring. The Armadillo work has been very rewarding from a learning-lots-of-new-stuff perspective, and I'm still committed to the vehicle development, even post X-Prize, but the work at Id is back to a high level of interest now that we are working on a new game with new technology. I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I'm going to give it a more general try here. .plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I'll be sensible and use the web. I'm not quite sure what the tone is going to be - there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks. I have had some hesitation about doing this because there are a hundred times as many people interested in listening to me talk about games / graphics / computers as there are people interested in rocket fabrication, and my mailbox is already rather time consuming to get through. If you really, really want to email me, add a "[JC]" in the subject header so the mail gets filtered to a mailbox that isn't clogged with spam. I can't respond to most of the email I get, but I do read everything that doesn't immediately scan as spam. Unfortunately, the probability of getting an answer from me doesn't have a lot of correlation with the quality of the question, because what I am doing at the instant I read it is more dominant, and there is even a negative correlation for "deep" questions that I don't want to make an off-the-cuff response to. Quake 3 Source I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn't the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I'm pretty sure there would be some hard feelings. Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won't be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won't wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release. Random Graphics Thoughts Years ago, when I first heard about the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs, I couldn't think of anything off hand that I wanted them for. As I start working on a new generation of rendering code, uses for them come up a lot more often than I expected. I can't actually use them in our production code because it is an Nvidia-only feature at the moment, but it is convenient to do experimental code with the nv_fragment_program extension before figuring out various ways to build funny texture mip maps so that the built in texture filtering hardware calculates a value somewhat like the derivative I wanted. If you are basically just looking for plane information, as you would for modifying things with texture magnification or stretching shadow buffer filter kerne

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[inu_maru]

argh... next time I'll do preview... and post anonymously... sorry. mod it down or whatever...

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[OblongPlatypus]

Ack.. you call Xian (aka Christian Antkow) "someone"? What sort of a geek are you?

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Richard_at_work]

I have no idea who that is :) Im not a gaming geek, enough said. My knowledge of gaming, and related celebraties extends to a casual game of something every now and then.

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted the direct quote referred to here as an AC long before the parent did, but I got modded down nevertheless. He gets a 4 Funny? I guess that will teach me not to post as an AC.

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[t0qer]

Check my sig, according to AOL/TW Nullsoft i'm the worlds MOST DANGEROUS karaoke geek.

Not just a karaoke geek, the worlds most dangerous karaoke geek.

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Rie Beam]

Eh, I doubt it's intentional. Odds are it's just checking where the most users are coming from, and displaying the URL. If it had been intentional, I doubt they would have included the full URL, opting for "/." or "Slashdot".

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Anonymous Coward]

No, http://www.slashdot.org redirects to http://slashdot.org So the referrer would point to the latter, while the site shows the first.

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that will teach me not to post as an AC. -- Somehow I doubt that.

Re:Admin has a funny sense of humor

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

...according to AOL/TW Nullsoft i'm the worlds MOST DANGEROUS karaoke geek. Much like being president of the AV club in high school not exactly something to crow about.

First post and....

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3 has been out for nearly 6 years now.
The source for Doom was relased in 97, 4 years
after that game's release. I wonder what's taking
ID so long?

--
Bandit has a dome

Re:First post and....

[2nd Post!]

Read the article/mirror/slashdot karma whore post

It's in there

And if you're too lazy: They decided to hold off since someone else licensed their engine, and it would be poor form to release it 'for free' after someone paid several thousands to use the source.

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/94b382fc4adc8812a 904c676b34b459e/index.html

- S

Was I the only one...

[SharpFang]

...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?

Re:Was I the only one...

[djdavetrouble]

...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?

Probably not. Statistically speaking there has to be at least one other dyslexic on /.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell are you and what gives you the ability to decide which of these engines are better. If I had to guess I would say that the engines themselves are pretty much identical feature set wise. The problem is that one of them had a mediocre tech demo (i.e. - doom 3) and the other had two full blown games released for it (HL2 and CS Source). So, obviously you have some deep insight as to what makes Source the better engine:

I hate the Doom 3 engine, Source is way better

Hmmm...nope that's just a useless comment with nothing to back it up. Let's try this instead, the Source engine is a rendering engine, not a physics engine. The physics are the work of Havok. The engines themselves probably only differ in the way they do facial animations. Source improves on the way eyes are rendered. Outside of that I didn't see anything in HL2 that couldn't have been rendered by the Doom 3 engine.

I doubt very much that if there were a remake of Quake 3 that they would break the bank just to use a top tier physics engine (hell they didn't even do it with Doom 3). In the end you wouldn't be able to tell which engine the game was written with since there aren't any real signatures that come from the use of these engines.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Nicolae]

Of course, can't really expect an iD/Valve collaboration any time.. ever. -- Wasn't HL1 based on the Q2 engine? Or am I just pulling that out of my ass because I haven't have caffiene yet.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I remember, it was based on the Quake 1 engine with many, many modifications.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Ford Prefect]

Wasn't HL1 based on the Q2 engine? Or am I just pulling that out of my ass because I haven't have caffiene yet.

The Half-Life 1 engine is a massively hacked-about version of the original Quake's engine - it's lacking some important features from Quake 2 like areaportals, surface properties and so on. Things like coloured lighting, skyboxes etc. got put into Half-Life by Valve, hence there are some odd differences...

Plus, if you want the Quake 1 deathmatch in a updated form, have a go with Valve's 'Deathmatch Classic', which my Steam installation describes as follows: "Valve's tribute to the work of id software, DMC invites players to grab their rocket launchers and put their reflexes to the test in a collection of futuristic settings."

It's got remakes of classic Quake deathmatch maps - I've no idea if it's in any way an 'authorised' thing, but I never heard of complaints from id about it... :-)

Re:Was I the only one...

[artemis67]

Of course, can't really expect an iD/Valve collaboration any time.. ever.

Why not? Ever play "Deathmatch Classic" in Half-Life? It's a Quake 1 multiplayer conversion for HL, that is distributed by Valve.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you couldn't tell the difference except the frame rate for the doom 3 engine one would be about 50% less

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

and the other had two full blown games released for it

Don't forget Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, or however it's supposed to be punctuated. Probably ready to come out at least a month before Half-Life 2, but delayed until that was ready. Had many of the same bugs, too.

Re:Was I the only one...

[patternjuggler]

...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?

That's got to be the stupidest engine name ever. Or maybe the were hoping that by making it ungoogleable they would be able to keep it safe from pirates and hackers...

Re:Was I the only one...

[ergo98]

So true. I actually bought HL2 through Steam last night, and was suprized to see "Half Life - Source" and "Counterstrike - Source" in my game list. My obvious thought was that they had released the source, though of course in reality they had updated those games with the new engine (which is pretty cool, and proves that they had a pretty good architecture).

Re:Was I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to "Steam" which you think is fucking brilliant? They need to hire someone who can come up with less shitty names, cause allof the ones they have now suck jello thru a straw.

Some TA Stuff is out

[00Monkey]

I'm not sure exactly what it is but there is some source for something in Team Arena out:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/source/

Re:Some TA Stuff is out

[jonwil]

That is the source code to various game-specific bits and is released under a restrictive EULA.
The same thing has recently been done for Doom III (releasing lots of the game bits and stuff under a similar licence)

Re:Some TA Stuff is out

[Anonymous Coward]

Please visit Slashcode bug #981137, which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

Re:Some TA Stuff is out

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want it to be a link, make it a link. All you have to do is put <URL: in front of the link and > after the link. That's six fucking characters. Is that so hard? Don't be such a fucking lazy dildo sniffer.

ENTIRE TEXT

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome, Q3 source, Graphics

December 31st, 2004 | John Carmack's Blog

December 31, 2004

Welcome

I get a pretty steady trickle of emails from people hoping for .plan file updates. There were two main factors involved in my not doing updates for a long time ? a good chunk of my time and interest was sucked into Armadillo Aerospace, and the fact that the work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring.

The Armadillo work has been very rewarding from a learning-lots-of-new-stuff perspective, and I?m still committed to the vehicle development, even post X-Prize, but the work at Id is back to a high level of interest now that we are working on a new game with new technology. I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I?m going to give it a more general try here. .plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I?ll be sensible and use the web.

I?m not quite sure what the tone is going to be ? there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks.

I have had some hesitation about doing this because there are a hundred times as many people interested in listening to me talk about games / graphics / computers as there are people interested in rocket fabrication, and my mailbox is already rather time consuming to get through.

If you really, really want to email me, add a ?[JC]? in the subject header so the mail gets filtered to a mailbox that isn?t clogged with spam. I can?t respond to most of the email I get, but I do read everything that doesn?t immediately scan as spam. Unfortunately, the probability of getting an answer from me doesn?t have a lot of correlation with the quality of the question, because what I am doing at the instant I read it is more dominant, and there is even a negative correlation for ?deep? questions that I don?t want to make an off-the-cuff response to.

Quake 3 Source

I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn?t the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I?m pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.

Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won?t be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won?t wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

Random Graphics Thoughts

Years ago, when I first heard about the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs, I couldn?t think of anything off hand that I wanted them for. As I start working on a new generation of rendering code, uses for them come up a lot more often than I expected.

I can?t actually use them in our production code because it is an Nvidia-only feature at the moment, but it is convenient to do experimental code with the nv_fragment_program extension before figuring out various ways to build funny texture mip maps so that the built in texture filtering hardware calculates a value somewhat like the derivative I wanted.

If you are basically just looking for plane information, as you would for modifying things with t

Google cache

[Anonymous Coward]

of Carmack's page here

What's that you say...

[Jaidon]

...id Software is going to be LATE releasing something? No way!

Re:What's that you say...

[trawg]

You can't be late when your release date is "when its done".

this does suck

[jonwil]

This sucks that Q3 code is being delayed.
Unless there is some provision somewhere in one of the licence aggreements with the companies still using Q3 code, they should just release it like they promised damnit.
The companies who have licenced it can still use it for whatever it is they are using it for without any problems.

Releasing the Q3 source code would provide people wanting to produce 3d games (well those that would fot onto the quake 3 engine and its way of doing things anyway i.e. FPS's mainly) a good base to work from.
Just look at what people have done with the previous code releases (Doom, Quake, Quake 2 etc)

Re:this does suck

[Richard_at_work]

Firstly its their code, and the reason Carmack gives is a very valid one - keep your paying customers happy before your non paying customers. He does agree that a royalty free license is not the same as a GPL license, but regardless of the difference, theres going to be some hard feelings if he just released the code right after someone forked over a large amount of money to use it.

As for your second point, I cant actually think of one single opensource project that has taken the Doom, Quake, Quake2 source code and done something memorable with it. There were a couple of ports to different platforms, but no real memorable independant projects with new gaming material.

Re:this does suck

[jonwil]

I dont know much about Quake or Quake 2 but look at DOOM.
Look at zdoom for example, that takes the DOOM engine and adds many many features to it.
A fair number of maps and mods out there take advantage of the new features added to ports like zdoom.
check sites like www.doomworld.com to see what people are doing with DOOM and its engine.

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry man but.. if you read his text he explains that the reason why the source cannot be released just like that is because they had just licensed the code to a client for a few hundreds of thousands dollars.
You'd understand this client would be at least a bit unpleased if ID GPLd the source code not much after. He would maybe even loose those clients for in the future.

Happy enough that ID is doing this, and I'm sure the rest of the source code will follow in time. Let them make the money they deserve, I'm sure only more good comes off it for the open source community too!

Re:this does suck

[rhennigan]

I cant actually think of one single opensource project that has taken the Doom, Quake, Quake2 source code and done something memorable with it.

While this may be true, the educational value of being able to look at the code itself is enormous, even if you never make anything from it. Think of coders who make games that can use Q3 Arena code to improve their project.

Re:this does suck

[Hamhock]

they should just release it like they promised damnit.

I hardly think that when Carmack said they would GPL Q3, that that counts as a personal promise to you. If id expects people to license any future engines, then they have to respect the current license holders. If they can't make money off of their current engines, then they can't continue to produce more of them (well, maybe Carmack could, but that's beside the point). Just the fact that id does GPL their old engines should be enough for anyone. The timing of when they do it is entirely up to them.

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

going to be some hard feelings if he just released the code right after someone forked over a large amount of money to use it.

While I understand what he's saying, and you're right, there would probably be hard feelings, look at it this way: Everyone knew Q3A's engine would be open sourced. It's not a secret that every quake game engine has been opensourced at the end of its life. Hell, he's even talking about how it was scheduled for release last year. Whoever paid $500K should have thought to themselves "gee, maybe we should wait two weeks!"

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

What have they done? Nothing good

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

As for your second point, I cant actually think of one single opensource project that has taken the Doom, Quake, Quake2 source code and done something memorable with it.

You're missing the point here. Quake 1 & 2 doesn't have a very virile mod community. It all went to HL. Quake 3 does. Imagine what the mod developers could do with the source code.

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres nothing to learn from those projects source code other than bad coding practices

Re:this does suck

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Quake has gone even further.
Modern quake engines use full 24bit replacement textures, can load maps from Hexen, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, or HalfLife (and all textures there of), have all the graphical improvements you can think of (stencil shadows, specular lighting, etc). Some quake clients can even load Quake3 QVM code(Thats the mod data, meaning you could load a quake3 map with the bsp loader, the weapon models with the .md3 loader,and the mod itself)

And thats just the stuff I remember. Check out http://quakeworld.nu for more info.

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

The first things I would do is to add a vechile code and improve the outdoors/terrain code.

Re:this does suck

[Cylix]

Not so!

The quake world base was expanded quite well I think.

If you look at some of the clients that are still around today. FuhQuake, QuakeForge and of course ezQuake. (though they all appear to be dying/dead now).

Now, eQuake has done an excellent job repacking Fuhquake and providing some excellent work building that out with addons. The biggest improvement was dynamically retextured objects at run time.

So with the quake retexture project the grahpics aren't half bad.

Though all those simply build out on an existing platform and enhance the QW client/server line.

Tenebrae, which I believe is now defunct, had some excellent work in this area. Tenebrae2 looks visually appealing and was based on their work with the Tenebrae engine (quake 1 source). Bump mapping was introduced as well.

Of course look for yourselves...

Though unreleased, Tenebrae2 looks really good, but I really don't believe developement has gone very far lately. (www.tenebrae2.com)

I think T2 has been one of the better evolutions I've seen from the original Quake source.

Now go grab eQuake and then pick up XQF

Re:this does suck

[Bedouin X]

I don't know. The Team Arena outdoors code was awesome. There were maps that were on the scale of Tribes.

Re:this does suck

[AvitarX]

The XCOM game using Quake II (I think) is pretty memmorable, though not yet past alpha.

Re:this does suck

[Tim Browse]

Unless there is some provision somewhere in one of the licence aggreements with the companies still using Q3 code, they should just release it like they promised damnit.

I direct you to the wisdom of Mr Torvalds:

"He who writes the code gets to choose his license, and nobody else gets to complain."

There's some other stuff in the original quote that you won't like either, but I've spared you that :)

Re:this does suck

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Are you saying The Carmack has bad coding practices?? On slashdot?! Wow, you got some balls (or you're just ignorant).

Re:this does suck

[KarmaMB84]

but then they can't keep the modifications to themselves.

Re:this does suck

[arose]

UFO: Alien Invasion.

Re:this does suck

[Stormwatch]

Mac users who want an modern Quake... check fRuitz oF dojo .

Re:this does suck

[geminidomino]

Xcom?!

Provide link. NOW.

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ufoai.net/

Re:this does suck

[smeat]

Here you go buddy!

http://www.ufoai.net/

smeat!

Re:this does suck

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are you saying The Carmack has bad coding practices?? [...] Wow, you got some balls (or you're just ignorant)."

You've obviously never looked at Carmack's source code. He mixes shorts and unsigned shorts, doesn't declare local functions static, uses ints instead of shorts and longs in structures sent over a network or read from/written to files, etc. etc. He is inconsistant in naming his global symbols. Functions and variables aren't always located in the files in which you would expect them to be located. (Thank god for ctags, or I'd never find anything.) Some variables are defined in include files. Etc., etc.

Try compiling the Q2 source using gcc. You will get tons of warnings, most of which are for things that are easily fixed.

JC has come up with some really neat algorithms, and he knows his stuff when it comes to graphics, and, to some extent, networking (although using UDP to download resources was a bad idea), and he seems to know how to code efficiently in assembly language, but his C coding practices leave much to be desired.

Re:this does suck

[IntergalacticWalrus]

You cut the "on slashdot" part when you quoted me. My point was that you were dissing slashdot's most worshipped programmer, which is bound to piss off a lot of people.

Anyway that was very informative. I wasn't aware that Carmack was such a sloppy coder.

Re:this does suck

[HFXPro]

You do realize that at the time Q2 was released, very few compilers would give you warnings about the things you are complaining about. What is more interesting, is how many warnings I get for the same type of things while compiling the 2.6 kernal.

Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:Okay...

[genrader]

The Apocalypse will have come and gone long before DNF is released.

Re:Okay...

[ziggles]

But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

That was probably the large licensing deal that recently went through.. DNF switching engines AGAIN, this time to an old one instead of a new one.

:P

So the answer is yes.

Re:Okay...

[rpdillon]

Anyone else getting the feeling that the folks at 3DR are chugging away at DNF, and then, one day, you'll load up /. and see a headline:

DUKE NUKEM FOREVER GOES GOLD - IN STORES NEXT MONDAY

and everyone will scratch their head:

"Holy shit, didn't see that one coming."

And, and as far as id releasing late, I don't think they ever give dates...so it makes it hard for them to break dates. Too bad other companies can't do the same, you have to have a lot of credibility to not call dates in advance (publishers beat up on you).

Re:Okay...

[Jardine]

But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

The source for Doom 3 will probably be released before DNF

T and A? What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did Janet Jackson work for ID?

Speaking of source...

[Anonymous Coward]

View the HTML source of Carmack's blog. Looks like the blog entry has been written in MS Word and exported to HTML. The HTML file generated by Word has then been copied and pasted into the blog HTML template. Just look at the source: it has one element inside another. Sure, it works and is probably displayed OK in most browsers, but...

Re:Speaking of source...

[rastakid]

No one cares but fat greasy nerds like yourself.

So, you're reading a news website for nerds and you comment on a comment which you don't care about and you still dare to call the OP a nerd?

You, sir, just made my day.

Re:Speaking of source...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have but one question for you, oh great Crusader of the Nerds: What does the format that Carmack originally wrote this entry in matter?

Re:Speaking of source...

[Anonymous Coward]

That comment really hit close to home for you, didn't it?

Go eat another bag of candy to stave off your depressions you fat slimy slob.

Re:Speaking of source...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

That comment is as insightful as it is funny.

I still don't understand why people come to Slashdot to complain about how they dislike the place and prefer $OTHER_WEBSITE, why people respond to things to say that no one cares, etc.

If you don't care, then why exactly are you reading and replying!?

troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"[...]Quake 1, 2, and 3, unreal, and the upcoming doom3."

Written ages ago...

"He has also popularized the Direct3d 3d format over Microsoft's competing Opengl format[...]"

Blatently false, trolling for corrections...

"[...]released accelerated quake for the s3 virge chipset."

Another falsehood, begging for a correction.

"[...]if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games[...]"

Comparing Einstein to Carmack.

"Jon carmack is unfortunately doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead of furthering the knowledge of humanity."

But instead of saving the world, all he does is write games! Awe, gee... what a jerk!

[...]

There's more of this crap, but I'm sick of reading it. Hope you get the -1 and subnet ban you deserve, trollster.

Re:troll

[TheRaven64]

"[...]released accelerated quake for the s3 virge chipset."
Another falsehood, begging for a correction.

I remember running GLQuake using the ViRGE GL driver. It got a whole 3fps. Significantly better than the 0.3fps I got running it on Microsoft's software OpenGL implementation on the same hardware.

Re:troll

[MarcQuadra]

If you recall, the S3 ViRGE was called 'the 3D decelerator' by a large portion of the community.

Re:troll

[TheRaven64]

Not entirely fairly. I had a copy of Terminal Velocity that was written for the ViRGE. It looked a whole lot nicer than the software rendered version, and performed acceptably. I never found another game it was good for though...

Re:troll

[gl4ss]

which other hw you had? s3 virge would have been nice at accelerating some one specific thing that just now beats me(shaded vertical lines? or something like that was the only thing it could 'accelerate'). and it's entirely probable that they just added some things to the terminal velocity engine to the s3 virge version to make it appear nicer..

so on an even moderate pc for the time it was pretty much just a decelerator. ESPECIALLY if you compared it to the fresh prince voodoo, glquake on voodoo1.. on a pentium 100 blowed some eyeballs("woah!").

Re:troll

[gl4ss]

hate to reply to myself, but gotta point out that drawing shaded vertical lines is very important 3d engines. it's just that virge sucked in those things , being slower than software in most cases(or just close enough for anyone to even bother using it)...

virge was the "we gotta have a 3d sticker on the machine" gfx card of choice.

Re:troll

[gl4ss]

horizontals.. anyhow, you know, those that go from left to right. scanlines.

aftereffects..

Re:troll

[wheany]

If you knew it was a troll, why did you reply? That's exactly what he was after.

Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[cgenman]

"The work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring."

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's how the public felt playing it too.

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[mavi_yelken]

Exactly what I felt while I was crawling the fucking corridors your engine rendered...

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[justins]

That's just silly. What he's saying is specific to this game, not a general example of the industry. For example, in the last part of q3 development id ripped the game apart and created qvms, which almost certainly wasn't boring work. :)

The holdup in d3 was the labor-intensive content creation, not the programming, so it's not surprising there weren't any major programming challenges near the end. He had lots of time.

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Or didn't, based on all the BLACK FUCKING PIXELS

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[cgenman]

I just meant to point out that programming for the gaming industry has it's downsides. Most projects end with a massive bughunt rather than a systems rewrite, and this usually burns especially hard on the programmers. You really have to love programming for programming's sake during those times, or you're going to dread coming in for the 60 - 80 hour weeks.

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Quake3 had qvms all along, the tests were just released as dll's...
I recall him saying he was bored with Quake3 at the end too because all the rendering was done and they were all just waiting around for the bots to get finished.

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[justins]

Actually Quake3 had qvms all along

No, it didn't:
http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?us erid=john c&id=12698

The relevant quote, from 7/24/99:
On wednesday I was sweating a bit, not sure if I would have the VM finished in time, but it all came together in the last two days.

Keep in mind quake 3 was released in December of that year.

Re:Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[colmore]

Doom 3? Boring?

Let me guess... he was playtesting.

Writing commander keen

[clockwise_music]

Bit of a difference from his Earlier days!.

My favourite quote from this article:

>John C. having some trouble getting the little Scrub in Keen2 to carry the player on its back and, as always, The Carmack figures the shit out and gets it done

Hats Off To id

[blueZhift]

Even with the delay, I would say hats off to Carmack and id for continuing to release code like this. As others have already mentioned, it really does help keep the fps genre in particular alive and progressing because it seeds the next generation of development talent. This is good not just for fps games, but anything where a good 3D engine is needed. It's easy to think that there may not be any need to further develop 3D engines, but with new hardware and software coming out all of the time, along with new ideas on how to do things, there's always more that can be done.

Contrast this openess to a company like EA which as far as I know has never released any source code. As many here already know, EA just sewed up an exclusive deal with the NFL for NFL branded football games which essentially puts competing games from ESPN or 989 off the field since they can't use NFL players or stadiums. There has never been any source code for sports games like this released to the public, which means no mods or clones. And it also means that learning how to write these types of games has an enormous learning curve. Well I'm rambling now, but I think the point has been made. Oh, and of course EA is not the only company tight with source code, most are!

Re:Hats Off To id

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a major difference between most games and a scriptable FPS like the last several Carmack's spit out. For Doom and Quake, the engine is simply the rendering technology. That makes it possible to release the engine source without compromising the gameplay details and other IP of games built on it, to some extent. For most other games (and especially yearly sports games), the main engine *is* the crown jewels.

Re:Hats Off To id

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it ea's fault that commercial interests hijacked sport? Seven figure salaries and nandrolon for all!

Re:Hats Off To id

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to keep the FPS genre alive? That style of gaming, though hugely successful, should be allowed to die however swiftly or slowly it will. It's sucked all sense of character and storytelling from games... story is advanced now through cut-scenes. What YOU do in the FPS world has no relation to the story... all you do is shoot stuff. The reason it's so pervasive it that it's EASY to make a game... and EASIER to make a 2nd game, where you keep the hard part (rendering engine) and just modify content. It's lame, and it really should be allowed to die a natural death. No need to accelerate it; I don't mind the wait. But certainly no need to 'keep it alive'.

Re:Hats Off To id

[Zebbers]

Wow. Ummm...cut scenes serve a purpose. Go play MGS3.... amazing cut scenes that contribute to the movie...er I mean game you are playing. Its one game my girlfriend likes watching since it plays out so movie like.

Re:Hats Off To id

[Anonymous Coward]

...football games...

heh. people still play tecmo superbowl. but yeah, ea still sucks.

Someone remembers Bolo?

[AsmCoder8088]

I can remember back when I was maybe ten years old and me and my brother would hook up a couple of PowerMacs to the network and play Bolo together. It was really fun, because back then games that were written specifically for the Mac seemed to have a special quality in them that a game tied to another platform did not; some mysterious feel about them that could only be experienced on a Macintosh.

In Bolo, the graphics were very fine and had good color, the refresh was excellent, and you never had any flicker. Also I think that because Macs were natively designed with a good 16-bit sound system in them (unlike DOS machines at the time with a little beeping speaker), game designers were inspired to write software for this platform. Who wants to play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on a PC when you could experience the game and all its gloy with full 16-bit sound on the Mac? Sadly, game developers moved away from the Mac with the introduction of DirectX on the PC, and most of the games now-adays lack that mysterious and inspiring quality in them. And Bolo was a network game written way back before Windows was sold to the Masses. Oh well... I'm 17 now, and enjoy writing software using Visual C++ for Windows anyway.

Re:Someone remembers Bolo?

[rincebrain]

I remember playing Bolo.

What confuses me is, I remember playing it on a DOS/Win3x machine...

Good times, in any case.

Re:real reason for delay: Doom 3 is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

you miss the point:

a commercial outfit cannot pick up Q3A's code, once GPL'ed, and derive it to their benefit without releasing their changes.

a commercial outfit can, however, derive and keep their secrets if they pay for an proper licensing contract.

JC is being polite to his licensees, but he doesn't *really* have to. a commercial license to the Q3A source is far, far, far more valuable than a GPL release.

Really ?

[Jimboscott]

oh, Sh*t, so in 2005, i have decide to develop a web game instead ;)

Re:real reason for delay: Doom 3 is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine capabilities have nothing to do with how Idsoftware envisioned Doom3 as a game. Multiplayer support out of the box was not their focus this time around and was announced early on that it wouldn't be.

The D3 engine itself and the underlying netcode is quite capable of supporting far more than 4 players. D3 netcode is still better than UT4's

When Quake 3 shipped, it faced similar critisism. Most people didn't have the video resources to play it and it sucked up more cpu cycles on the servers. How soon people forget.

I do however think idsoft missed the mark when they assumed the single player aspect would be enough to make a winning title. I'm more inclined to think they will be successful with this next generation engine commercially. It's well placed to support the company for the next 4 years, with sales to other game developers alone.

We will also see what idsoft cranks out over the next couple of fiscals. It may very well tell us what direction they forsee the company moving into, or whether this really is the retirement swan song of the senior owners.

Nethack

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nethack Dev Team was founded in 1986.

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Trurl's Machine]

What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity? Humanity would suffer! Jon carmack is unfortunately doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead of furthering the knowledge of humanity.

It's an obvious troll, but I'll feed it to stop proliferation of a dangerous meme. Geniuses never work alone with their thoughts - they need to relax and concentrate in order to pursue their own ideas. Deprive Einstein of his famous pipe, his even more famous violin or his (slightly less) famous yacht and you won't get a genius, you will get someone who is too frustrated to work anymore. The old proverb about geniuses "standing on the shoulder of giants" is only partially true - they also stand on the shoulders of anonymous persons who satisfy their daily needs, just like Einstein stood not just on arms of Poincare or Newton, but also on the shoulders of anonymous guy in some Long Island marina, who kept his yacht ship shape, so Einstein could safely sail and think. You never know who is relaxing his tired mind fragging monsters in Quake this very moment. It could very well be this century's Einstein.

bzflag.org

[Anarchofascist]

I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.

BZFlag, admittedly not from 1996, more like 1986.

Early Quake code in HL2

[Anonymous Coward]

How would JC know what's in HL2's code base?
Don't think he looked at the leaked code do you?

Re:Early Quake code in HL2

[ydnar]

HL2 is a HL1 derivative, which in turn is a Quake (1) derivative. There aren't any compelling reasons for Valve to rewrite the last remaining pieces, and plenty of compelling reasons not to.

I'm sure the business case was worked out eons ago anyway.

y

Re:Early Quake code in HL2

[OmgTEHMATRICKS]

Dude, the Source engine is a from-scratch engine. The only similarities to HL1 are there so that maps people were working on in HL1 can be ported over to HL2. HL2 is NOT using a highly edited 9 year old engine.

You can see that here. Yes, an ad for the HL2 book, but it talks about Source and how it is a brand new engine in the ad. http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?cookie%5Ftest= 1&product_id=871706

Re:Early Quake code in HL2

[ydnar]

Valve did not, nor ever claim to have rewritten every piece of code in the engine.

Believe it or not, but there are still vestiges of Wolfenstein 3D in the Quake 3 engine and probably Doom as well. I can't say for certain about the latter because I have not worked with its code directly.

y

Re:Early Quake code in HL2

[DaveCBio]

They rewrote anything that belonged to id. I'll guarantee that 100%. Why would they risk a lawsuit or be stuck paying royalties?

Re:Early Quake code in HL2

[DaveCBio]

I stand corrected, apparently there still are bits of code in there from Quake 1. Why they'd do that I don't know.

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

you idiot

Re:real reason for delay: Doom 3 is shit

[lspd]

JC is being polite to his licensees, but he doesn't *really* have to. a commercial license to the Q3A source is far, far, far more valuable than a GPL release.

But the price of licensing the current GPL release for commercial use is substantially lower than the price for licensing the current commercial release for commercial use. Licensing Quake 2 costs $10,000. Licensing Quake 3 costs $250,000.

Tough beans.

[The trees]

To the new licensee, I say tough beans. While there wasn't really an official announcement, it was fairly well known that Carmack was planning on releasing the source soon. Either they decided that it was worth it to pay and have it right away (instead of waiting for it to be opened), or they somehow missed this information when they researched their purchase. In the first scenario they have no reason to complain when it's open-sourced, since they were expecting it. In the second scenario they can complain, but only that they made a poorly informed purchase.

Re:Tough beans.

[Anonymous Coward]

To the new licensee, I say tough beans. While there wasn't really an official announcement, it was fairly well known that Carmack was planning on releasing the source soon. Either they decided that it was worth it to pay and have it right away (instead of waiting for it to be opened), or they somehow missed this information when they researched their purchase...

Wow you must be quite the successful businessman, with lots of repeat customers.

What's that -- you work for the government?? Ohhh that explains it.

Move along...

Re:Tough beans.

[Anonymous Coward]

he's on welfare actually.

Re:Tough beans.

[space_jake]

I think I recall from reading the licensing agreement on the id site that you can not develop a game and sell it for profit with these source code releases, so it doesn't really much make a difference. I'm just glad that there are companies that release gaming code for us like this. Things like this, the make something unreal contest, and good mmog's are going to keep PC gaming alive through another generation of consoles.

Re:Tough beans.

[lordarthur]

They had to license it, if they want to keep the source of their new game closed.
That's the deal with the GPL, the license used for Quake (1|2).

Kudos for Camack

[ramar]

As I read through the comments so far, there hasn't been a single negative reply (within my threshhold) in regards to the delay, and I also applaud Id's efforts. Funny though, 'cause when I read this, I thought it sounded strikingly similar to the licensing delays Sun has in releasing the Solaris source code, which more people than not criticize as feet dragging or worse.

Sure, they're not exactly parallels, but both Id and Sun have positive history in the open source world (thats not intended as a troll...) Why is that Id gets slack while Sun gets stiffed for attempting the same thing?

Re:Kudos for Camack

[mowler2]

Because SUN bought a SCO license, hence funded SCO in their anti-linux crusade. Also I have heard SUN employees bash Linux for its "uncertain IP" and "risk of litigation", while promoting SUN products such as their Linux distribution...

Re:Kudos for Camack

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that id has a reputation for being serious about releasing code under the GPL and a history for doing so. Sun is releasing under a special license that most people aren't familiar with, and has yet to release.

Re:Kudos for Camack

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same sun who mislead repeatedly about open sourcing Java? Giving to a standards body (no, their JCP does not count) etc?

Is this the same Sun who funds SCO?

Is this the same sun that was the dot in dot com?

Carmack has a real history and commitment to open sourcing software, even in the absense of a profit motive.

Re:Kudos for Camack

[pilkul]

Id is a very small, transparent company where the employees speak for themselves, whereas Sun is a giant corporation. I find it easier to trust Carmack when he gives excuses than some random spokesperson. Also, no other game developer does this.

which would be great but

[oliverthered]

I can't make any money off the free version anyway.

Trolltec must make some money from QT, (I've got a paid up version of Kylix with a QT license for staters), it's not like there's been a OSS quake game that's taken over the world.... yet. (though UFO2k is looking good!)

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just on a side note, I had heard that the "on the shoulders of giants" quote, given in a letter from Newton to Hooke, was actually a subtle jab meant to reference Hooke's height. Pretty funny, if you ask me.

BTW, I've seen the piece you quoted from a previous post, so it's not just a troll, it's a copycat troll.

Carmack is great

[shotgunefx]

In the beginnning of the 90s, I was a teen trying to get started in video games.

I found a BBS (I think MCI Worldcomm) in CA where John Carmack and Michael Abrash frequented. He was discussing Doom as it was being developed. Actually posted code from it as he was developing it and going into specifics of the engine. It was amazing to get that kind of perspective when your just starting out.

After a couple of months though it was removed. I take it that some people at Id didn't like him sharing the development of this ground breaking game while it was still being developed.

One of the things they looked at for Doom originally was Voxel models. I still have copies of this stuff someplace (including a primitive Voxel editor he released). I should dig it up and post it for posterity sake.

Re:Carmack is great

[Stevyn]

It belongs to Id under US laws, so I'd recommend you don't share it with us. It probably won't hurt anybody, but I don't think /. needs the headache.

Re:Carmack is great

[shotgunefx]

I guess that never occured to me. I would be suprised if anything concerning Doom 1 would cause a problem over a decade later. Specifically seeing that it was obtained from an Id representitive in a public forum.

Anyway, it's something that would take me awhile to find. I've got a good idea where the hard copies are, but don't feel like scanning all that in. I'll have to dust off my 386sx-16 one of these days.

There is also stuff that isn't Doom related such as various discussions of how to compress Mode 13 VGA video in the most effective manner, and some thoughts on Wolf3D, etc.

Re:Carmack is great

[Anonymous Coward]

I say it would be very intersting. I still play with mode X from time to time.

Re:Carmack is great

[Anonymous Coward]

your just starting out

"you're".

Go ahead with your plans Mr. Carmack!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully the company which licensed it will say something to the effect of:

"The Q3 GPL source release has no effect on our game(s). Go ahead with your plans Mr. Carmack!"

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't even try to pretend you're some sort of genius.

Geniuses aren't entitled to special treatment. Einstein had a yacht? Rich fuckhead should have sold it and given the money to charity, right?

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

in no way am i trying to say i am a genious or anything, but I will put myself in the "creator" or "somewhat artistic" corner then follow up by saying that without CounterStrike Source, I would be "thinking" about boring day to day stuff so much that I would not be able to focus on songwriting when I needed that energy.

So mr games creating people my beats thank you. (bad grammar intended for the english nazi's here)

Porting

[Dan East]

For some reason I don't think I'll be porting this one to Pocket PC anytime soon (can't find the slashdot story for the Q2 port).

OTOH, Pocket PCs are already on the market with hardware acceleration, so who knows? :)

Dan East

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[justforaday]

You never know who is relaxing his tired mind fragging monsters in Quake this very moment. It could very well be this century's Einstein.

Yup, it sure is...

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

and...maybe a rich fuckhead like yourself should sell your computer (and cancel your ISP contract), and donate the money to starving children in Guatemala. You, sir, are a genious...much like Ray in "Rainman".

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Wealth is relative as well...

Re: freesource allows improvement

[Xross_Ied]

http://www.fuhquake.net

FuhQuake is a really great opengl quakeworld client.

Much better than quakeforge because fuhquake has support for 32bit textures AND includes 32bit textures for many, many maps as well as many other small refinements that compare to today's games. I don't know if it compares to doom3 but it does compare to quake3arena (2 years old?).

How was this blog found?

[Freddy_K]

I don't see it linked or announced anywhere.

Re:How was this blog found?

[BiggerBoat]

Mentioned in his .plan file, seen here, for example, on Webdog.com:

http://www.webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger.plm?id=1/

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk. Carmack is wasting his talents.

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a good thing if the people who are stupid and suggestible are encouraged to kill themselves. Too many people drift through life in a morass of pointlessness, so if the parent was literally true, a few worthless people would be removed from the world.

If the parent was true and not an incredible transparent attempt at trolling. I've seen this one a few times before, and wonder who keeps these comments and trots them out occasionally.

I suspect it's someone with a deep and fundamental worthlessness. A truly useless human being, utterly pointless.

Completely off-topic question

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdotters love John Carmack.

Slashdotters also love piracy and go to great lengths to justify it.

So, do Slashdotters support pirating John Carmack's games, and if they do, what do they think his reaction is to it? What do they think his reaction was to Doom 3 being pirated for up to $1.5 million the weekend before its release?

Just curious...I don't know of any other situation in which this could be asked.

Re:Completely off-topic question

[Stiletto]

What do they think his reaction was to Doom 3 being pirated for up to $1.5 million the weekend before its release?

Sounds like they released the game a weekend too late...

Oh?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought we were all about P2P warez piracy here on Slashdot? Does that mean it's okay if I rip off John Carmack's games, even though we "hold him in very high regard?"

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has nobody guessed that it's a script that automatically scans the referrer logs for the highest probable cause?

The proof is it uses Slashdot's full URI instead of just saying "Slashdot."

Mod parent up "arcane"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up "arcane".

AS cloaker coming in on Rigel...

[otis wildflower]

OGG!

So why is Quake 3 still the best after many years?

[Sturm0001]

[quote]
When Quake 3 shipped, it faced similar critisism. Most people didn't have the video resources to play it and it sucked up more cpu cycles on the servers. How soon people forget
[/quote]

Very good point. When Quake 3 shipped, folks still saw Doom as the better game.
But then something happened.
Like the internet, and high speed connections.
Suddenly Quake 3 became a world-wide multiplaying phenomenon. It changed history, really.

So why is Quake 3 still the best after so many years?

I am really puzzled why iD did not recognize multiplayer as their new focus. Valve, for instance, bought up Counter Strike and made it a new success. Counter Strike continues to be a successful enterprise.

We are playing for the consistent physics in a multiplayer game. Graphics are way far in second place as a reason to play. Many Quake 3 players turn the graphics down to favor steady frame rates.

Why, after all this time and all this success, has there not appeared the next great multiplayer game?
Unreal Tournament, Painkiller, Doom 3, are not a step forward. If there were a better game than Quake 3, I would be playing it.

For the best Quake 3 modification, one that takes its physics and game play seriously, check out:
http://www.promode.org/ .

Re:Jon Carmack: dooming society?

[Omniscientist]

A common troll seen every time John Carmack's name is brought up. However let's not bring Albert Einstein into the equation. Of course an amazing individual, however when we are talking about someone doomin society, Einstein did make it possible to create the atomic bomb.

Thus your argument ends HERE.

Re:So why is Quake 3 still the best after many yea

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Best Q3 Mod ever in my completely unbiased opinion.

- newborn ;)

ZQuake now available for Mac Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres a better client in development ...
Oldman has released a test version of ZQuake-SDL in the last few days http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=273 6

Anyone ever notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

JC .... Jesus Christ? Coincidence? I think not.
I think he may be the second coming...

Re:Anyone ever notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

And John F. Kerry = JFK. Didn't do him much good though.

How about Enemy Territory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the source code for Enemy Territory released ages ago to the public? It was based on the Quake III engine with numerous enhancements...

Re:How about Enemy Territory?

[EMR]

the source to the game code (for modding) for enemy territory was released, not the engine code.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I'm going to give it a more general try here. .plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I'll be sensible and use the web.

We know that he's new to blogging because the RSS/RDF/XML/Atom/whatever files are missing...

Dual-licensing works out good

[phorm]

I wish more companies would work like this. Make the code available on dual-license terms. You could then legally use it to create your game, and at the time of release decide if you wanted it to be freely available or not.

So basically, it's try-before-you-buy in the sense that you can develop and then market. But to market (and make money) requires that you pay the piper first.

Only... 12 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of focusing on this, they should be focosing on releasing the game they promised over twelve years ago. We want The Universe Is Toast!

Actually wait, no we don't, not if it's made by the current iD Software. Today's iD Software is a mere shadow of the former great company. The crap they've been releasing for the past ten years has focused solely on graphics, with little attention given to gameplay. The Doom and Quake games don't even compare to the brilliance that was (and is) Commander Keen.

Of course, this will be modded either flamebait or troll, seeing as there are quite a few graphics whores here. That comment probably didn't help either :P

Re:real reason for delay: Doom 3 is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The D3 engine itself and the underlying netcode is quite capable of supporting far more than 4 players. D3 netcode is still better than UT4's

Which is why the biggest UT2k4 server has over 40 people and the largest doom 3 I can find?? Oh wait, NOBODY is playing doom 3 multiplayer. How exactly can you compare the networking in a game that has literally thousands of people playing it at any given second and a game that maybe 10 people have played multiplayer since it came out?

Hear that?

[TheAdventurer]

That is the sound of 100,000 nerds adding a new link to their favorites menu.

Re: freesource allows improvement

[tunah]

I don't know if it compares to doom3 but it does compare to quake3arena (2 years old?).

Quake 3 was 1999. Having to delay a source release now because they're licencing the engine is pretty damn amazing.

So, looks like Armadillo is going to die?

[Buran]

Looks like all that hard work that was going into Armadillo (which had some pretty promising-looking stuff going) is going to fade into the background again. I was afraid of this: the prize has been won, so nearly everyone who didn't win now decides it's no longer worth trying and fades into the background to follow other things.

I guess we'll just have to wait to see what Scaled Composites does next ... if they, too, don't give up. They say they won't, and knowing them I'm inclined to believe it, but I thought Armadillo was doing well enough that they'd keep going, too.

A shame. There's a nice mockup of their vehicle on public display in front of the science museum here in St. Louis. Too bad it's just a mockup.

RE: Your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." -- Matthew 10:34

This Matthew guy had better watch out if he doesn't want to find himself in Gitmo.
Also, it's not 10:34; it's 8:27 (A.M.).

Re: Buying source about to be GPLed

[some guy I know]

I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later too.

OTOH, if they said "We're going to release the source code in December 2004", and let prospective customers know this, then those customers could decide whether or not it's worth it to buy a license (either to get it early, or to release a closed-source game).

Speaking of Keen...

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

Speaking of Keen... You promised us The Universe Is Toast would be out in '92! What's taking so long? Huh?!

Scaled Composites isn't exactly giving up...

[imagin8or]

Have you not heard? Sir Richard Branson has signed Rutan up to make him some space planes, in his latest venture: Virgin Galactic
Stories:
Virgin Atlantic Licensing SpaceShipOne (27/09/04)
Sir Richard takes Virgin into Space (10/01/05)
Yahoo: 2004, The Year Space Tourism Finally Took Off

Plus, Armadillo Aerospace don't seem to have lost all hope yet either - Almost ready (06/01/05)

Re:Scaled Composites isn't exactly giving up...

[Buran]

Nononono, I know Scaled isn't. I'm hoping Carmack doesn't pack it in and give up, since Scaled won.

It will be interesting to see what happens. If they hang in there and launch anyway (like the Da Vinci Project is doing) we might have multiple commercial vehicles flying and not just one.