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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."
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/94b382fc4adc8812a 904c676b34b459e/index.html
- S
Welcome, Q3 source, Graphics
.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.
.plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I?ll be sensible and use the web.
December 31st, 2004 | John Carmack's Blog
December 31, 2004
Welcome
I get a pretty steady trickle of emails from people hoping for
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.
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
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
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)
Quake has gone even further. .md3 loader,and the mod itself)
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
And thats just the stuff I remember. Check out http://quakeworld.nu for more info.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.