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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."
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....
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.
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.
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
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/94b382fc4adc8812a 904c676b34b459e/index.html
- S
...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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/
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
of Carmack's page here
...id Software is going to be LATE releasing something? No way!
But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?
"The work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring."
The ______ Agenda
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.
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
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.
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!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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
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
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
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.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
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.
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, admittedly not from 1996, more like 1986.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
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.
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
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?
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.
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
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?).
This sig space tolet, reasonable rate.
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...
the source to the game code (for modding) for enemy territory was released, not the engine code.