Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

fwice writes "QuakeCon has just kicked off and at the end of the keynote speech, John Carmack made an announcement saying that the Quake 3 sourcecode will be released shortly. "

Comments

This is great

[ibentmywookie]

This is why I love idsoftware. Now we'll see some cool stuff done with the quake III engine, like with Doom Legacy, quakeforge, etc etc.

Yay :)

Re:This is great

[Irashtar]

Indeed, they deserve a 21 railgun salute, but who would waste that much shooting at the roof of the map?

Re:This is great

[gothfox]

Yes, really nice of them to do this time and time again. It's worth mentioning though that not only id opensources their previous generation games.

To name a few, Star Control 2 was opensourced and is being developed on Sourceforge. Beneath the Steel Sky sourcecode was also opened. It would be great to see this trend continue and expand.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Beneath the Steel Sky just freeware data played on ScummVM? I think they helped to get it running though.

Re:This is great

[cheesybagel]

They also gave the ScummVM team the source code to integrate into ScummVM proper.

Re:This is great

[Stripe7]

How soon before political vultures hear about this and start yelling about giving modders tools to create "Hot Coffee" type games.

Re:This is great

[Novus]

Beneath a Steel Sky was reimplemented by the ScummVM team based on source code provided to the ScummVM team by Revolution Software Ltd. The original BaSS source code was not open sourced, but the ScummVM reimplementation is open source. Quoting from ScummVM AUTHORS file:

Special thanks to:
[...]
              Tony Warriner and everyone at Revolution Software Ltd. for sharing
              with us the source of some of their brilliant games, allowing us to
              release Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware... and generally being
              supportive above and beyond the call of duty.

Similarly the original Star Control II source (PC or 3DO) was never released; what Toys for Bob released was a barely working Windows port of the 3DO version. This has been cleaned up into The Ur-Quan Masters.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true, but the Quake III engine is still being used in many of the current generation games (albeit slightly upgraded), id software could still make profits licensing the Quake III engine to game developers, instead they set them free.
I love id software.

Re:This is great

[NewStarRising]

"giving modders tools to create "Hot Coffee" type games."

Modders have always had tools to put their own content on computers.
The problem with the "hot coffee" content was that the game publisher supplied it. The tools were never the problem.

Re:This is great

[dmaxwell]

0.40 of UQM is fantastic. It supports various scaling options now. The biadv scaler is absolutely beautiful; the game looks good at 800x600 and above resolutions. It also gives you the option of 3DO graphical menus or the PC menus. The in-game graphics of course are the 3DO versions which are superior to the old PC version. It is even better to play now than it was then.

The Precursors are recreating the MOD music the game originally shipped with and have replaced about 75% of the in-game ditties and larger pieces. They supply this music in both ready to listen forms and in a form that can be dropped in UQM's data directory. It adds some atmosphere to an already good game.

Re:This is great

[AKAImBatman]

id software could still make profits licensing the Quake III engine to game developers

They do. Still make a profit, that is. When they release an engine, they release it as GPL. Anyone can make a game out of it, but then they must release their game under the GPL. As a result, many companies will choose to purchase a commercial license instead of dealing with the issues imposed by the GPL.

The only real reason for the lead time on Open Sourcing their software is that ID doesn't want to help competitors by outright teaching them the technology they developed. Once the technology is old hat, then keeping the source closed becomes less important.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree... IDSoftware & Mr. Carmack are "pillars of internet society" by all means!

* :)

(Very cool of them as-per-usual, & now, I look forward to the modded versions of this game that usually always come from the community of developers out here online that do these mods (e.g.-> Quake II Max, Quake II Evolved, etc./et all))

APK

Re:This is great

[Jagasian]

Are they still using lossy compression for the voices and other audio? Also, have they made it so that you can use the pre-rendered CG video from the 3DO version? It has been a while since I have tried the UQM. I'd love to see the game has everything that the PC and 3DO version had. I first played the 3DO version, and it is still a favorite of mine, but there were things missing from the 3DO version. I'd hate to see the UQM not include the few goodies present in either of the previous versions.

Re:This is great

[Pxtl]

Well, apples to oranges. While Q3 is opened, the content remains closed. Star Control II had all it's content freed - everything but the name of the game is open for the UQM team to use. Similarly, crack dot com's Abuse (awesome platformer) is open, including all content but sound. Opening the source is extremely awesome, but isn't comparable to those who throw the entire game - content and all - into the public domain.

Kudos to Id for doing it tho - probably the best opened engine yet, and the amount of free content available for Quake 3 - plus the DM gameplay means not needing monsters - means that cobbling together a FreeQ3 pack similar to OpenQuartz and FreeDoom should be an order of magnitude easier.

Re:This is great

[stupidfoo]

The whole game doesn't have to be GPL. You could charge for the game since it would most likely include custom models, sounds, images, etc. that would be entirely outisde of the open source engine. They still would have to make available the original code and the modified engine code, but the rest of content is there's to do with as they wish.

Re:This is great

[stupidfoo]

"there's" --> theirs

it's too early...

Re:This is great

[dmaxwell]

I've read that if you have the original 3DO cd then you can drop the movies into the UQM data directory and it will use them. The movies have a separate copyright and Toys For Bob couldn't release them.

Except for some odd bits of dialog missing, I believe the UQM maintainers have re-implemented the most important features of the PC version.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

stop posting

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to download something off the internet and add it to the game to be able to see that content. There's no difference whatsoever.

Re:This is great

[stfvon007]

Thats why you let an enemy use a bouncepad just before the salute......

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and speed/wall hacks just like quakeworld and quake 2 source releases. Why haven't they learned?

Re:This is great

[i.r.id10t]

Out of curiosity, why is keepign the content "closed" bad? It is the content that makes QuakeN what it is. Other commercial games have been based on the various Quake engines already, not to mention the Firt Of mods (original CTF or TF in QW, AirQuake, AQ2, etc). Its the content that makes a new game...

Re:This is great

[SCVirus]

The Sims 2 included censored penises and vaginas, which were unlocked with a mod, yet its still rated T. Its 'problem' is people jumping on the bandwagon.

Re:This is great

[WilliamSChips]

There is a technical difference, in that the data is already there in the "Hot Coffee" case. Which means that the patch probably wouldn't need to contain art-type files, only logic-type files. Whether there's a political difference is an open question.

Re:This is great

[Morgon]

This is not true. The models were basically Mattel-dolls. The mod replaced the skins with the (in)appropriate parts.

Re:This is great

[The Evil Couch]

wholly untrue. I know that slimeball lawyer is making those claims, but he's full of shit. there's nothing but smooth skin underneath those pixelated squares

Re:This is great

[tod_miller]

Many of the previous commercial games that intrude onto the open source space are documented on the liberated games website. Some are just free, not Free, but a good resource.

New game: Use your script word in your comment, as a kinda protest against its redundancy.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: intrude

random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! -1, Idiot.

Re:This is great

[mabhatter654]

the ESRB found the mod data in ALL the versions of GTA:SA.. even the console ones. It was "possible" to access the gamelet in any of the versions... people just haden't figured it out yet.

Re:This is great

[gravious]

"According to slashdot users Im funny, insightful, and interesting!So why arnt girls all over me?*Stop commenting on sig*"

Because, you are an apostrophobe.

Re:This is great

[daVinci1980]

Your reason for why they do not open the source earlier is not John's stated reason. He's mentioned this in blogs before, but the reason he does not open his source sooner is because of the perception of licensees. It would seem "rude" to charge someone for a license (to the tune of $250K) only to turn around and open the source up for all to see a month later.

id was planning on opening the source up about 4 months ago, but had just signed a new licensee who requested more time before the release happened.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apples to oranges. While Q3 is opened, the content remains closed. Star Control II had all it's content freed - everything but the name of the game is open for the UQM team to use.

Apples to apples, actually; the Ur-Quan Masters source code was freed by the original authors, but they released the content as "only for use with Ur-Quan Masters".

Re:This is great

[Jagasian]

Can the uncompressed dialog also be ripped from the 3DO version and used with the UQM?

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason keeping anything "closed" (non-free) is bad?

Of course it isn't anything as bad as non-free software, since the content is non-functional, and won't need to be updated to work on new machines. But it's always nifty to have new free content, e.g. to reuse in other open source games.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

There's another good reason companies choose to purchase a commercial license -- they get support, don't forget that. And having support for everything is probably going to be a lot more useful than not having to give away your code.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true, but the network layer would all be GPL'ed and likely very easily hackable.

sauce?

[0b501373]

Use the source Luke!!!

Re:sauce?

[Anonymous Coward]

zomg?

Will it be modified?

[mattdev121]

I wonder if this source code will be modifier and edited some way to keep some company secrets hidden or if the comments will be purged.
Should be interesting...

Re:Will it be modified?

[slugo3]

If there releasing the source I don't think there going to hold back anything, hell they GPL'd Quake 1. They might strip the comments because thats not a part of the code.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like they're taking out the punkbuster code. The evenbalance people seem kinda secretive about their code, I suppose for security through obscurity. I saw the Q3A code while working on Medal of Honor, and there's nothing really secret or special about it. ID's cool about GPL'ing their old code, so I doubt they'll modify anything except the punkbuster stuff.

I've been looking forward to this for a while. I had tons of fun writing normal mods for Q3.

Re:Will it be modified?

[uchian]

No point really, it's five year old technology. While it's great for people coming into the gaming industry, there won't be anything in the quake 3 code that the competitors haven't already discovered for themselves, and also with the advance of the technology of gpu's, a lot of the neat tricks in quake 3 will probably be either unnecessary on the latest graphics cards, or will be completely supplanted by some other technology.

However, given source releases of other games (remember descent), they may clean out some expletives from various comments :-)

Re:Will it be modified?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of their other source releases (every game dating back to Wolfenstein 3D) were tampered with in any way before releasing them.

Actually... The Doom source release consisted of only the Linux version, not the code for the DOS version, because id used a third-party DOS sound driver. So they simply stripped the DOS version out. Didn't much matter anyway, considering that neither the DOS nor Linux versions were particularly useful when the Doom source was released.

And thinking about it, all of their source releases were rather devoid of comments. There were actually comments included in the code, but not a lot of them, and it's not uncommon to see a couple of pages of rather dense code with only a couple of one line comments splattered around. I think that's mostly their coding style - there were very few comments in the first place, rather than having been stripped out. And what would be the point in stripping the comments? To make the code harder to read? Then why would they release it at all?

As for "company secrets", you are aware that id tend to be very open about what they're doing, and quite freely share new ideas and methods with everyone else (maybe not the instant they come up with them, but they don't seem big on the whole "company secrets" bit), right? And considering the age of Quake 3, there's probably nothing at all in there that would count as a secret, because virtually everyone who wants to know how something like Q3 works already does.

Re:Will it be modified?

[leathered]

It may be five year old technology but it was way ahead of it's time when it was launched. My first impression of Quake III was how crap it looked on my fairly up to date hardware back then. It was only a couple of years later when I bought a GeForce 3 did I finally see what a wonderful engine Carmack and co had come up with.

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

The q3 netcode is still better than just about anything out there. See for instance the unbelievably crappy netcode in most current FPS. q3 still smokes them all.

Re:Will it be modified?

[QuaZar666]

I think I remember that they did have to modify Quake 1, due to various licensing issues. I would expect that this would be the same thing with Quake 3. Might not be that difficult since 90+ of the code was made by ID.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

Q3's netcode is pretty shoddy until you add in Unlagged. Then it's netcode performs on par with good modern netcode.

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

where is this 'good modern netcode' you speak of?

it sure isn't in hl or hl2. it isnt in ut2k(3|4) either. it isnt in painkiller nor is it in farcry. it most definitely isnt in bf or bf2.

when i speak of netcode i speak of _engine_ netcode. unlagged isnt engine. you can fix a lot of engine ills through modding, but it helps to have a decent netcode base to start with.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Sigma 7]

None of their other source releases (every game dating back to Wolfenstein 3D) were tampered with in any way before releasing them

Even if that's true, it doesn't mean that the source code is in an instantly usable condition. Wolf 3D requires some obscure assembler product and would not compile out of the box for most users. (However, it's trivial to replicate a Wolf3D engine - no need to optimize it to Wolf3D's levels, since computers have enough processing power to do things quickly enough.)

Of course, the source did change between the latest version and the source release. Doom, as you mentioned, only compiled under Linux. There was a problem with the demos from Doom 1.9 losing sync in the source code release - this was traced to a change made between 1.666 and 1.9 which was somehow rolled back. I'm not sure if this has been solved, but it would definatly take a while to fix.

This is followed by Quake 1 source release. As you know, the latest Dos version is 1.08 - the source code release was 1.09. (While WinQuake was 1.09, I'm sure there's some minor, trivial changes that were made.) The soruce package also came with QuakeWorld, version 2.30 - later than the final binary release.

All in all, the source code isn't guarenteed to be "true and pure". But that doesn't matter at this stage, since those engines have evolved much since then.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

I consider netcode to be the method of which the server and client communicate game states, and how that data is used. Unlagged makes several changes to the way that the client deals with that data, such as implementing much better client-side player movement prediction, as well as server-side latency correction.

I think you should understand what exactly moding entails. It is not an addition, it is a modification, of whatever sections of the engine source the company has chosen to make available. In the case of Quake 3, while the low-level network handling code isn't provided, as I understand it the modder has control over what goes over that link.

HL1 and HL2 have excellent netcode, probably the best available on the market. If you are going to claim otherwise you're going to have to give a reason. HL1/HL2 work well in low bandwidth situations, is very adjustable based on available bandwidth server and client side, has good movement prediction, features latency correction, works well even with packetloss, and so on. It is generally quite reliable. And it is most assuredly better than Quake 3, especially from the server side. Unlagged makes a great deal of progress, however, to improving Quake 3's playability under worse than normal conditions. Despite the main feature of the mod being the latency correction, the new movement prediction probably has a greater impact.

UT2003/2004 has "ok" netcode. On a low latency low-loss link, it is rather decent, though the lack of latency correction found in many modern games is a downside. However UT2003/4 don't handle packetloss or high latency very well.

BF1 was horrible. I have very limited experience with BF2, so I can't really comment on it, but from what I've seen it has made at least some small improvements. How small I can't tell without further play.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Tim C]

It may be five year old technology but it was way ahead of it's time when it was launched.

I disagree. It was launched at around the same time as UT, which I still consider to be a superior game and engine. There's not a lot in it, and the two of them together were way ahead of their time, but I think it's misleading to say that about Q3 without mentioning UT.

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

Ok, um. HL1 and HL2 have "excellent" netcode? Now I know for certain you're not a modder. :-)

I think you should understand what exactly moding entails. It is not an addition, it is a modification, of whatever sections of the engine source the company has chosen to make available.

Er, no. Companies never make _engine source_ available. Otherwise you'd be able to easily circumvent copy protection, cheat detection, etc.

What companies make available is _mod source_, eg modules which the engine loads and runs the mod code. Different engines handle this in different ways. For instance UT uses a VM similar to java. quake3 offers VM as well as machine-native DLLs.

In essence the engine is the linux kernel and mods are linux executables.

HL1 and HL2 are based off of _quake1_ engine code. HL2 still has a lot of icky quake SDK cruft in it, if you bother to look. It simply is not better than quake3. The only reason why it might "appear" to be good is that it is a very simple engine running very simple mods -- the amount of traffic traveling over the link is very small.

But give it a complex game to run, with tons of complex entities and complex gamestates, and it will not do as well as q3 engine games.

quake3 works _excellent_ in high packetloss and high latency situations. i've tested it to eg 80% packetloss and 500ms latency and it was still playable.

and er... unlagged doesnt change player movement prediction. it does make a change to serverside extrapolation if clients drop command packets, but that's a different thing entirely.

Disclaimer: I wrote etpro and ettv.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

Ok, um. HL1 and HL2 have "excellent" netcode? Now I know for certain you're not a modder. :-)

True enough, at least now. At one time I wrote a Q3 mod called GibHappy. It was very simple, however. But in reality it matters how the netcode performs for endusers, not how pretty or ugly the code itself is.

Er, no. Companies never make _engine source_ available. Otherwise you'd be able to easily circumvent copy protection, cheat detection, etc.

It depends how you define "engine". If you strictly mean the 3D engine, you'd be right. But in Quake 3's case, a lot of the code that I would call the engine (as in game engine) is contained in what you call the mod source. For example, the Q3 AI system is entirely contained within the "mod source".

The same applies to the higher level netcode; it's not in the executable, it's in the QVMs/DLLs. But netcode is undeniably part of the engine.

My point is is that the engine code is not strictly limited to the executable.

HL1 and HL2 are based off of _quake1_ engine code. HL2 still has a lot of icky quake SDK cruft in it, if you bother to look. It simply is not better than quake3. The only reason why it might "appear" to be good is that it is a very simple engine running very simple mods -- the amount of traffic traveling over the link is very small.

That'd be incorrect, though. HL1 is pretty much entirely Quake 2, with a few lines from Quake 1. So say Valve themselves, and since they're the only ones who truely know how much code they took from each, we should defer to their statements. HL2 was written from scratch, though that is a topic of much debate. Regardless, unless I'm mistaken the "SDK" for Quake 1 was all in Quake C, so it is impossible that any of it made it into HL1, let alone HL2.

If you consider Quake 3 to be complex and HL2 to be simple, well, you'll certainly have an easy time coding in the future. But I disagree with you; Quake 3 doesn't pump nearly as entities down the pipe as HL2, or even some HL1 mods (Natural-Selection anyone?), and without Unlagged it's missing stuff from newer games like client-side movement prediction and latency correction.

quake3 works _excellent_ in high packetloss and high latency situations. i've tested it to eg 80% packetloss and 500ms latency and it was still playable.

Are you referring to Q3 now, or ET? ET doesn't feature the same netcode. For one thing it DOES have latency correction and IIRC, client-side movement prediction. The game (Q3) might play fine for YOU when you have 80% packetloss and a ping of 500, but without client-side movement prediction, the other players will see you teleporting from point to point as your packets come in sporadically.

and er... unlagged doesnt change player movement prediction. it does make a change to serverside extrapolation if clients drop command packets, but that's a different thing entirely.

Re-reading the Unlagged documentation, I'll admit it isn't clear as to if it does the prediction client or server side. If it is really doing it server side, well, then, that remains a particularly crappy part of the Quake 3 netcode even with Unlagged. But then again Neil Toronto was always big on doing everything serverside, so it'd make sense.

In my mind, the lack of latency correction alone is enough to make me consider a game's netcode "unpleasant". But the lack of proper prediction is a big nono. Quake 3 can be forgiven due to it's age, but that doesn't mean it's even remotely good. Ever watch people going over the top jump pads on Q3DM17? Since there is no movement prediction players don't move smoothly in mid-air, they appear to be moving at a much lower framerate than the game is actually moving; they're only being updated for every packet received from the server (Once every 20 seconds by default). Prediction and interpolation go a VERY long way towards a smoother online experience. Quake 3 is lacking in this department. But your experience seems to be with ET, which already features much better netcode... and prediction!

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

It depends how you define "engine". If you strictly mean the 3D engine, you'd be right. But in Quake 3's case, a lot of the code that I would call the engine (as in game engine) is contained in what you call the mod source. For example, the Q3 AI system is entirely contained within the "mod source".

Ah... No.

The Q3 AI system is most definitely not entirely contained within the mod source. The ai code in the mod source is very high level bot and game-specific behavior (basically, game-specific rulesets). However, BSP route finding and bot movement is still handled entirely within the engine and is still a closely guarded secret. It will be interesting if id does indeed release the engine bot code when they GPL quake3, given how paranoid they've been in the past.

The same applies to the higher level netcode; it's not in the executable, it's in the QVMs/DLLs. But netcode is undeniably part of the engine.

I'll try to make this clearer. The QVM/DLL has no control whatsoever regarding the protocol on the wire. All the QVM/DLL can do is change the interpretation of what it receives from the engine. Want to expand the entitystate struct? Want to increase the number of configstrings? Want to increase the number of entities beyond 1024? Tough. You can't. It's hardcoded into the engine.

I don't consider anything QVM/DLL as "part of the engine netcode" any more than I consider Firefox/Mozilla as "part of the linux kernel".

If you consider Quake 3 to be complex and HL2 to be simple, well, you'll certainly have an easy time coding in the future. But I disagree with you; Quake 3 doesn't pump nearly as entities down the pipe as HL2, or even some HL1 mods (Natural-Selection anyone?), and without Unlagged it's missing stuff from newer games like client-side movement prediction and latency correction.

Er.. yes, q3 most definitely does have client-side movement prediction. Anything with a simple trajectory (rockets, grenades, etc) is predicted.

What is not predicted in q3 is player movement. And fwiw it's not predicted in ET or UT or many other games either. prediction for player movmeent is generally considered very bad because for games where players have air control, it means your predicted position will usually be wrong and your players will warp around.

You really, really, really, really do not want player movement prediction in general. Tribes2 had it, and the result was the horrible jerky movement for players -- especially players on fast movers (vehicles).

Unlagged does add serverside 'predicted' player movement in the case where players drop user movement commands, but I don't really like the method unlagged uses (it can predict players warping into walls, for example). It is also an option and defaults to off, because of the bad side effects.

ETPro doesn't have player movement prediction either... we deal with the problem in a different way -- we call the code "antiwarp". And IMO it works far better than unlagged's method.

Are you referring to Q3 now, or ET? ET doesn't feature the same netcode. For one thing it DOES have latency correction and IIRC, client-side movement prediction. The game (Q3) might play fine for YOU when you have 80% packetloss and a ping of 500, but without client-side movement prediction, the other players will see you teleporting from point to point as your packets come in sporadically.

Er, ET most definitely does have the same netcode. The only difference between Q3 and ET is that ET has latency correction for shots -- and the original 2.5x releases of ET had massively buggy latency correction based on a flawed understanding of neil toronto's unlagged 1.x code. I rewrote the latency correction from scratch for id/activision for the ET 2.60 release based on techniques neil toronto used

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

UT has its pluses and minuses. It's a decent engine but you are locked into the umod system (and their scripting language). With q3 you have a choice of QVM or native DLL. Without the option of DLL you are prevented from doing many useful things (and using a real compiler).

As for renderers, I would say the Q3 renderer is more advanced than UT.

As for gameplay, imo UT's gameplay is more fun than Q3. But that's subjective :-)

Re:Will it be modified?

[The Axe]

"That'd be incorrect, though. HL1 is pretty much entirely Quake 2, with a few lines from Quake 1. So say Valve themselves, and since they're the only ones who truely know how much code they took from each, we should defer to their statements. HL2 was written from scratch, though that is a topic of much debate. Regardless, unless I'm mistaken the "SDK" for Quake 1 was all in Quake C, so it is impossible that any of it made it into HL1, let alone HL2."

Actually, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Half-Life is most definitely _NOT_ based on Quake 2.

I can't remember where I saw it, but a Valve developer posted on some forum and said they based the engine off Quake 1. Of course, they ripped everything out and rewrote it from scratch, but there is indeed Quake 1 and QuakeC code left in there. At least, I saw quite a bit of it (QuakeC) in the SDK. Quake 2 was licensed, but not one line of code was used.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

Gah, you're right, I'm mixing things up.

HL1 is Q1 with a few snippets from Q2. The opposite situation from the one I described, I was mixing the two up.

QuakeC was a scripting language not supported by HL1 or HL2 so there is definately no QuakeC source anywhere in the HL2 SDK, and there shouldn't be any in the HL1 SDK. HL1 used DLLs instead of QuakeC. Please provide examples of QuakeC source files in the HL1 or HL2 SDK.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

Hmm, it seems I have managed to lodge my foot firmly in my mouth. Oh well, being wrong can be educational :)

Ah... No.

The Q3 AI system is most definitely not entirely contained within the mod source. The ai code in the mod source is very high level bot and game-specific behavior (basically, game-specific rulesets). However, BSP route finding and bot movement is still handled entirely within the engine and is still a closely guarded secret. It will be interesting if id does indeed release the engine bot code when they GPL quake3, given how paranoid they've been in the past.

Shows me for stating half-remembered statements from people from years ago as fact.

I'll try to make this clearer. The QVM/DLL has no control whatsoever regarding the protocol on the wire. All the QVM/DLL can do is change the interpretation of what it receives from the engine. Want to expand the entitystate struct? Want to increase the number of configstrings? Want to increase the number of entities beyond 1024? Tough. You can't. It's hardcoded into the engine.

I don't consider anything QVM/DLL as "part of the engine netcode" any more than I consider Firefox/Mozilla as "part of the linux kernel".

It still strikes me as a lower level transport protocol... You can still send whatever information you want over that link, and mess with what information the engine sends, no?

Er.. yes, q3 most definitely does have client-side movement prediction. Anything with a simple trajectory (rockets, grenades, etc) is predicted.

What is not predicted in q3 is player movement. And fwiw it's not predicted in ET or UT or many other games either. prediction for player movmeent is generally considered very bad because for games where players have air control, it means your predicted position will usually be wrong and your players will warp around.

I was referring only to player movement prediction. Predicting a rocket or grenade, well, it's not really prediction, it's calculation. I mean, it might be splitting hairs, but I'm just explaining why what I meant is player movement prediction.

You really, really, really, really do not want player movement prediction in general. Tribes2 had it, and the result was the horrible jerky movement for players -- especially players on fast movers (vehicles).

Unlagged does add serverside 'predicted' player movement in the case where players drop user movement commands, but I don't really like the method unlagged uses (it can predict players warping into walls, for example). It is also an option and defaults to off, because of the bad side effects.

ETPro doesn't have player movement prediction either... we deal with the problem in a different way -- we call the code "antiwarp". And IMO it works far better than unlagged's method.

I could have sworn ET did prediction... at least, what I define as prediction. I might not be using the right term. I refer to the player continuing to move in the direction that he was last known to be heading in. Perhaps I am not remembering correctly, but I recall games of ET in which I became disconnected, and players continued moving in the same directions before the connection was re-established and they were moved back into the correct position. I call this prediction, because the game is trying to guess where the player will be even if the client didn't receive a packet. Perhaps extrapolation is a better word?

Forgive me, but "antiwarp" sounds more like a buzzword than an actual descriptor, just like "antilag" is used in place of "latency correction" ;)

Er, ET most definitely does have the same netcode. The only difference between Q3 and ET is that ET has latency correction for shots -- and the original 2.5x releases of ET had massively buggy latency correction based on a flawed understanding of neil toronto's unlagged 1.x code. I rewrote the latency correction from scratch for id/activision for the ET 2.60 release based on techniques

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

I don't consider anything QVM/DLL as "part of the engine netcode" any more than I consider Firefox/Mozilla as "part of the linux kernel".

It still strikes me as a lower level transport protocol... You can still send whatever information you want over that link, and mess with what information the engine sends, no?

No. You can only send what the engine will let you send. Which is actually quite limited.

The addition of "antiwarp" and latency correction would seem to indicate greatly improved netcode. Improved means not the same :)

The antiwarp is for etpro, not et 2.60 stock.

Is latency correction and prediction/extrapolation/antiwarp/whatever progress? Damn straight! Latency correction alone is enormous progress... With most games if I could improve the netcode in one way, it would be to add latency correction ;)

And still you have yet to mention an engine which does latency correction better than ET or q3/unlagged... !

Your original claim was that unlagged 'brings q3 up to modern netcode'. Well, where is this other modern netcode you speak of then?

That's ok then, since Q3 does in fact have "proper" prediction. :-)

Proper being player ;)

As I keep saying, player prediction is a very bad thing and you don't want it.

Ever played tribes2? See all the players warping around all the time? That's why you don't want player prediction.

The lack of player movement prediction admittedly isn't really an issue anymore. Newer games have world updates as frequently as 60 to 100hz (The NS server I frequent does). Considering my laptop's LCD has a 60hz refresh rate, there isn't going to be any noticeable lack of smoothness in player movement if the server is sending me 100 updates per second. At this point I guess only taking packetloss into account matters.

actually 60/100fps is totally overkill. (and most clients are set to accept less snaps than that anyway.)

20fps is quite a convenient number (50ms). note that most modern engines use much lower serverside frame rates than 60-100. partly because the amount of data being sent is much greater, and the games are much more complex. running at higher frame rates means much more server cpu is required. also much more bandwidth. you don't want each player to have to have a T3 in order to play... 20-30fps is pretty ideal tradeoff between latency, bandwidth, and performance.

If only it were so cut and dry! If the last update I got from a player is from 100ms ago, where I see him frozen and where I'm shooting, that's not really where he is... Unless the engine is going to pretend he was there, at which point it's just as unfair to him that you managed to hit him as it was to you that you would have missed him. Either way it's not fair. Either the game is cheating you for showing you a position that will make you miss, or the game is cheating him for letting you hit him someplace that he wasn't even in at the time. Stationary targets are rather easy to hit, though repeated freezing sort of blows that statement out of the water ;)

On the other hand, I suppose if you did the movement correction server-side, it'd be more fair to you; the predicted position that actually counted for hits would be closer to the true position than his last known position is, so it's fairer to him, and you still get to see him in a more correct position.

Err, you really should go back and re-read what unlagged does... ;-)

It really is that cut and dry. You simply do not want to do player extrapolation, period. Interpolation is fine, because you're displaying where the player really was,

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

And still you have yet to mention an engine which does latency correction better than ET or q3/unlagged... !

Your original claim was that unlagged 'brings q3 up to modern netcode'. Well, where is this other modern netcode you speak of then?

Better? Equivalent. If it's done right then it will seem exactly the same. Personally I like latency correction on projectiles too, and some other games with latency correction do this by default. I know Unlagged features it too, since I helped beta test it, though it isn't enabled by default.

I must say my buddies and I much preferred latency correction on projectiles. We much preferred the side effect of rockets appearing a distance in front of players to the alternative of rocket impacts not hitting what they look like they are hitting. We figured that it wasn't actually unfair, because rockets fired at distant targets, it didn't matter if they were appearing further out, and rockets close up, you can't dodge anyhow. Anyhow, I've gone off on a tangent, moving along.

HL1/HL2 do latency correction as well as Quake 3. I think they do it on projectiles too. So when I say Unlagged brings Q3 up to the level of a modern game, well, HL1/HL2 is more modern netcode that I find quite decent, and it does latency correction, so Unlagged helps a great deal.

As I keep saying, player prediction is a very bad thing and you don't want it.

Ever played tribes2? See all the players warping around all the time? That's why you don't want player prediction.

Then please explain to me the phenomenon I see in many games where players keep moving when the you pull the network cable. Is the game not predicting their location based on their last known movement vector? I guess I'm assuming that this is movement prediction going on.

actually 60/100fps is totally overkill. (and most clients are set to accept less snaps than that anyway.)

20fps is quite a convenient number (50ms). note that most modern engines use much lower serverside frame rates than 60-100. partly because the amount of data being sent is much greater, and the games are much more complex. running at higher frame rates means much more server cpu is required. also much more bandwidth. you don't want each player to have to have a T3 in order to play... 20-30fps is pretty ideal tradeoff between latency, bandwidth, and performance.

Overkill? Perhaps. I think HL1/2 default to 30, as you say. Many servers, though, increase this to 60-100, and allow clients to do the same. When it comes to game bandwidth, the server bandwidth is always more of a concern than the client bandwidth (Also server processor power). After all, nobody (Other than the 3.8% Valve claims have slower than 256kbit connections) cares if a client needs to use 15KB/s to support a 60hz packet rate instead of 5KB/s to support 20hz. That's not exactly T1 speed, virtually every player supports it, and if they don't they're free to turn down their packetrate to tweak for their dialup connection. No, what really matters is a server using 80KB/s vs 240KB/s.

Is 20 to 30 fps a good tradeoff? Sure. Does that mean that if bandwidth is not an issue you still need to make the tradeoff?

Nothing unfair about this. It's exactly how unlagged works. :-)

I understand how Unlagged does it's latency correction. I wasn't even talking about latency correction. I was talking about how, say a player has half a second of packetloss, he's going to show up as stuck in one spot. Well, if I can hit him while he's not moving, that's not fair to him either just like your example of it not being fair to the player that you are shooting where he isn't. On his screen he isn't stopped in that spot, he's still moving around.

The server doesn't do any pretending. There's nothing fictional or cheating or unfair about how unlagged works. It works based on absolutely true and confirmed historical data.

Again, wasn't even taking latency correction into consideration at

All well and good...

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it run Linux?

Re:All well and good...

[Fooker]

Thats a complete dumbass thing to ask.

For DS

[Lozay_2k]

I hope someone tries to make a DS port of Quake.

Let the race to port this begin...

[WoTG]

Will Quake 3 run on a PDA, cell phone, DVD player, or a camcorder? I have a distinct feeling that we're going to find out really soon.

Oh yes, and start imagining the Beowulf clusters...

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Michael_Munks]

What will they do with quake 3 and a beowulf cluster? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine it very difficult to get OpenGL running on those devices...

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as they port it to text mode I'll be happy.

ttyquake

some screens for the lazy
screen shot

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Troed]

Java bindings to Open GL ES

There is an existing 3D API for J2ME devices, JSR 184. It provides effectively the same functionality as this JSR will. However, it is object-oriented and thus the interface to the underlying functionality is completely different from OpenGL. This JSR will cater especially to the needs of those developers who are already familiar with OpenGL, and furthermore do not require any of the high level functionality provided by JSR 184. Further, with the abundance of OpenGL applications on the market, having an API based on the OpenGL specification will ease the efforts of porting these applications to the J2ME platform. Providing Java bindings to OpenGL ES will ease the effort of moving applications from the ME space to the SE space and vice versa

No, this doesn't exist in any devices - yet.

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Solosoft]

This Pov Quake

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3 was ported to WinCE + the ATI Imageon accelerator by Dan East (the guy responsible for PocketQuake). Google might have more info, I'm too lazy to look it up though.

The port was for a tech demo, I'm not sure it ever made it into the wild.

Presumably something will be released after the Q3 source is released.

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[m50d]

Unreal Tournament can already do that, as can anything that uses SDL (e.g. frozen bubble or I think wargus)

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Krunch]

Modern ttys support colors too: http://sam.zoy.org/libcaca/

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[pchan-]

Finally, I get to use my natural smoothing and antialiasing feature. A game that looks better with my glasses off than with me wearing them.

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[DarkHelmet]

I wonder if all that text could actually be run through a perl interpreter...

If not, it'd be a pretty fun project making a text mode filter that produces compilable code.

Cool

[mistermark]

Cool! this also means projects like DEVMAP and QQQ can be released to a bigger audience

Re:Cool

[randyest]

QQQ looks like someone playing Q3 with smeared graphics. DEVMAP looks kinda cool in the screenshots, but I still can't tell what it's supposed to do. Other than to pimp your blog, it's not clear why you posted these links. Can you give a little more explanation (the links sure don't?)

Re:Cool

[mistermark]

Well, the point I tried to make is that there's more than just games that benefit from the source of the Q3-engine getting released.

These 2 projects I already blogged on my own page and I have been looking into direct-links with a proper explanation, but especially in the case of DEVMAP that's very hard.

the official page can be found on: http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/welcome.html

but that's a flash-interface which is kind of impossible to deep-link

The thing is that it's an installation on festivals which uses live-input & streams and such ...

"The concept is based around the interactive use of live media feeds and constant changing media manipulations triggered by visitors. Webcam footage, video output and dedicated sensors will be captured, transformed, and manipulated. Collected textures, sounds, images, and flows of information will be reworked and reprocessed, then mapped into and onto a virtual landscape, creating a constantly updated database that reflects and refracts physical reality."

this DEVMAP won a prize in Toronto lately:

"DEVMAP has been selected as a winner for the New Voices Toronto Digifest 2005. The project will be exhibited from May 27th untill July 1st, 2005. The exhibition will open with a panel discussion between selected artists. More information will be available on the http://www.dx.org/digifest website." (if you scroll down for episode 5, you can watch a streaming video about DEVMAP)

Since it's still hard to explain in 2 words what these projects are about, I posted the links to my blogposts about them, so that people have something to start with if they're interested... not to pimp my blog as you put it, although I don't mind the traffic.

Re:Cool

[EternityInterface]

"[...] Tom Betts is one of the most exciting and versatile artists [...]"

Sure... the vids are nasty and choppy - hard to explain it beyond that. Like some shit coming on your windscreen every 5 secs on a really bumpy road.

It's... not clearing the framebuffer? The only effect I see really. And then using blendingmode: screen/colourdodge, or maybe q3 does it by default. I've done some cool pics (you know, that game had a colourscheme) in q2gloom in chasecam mode clipping into things using that error. Found one which wasn't just ugly colours or a mismash of a million things, upper part looks nice - not multisampling though?

Many of the screenys look cool though - in thumbnails. When you blow them up you see it's just blending together frames of ordinary q3 things.

Another nice, although with seeing the vids I can imagine the stutter and crap, kinda off-turning. A lot of these can be done without any performance loss - especially colour schemes, I remember fucking around with the gamma settings and getting really trippy stuff - brightness went from like orange to green to purple. And just upping the saturation (nvidia called it some flashy name) made getting any hit red up your entire screen.

I did some screenys where I stayed at the same spot for 30+ mins, just taking screenshots. Then blending them together (mode: lighten) selectively to make it look like a huge fight.

Excellent!

[destx]

Does anyone know of projects that have been waiting for the source? I'd be interested to see what people are planning to do with it.

torrent of carmacks keynote

[i88i]

as always, filerush has got the goods: clickies

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[Anonymous Coward]

Nsv format doesn't seem to work with mplayer...
How can I watch the video on linux?

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[TheoMurpse]

Assuming the keynote is a video, what is the torrenter doing zipping a video? You get virtually no compression.

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a cheap way of keeping people from streaming it directly from the host.

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[Mishura]

Actually, you can if you have the w32codecs installed. It worked fine in Mplayer, but the NSV format doesn't allow fast-forwarding or any kind of seeking. Given that the movie is over an HOUR long, and there are some parts that drag on.. its kind of limited, but yes: It works.

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[Paralizer]

I downloaded and watched this, but it ended at about 60 minutes in the middle of a sentence. Where's the rest of it? I wanted to see the Q&A :\

Re:torrent of carmacks keynote

[QuantaStarFire]

The Q&A came just before the keynote speech, and the Quake4 playdemo came before the Q&A. They're also available on Filerush if you want them. :)

A reasonable model

[Coryoth]

This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source. Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done. Game engines, where being cutting edge counts for a lot, is one of those areas. At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold. Once you've stopped making cash out of your software then open source it and provide the community something to play with. You can end up with results like Tenebrae which is a fairly impressive open source engine considering it is built originally from Quake I source.

I wish there were some other commercial developers that could manage to follow the same sort of pattern. Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced? Are there some other applications that are currently locked up, not being sold nor developed, that could be opened up? I assume part of the problem is bookkeeping: you can keep software on your books as an asset even if you probably couldn't make a dime trying to sell it anymore - and "goodwill from the community" doesn't fit into accounting.

Jedidiah.

Re:A reasonable model

[latroM]

Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done.

Non-free model you mean? Commercialism and free software are compatible.

Re:A reasonable model

[Lisandro]

Actually, it's a good compromise. iD releases its older engines sources as GPL while still selling commercial licences for them to be used in closed source software. And apparently, they do sell them, for everything back to the original Quake engine.

    It's a great gesture, and iD gets (as it should) a lot of respect from the OSS community from it; i just wanted to point out that they still do make cash out of their "older" engines. No conflict of interests there.

Re:A reasonable model

[Hast]

While you may still be able to buy licences for the old games id has gone on record for waiting until all licenced games are out of "sales period" (basically a few years) before they release their source.

This is naturally in order to not piss off their customers.

Re:A reasonable model

[patternjuggler]

This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source.

What I'd like to see is companies promise this sort of thing up front- promise to open the code in some amount of time, or after so many copies have been sold, or similar. They could even place a copy of the code with a third party bound by contract to automatically release the code when the conditions are met.

Maybe when a few more major companies to do this on high-profile games it will feel like a prerequisite for every company to do, and maybe even create competition that will reduce the time to release the code after the game is released.

It's unfortunate that this model only allows a one-way transaction: Id will never be able to make use of or add to existing GPL projects out there, just spawn a bunch of new ones based their game each time they release code.

Now...

[iignotus]

We can finally have Quake 3 on linux!

Oh, wait...

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

or at least ported for mac osx86 intel

and really see how fast it is ..

Re:Now...

[blechx]

Not as much of a joke as you migth think.
For example, ids ported q3 uses OSS, wich is kind of deprecated now and doesnt even work with all soundcard drivers (i have to hack it through esddsp to get mmap-stuff to work), with the program released as free software anyone is allowed to make it work with ALSA, JACK, or whatever they see fit.

Re:Now...

[bcmm]

Seriosly, though, maybe someone will fix ALSA support a little bit, maybe use SDL for the sound like many Doom and Quake derived engines do and allow a good choice of sound drivers. Maybe even a proper aRts driver, so you can listen to music and get the Q3 sound effects (don't talk to me about artsdsp; hearing the sound 2 seconds late is worse than nothing).

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing Linux is so easy to use!

Re:Now...

[phrasebook]

Maybe even a proper aRts driver, so you can listen to music and get the Q3 sound effects (don't talk to me about artsdsp; hearing the sound 2 seconds late is worse than nothing).

If you can afford it, get yourself a SB Live or similar so you can have hardware mixing and forget about conflicts accessing /dev/dsp, and forget about those awful software mixers.

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use dmix, as aRts is beeing moved out, and SB Live sucks.

Re:Now...

[bcmm]

What is dmix and how does it work?

It's not an just an issue with 2 sounds at once, it can be difficult to get quake running even with nothing else doing sound.

Re:Now...

[joeljkp]

It's a plugin for ALSA that lets you play multiple sounds through the same channel at the same time. The format for the config file is a pain, but the following worked for me:

Put all this into a .asoundrc in your home dir:

pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmix"
}

Note that this is for a single sound card with a single audio channel, etc.

To test, try starting up two mplayers or something.

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! Way cool man!

And it's only after, lets see, about 5 years after Windows had it by default (or was it in Win98? Don't remember now...) that with such simple and intuitive addition to a config file (to make it really good, you have to edit with vi, yes?) Linux people can finally have it!

Well that's progress!

Re:Now...

[joeljkp]

Yep, it really sucks, and it should be enabled by default by distributions (or at least by a checkbox in a preferences dialog).

Oh, wait, I'm agreeing with a troll? My bad.

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that dmix is incredibly slow. I tried using it for awhile. It grinds my laptop to a halt.

I switched from Linux to BSD since then. So no ALSA. Still can't open the audio device more than once.

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an x86_64 based linux box and one of the newer 24bit soundcards (Envy24PT alsa driver=ice1724). I haven't quite given up but so far have spent nearly 2 full days trying various hacks to get sound out of QuakeIII.

The problem with simply using something like aoss, (similiar to using esddsp), is that the aoss libs are compiled and installed into /lib64. QuakeIII being 32bit will not load these. So I'm trying to figure out where/how to cross compile a 32bit version and have it installed in a way that q3 can load it... and hopefully send sound to my (working) alsa dmix setup.

Sound in everything else works great. It's just Quake3 and their damn mmap sound mode.

Already posted to various linux forums, just posting here hoping someone might've solved this already.

Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Agret]

The article name is misleading as the Quake 3 source has been slated for release for a very long time now. It was pushed back because someone licensed the engine right at the end of its life cycle.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[stoanhart]

That was kind of dumb of them. If they had waited, they could have had it for free, and they wouldn't have held the engine back from the rest of us. Oh well.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[richy freeway]

No, you're dumb. Yes, they could have had the source for free but without the licensing deal they couldn't have made any money out of it.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had waited, they could have had it for free.

It'll be GPLed, so they could only have it for free if the stuff they were building was free too.

Really, this is no different from the quite-successful Trolltech Qt or Aladdin Ghostscript business model: If people are willing to stay within Free Software, they can use the product for Free. If people want to go closed source, well, they get a commercial license (the copyright holder of a software licensed under the GPL to some people is 100% free to offer different license terms to other people)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

They (ie. Company X) could (at least in theory) make money out of selling a Quake 3 derivative under the GPL - it's just that their source code would also have to be under the GPL. That wouldn't mean anything for their content - maps, graphics, sound effects, music, etc. They wouldn't be obliged to make that available under GPL.

The only practical result from a company selling a game based on GPLed source code is that they couldn't easily do any copy-protection tricks on their game content.

To be fair, it'd be kind of tricky to make any real money from such a project - especially with the large number of fairly decent free mods available for Quake3 engine games. But it's theoretically possible... :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[richy freeway]

Fair point well made. Not really the norm though is it? :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Cyclops]

No, you're dumb. Yes they could have made money out of it even if it was GPL'ed. Selling the boxed copies of GPL'ed software + all those nifty proprietary game packs (the levels, the scenery, etc...) is what's really great.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[richy freeway]

And the chances of that actually happening? In the real world I mean.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Richard_at_work]

No, the company in question could have wanted to modify the engine and retain their own code, for example maybe they wanted to include a custom physics engine, or update the graphics engine in it. Under a license agreement with id they can do this, but by using the GPLed engine they cant do this. How many games do you know that use the Quake3 engine without even minor tweaking of the engine? Its not a simple case of 'Engine' 'Content' and making money from the content.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[ejito]

You can't release commercial multiplayer games (what the q3a engine was built for) on GPL'ed engines, unless you want dozens of hacks ready for cheaters when the game hits the shelves. With the release of code, instead of just hooking dll's, they can code straight onto the engine to make every basic hack. This is why modders don't GPL their code, even though they give away their product for free.

Legacy cheating isn't as much of a problem, which is why the Quake1 GPL wasn't much of an impact; but legacy cheating still happens.

Giving away an engine, then selling maps isn't feasible for several reasons. One is due to conflicts and interoperability: most game servers currently allow you to download scenarios and models (for free, obviously) to overcome that. Are you gonna block downloads?

If you want restricted distribution and less cheating, you're gonna have to either GPL the client and keep the server secret or GPL the server and keep the client secret.

Relying on soley single player scenarios to sell a game also isn't the best strategy. Currently, every heavily played FPS and RTS relies on multiplayer for popularity. Even RPGs are relying on multiplayer.

This only applies to PC games. You can GPL a console game and not worry as much. However, GPLing console code is stupid, because you can't play your own games on your console without unlicensed modding.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Anonymous Coward]

Modders don't GPL there code because they can't. At the most you can really only release a Unified diff of your changes code wise. Your not allowed to re-release parts of the code you didn't change.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[m50d]

If it was GPL (as some of ID's engine releases are) then they certainly could. Sure, anyone who bought their game would have the right to sell copies to their friends, but let's face it, that happens quite a bit anyway. Or they could just keep their models, textures etc. and not license them for redistribution. Redistribute the engine all you like, people can play total conversions with it, but if you want the actual game you still have to buy the CD.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

To put it mildly - no, no it's not. :)

It'd be extremely interesting if a small group of artists/modders could pull it off though - put together a professional-quality game with entirely their own content but using a (slightly) modified Quake3 engine. Maintain the engine as an opensource (GPL) project on their website, sell the content for $5 or so.

Ah well, it's a nice idea. :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Spellbinder]

i think you could split it up
what use is the physic engine without the storyline and the content??
if you consider that anyone had to release a game made with the physic engine also gpl
i think it would more be a problem to clearly seperate the engine from the content
maybe you had to release the game content also as gpl
the problem is that other companys could steal parts of your code and reuse it as in their closed source stuff without you knowing

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

You seem to be assuming that any such company would have to keep the game source code closed. I absolutely agree that most "normal" companies would indeed want to do that, the idea of making their game code available under the GPL would probably make their heads explode :). And you're exactly correct that if they wanted to use the Q3A engine but keep their code closed, they could pay id a (probably quite high) license fee for non-GPL access to the Q3A code.

All I was suggesting was that it'd be technically possible for a small (and abnormal :)) company to maintain a GPLed fork of the Q3A source for their own game engine (and thus not have to pay the large id licensing fee), but the aforementioned engine would be useless without their content. And they could sell their content under whatever license they chose.

Note that I wasn't (and still am not) saying it'd be likely, or even plausible. Just that it'd be possible.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Anonymous Coward]

The part about cheating is wrong. You can release the whole code for the game as GPL, as long as you have a seperate verification software. This needs (from what I can figure) to be closed source. This software is maybe like punkbuster (I dont know much about how PB works)?
What this software would do is to chekcsum the binary files and verify that they are correct to the server. Only when that is done it alows the client to connect. Each mod/fork/whatever would make a list of checksums of their binary files witch is installed with the server version of that mod/fork/whatever. The verification software dont need to know about all the modifications, all it does is send the chekcsums to the server, witch then desides if it want the client to connect.
Offcourse, this would put alot preasure on that verification software, to keep anyone from reverse-engineer it and make it just send out a fake checksum. I dont know how punkbuster keeps people from making a software witch makes the server thinks that the client runs PB, while it realy dont.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

the problem is that other companys could steal parts of your code and reuse it as in their closed source stuff without you knowing

Well, that's a problem with source code in general, not just GPLed source code - any license that makes source code publicly available is much the same. Hell, Microsoft could (in theory) have people stealing their "Shared Source" source code and using it in their own products.

The risk for companies that do that is that they'll end up building their products on sand - if they're ever caught (and the more successful they are, the more likely they are to be caught, so they're fucked either way) then their entire product line will be compromised and their reputation (if any) will be destroyed.

Worrying about a competitor stealing your code shouldn't really be a major issue. Most reputable companies wouldn't (knowingly) risk it, and most disreputable companies will destroy themselves through incompetence before you or id even have a chance to destroy them in the courts. :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Anonymous Coward]

It's technically possible that a small company could make money off of just asking Bill Gates for a $100k check every month.

Not that I'm not saying it's likely, or even plausible. Just that it's possible.

Arguments like these add nothing to a discussion and waste everyone's time.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[petermgreen]

what about disreputable coders inside reputable companies?

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I don't see why it is so unlikely. It seems like a natural progression. so why hasn't this been done already, and a lot? Is it a matter of lack of organization? If you put together the content, how likely is it to be bought out from under you by a closed, professional company? (Which could be part of your business model, actually...)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Spellbinder]

if they try to steal the whole program they could be caught
but i don't know how you could hope to detect a few 100 lines of sourcecode which is integrated in a much larger program?
they could change some stuff, mingle it with their own source and nobody will ever know if he can't look at the source
maybe you could find it out with bugs which affect the programs in the same way or something
but i think it woud be quite an effort needed to prove they stole something
and to prove it you would have to know which program to check

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

True, they could steal only a small amount of your code, incorporate it into their stuff and it'd be difficult or impossible for you to find out...

...but that little fragment of code isn't going to be terribly useful to them, is it?

You usually don't get a great deal of business value from tiny fragments of algorithmic/programming genius - the real value is in having a larger chunk of tested, known-good, documented and working code. Yeah, you'd get a little value from stealing a code fragment here or there - but nothing really significant. You'd still have to make the effort to integrate that stolen code into your codebase.

If they steal only a few small chunks of code, it's unlikely they'd be caught - but the value they'd get out of it would be pretty small. Conversely, if they stole a significant library of working code, they'd probably get significant value out of it - but they'd be at much greater risk of being caught.

It's a risk-reward thing - and even at best, the reward isn't likely to be anything too special. And I believe that most developers prefer to be honest and/or write their own code anyway (even if it's okay to use someone else's). Ever heard of the Not-Invented-Here syndrome? :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[andymadigan]

Even after it was open sourced they could buy a separate license for commercial development that would allow them to develop their software without releasing the source code. Plenty of companies do that, e.g. saxonica.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

Something like that has happened with the developers of some Half-Life mods - I believe Valve has hired most of the people behind the Counterstrike and Day of Defeat mods, and now sells/supports those mods commercially.

The main thing so far has been that id only releases their engines under GPL when they're a few years out of date - so generally you're not going to get a source mod while the engine is still widely used.

I'm not sure how much Q3A is played nowadays, but I get the impression that more modern games like UT2004 and HalfLife2 have pretty much taken over the online FPS scene.

It may also be that it's never really occurred to mod-developers as a possibility. I think the general rule with Q3A/UT/HL mods has been that the mod cannot be distributed commercially (though I may be talking out of my arse here). But if the engine is under the GPL, such rules couldn't apply.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[AvitarX]

It would be easy.

Step one:think of an illiterationg name involvng a an animal (eg Lisa Lemer).

Step 2: make easy childrens adventure game with goof voices and jokes and all

Step 3: Package in a box or Jewel case

Step 4: sell for under $10.00 on the Jewel racks at stores and for $30.00 in edutainment.

There are tons of non-cutting edge games being sold and making money, and in households where leaving the content on CD is copy rotection enough.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Cyclops]

General rule of network programming: if you trust the client, then you're toast.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[ejito]

Severs don't have the bandwidth or cpu power to handle all events server side.

If EVERYTHING was handled server side, then the game would essentially be a remote shell for 32 players -- desktops already have a hard time calculating environments just for 1 player (many games are cpu bottlenecked before videocard limits).

If you knew how aimbots worked, you'd understand that server handled aiming wouldn't be possible, especially with 40-200 ms mouse lag. With client side aiming, it's possible to hook onto the apps and have a dll aim for you when LOS appears. It becomes a trivial task once you GPL the code.

Wall hacks also rely on the principle that calculating line of sight for EVERY player is too cpu intensive for a server. Your computer has the cpu power to handle it's own line of sight detection calculations.

Currently, the server will give you the position of a player if it thinks you might be able to see the other player (with lag, most current netcode will give you the player position before you actually see the player, so players don't suddenly teleport out of nowhere). Current anti-hacks try to remove this problem by hooking to the application first, and hiding player positions to any cheating hooks (usually by making every player appear behind your field of vision).

Currently every FPS, action-RPG, RTS, etc. game requires quick reflexes, and handling controls server side is absolutely not an option.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[ejito]

They can with some effort. Just because a mod uses a proprietary game engine doesn't mean you can't release the mod code under GPL. You can't release the engine code itself, obviously, but you don't have to. Plenty of GPL'ed windows (a proprietary system) apps do this all the time. Same for Java apps -- the library isn't GPL'ed, but GPL'ed java apps utilize library code, they just don't distribute it with the program (they assume you have the library installed on your system).

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[ejito]

Even with both systems being closed source, hacks still occur. GPLing either one makes it a lot easier, though.

Exactly like you said, hacks will just shift to hacking PB first instead of the client. Currently halflife has VAC, but that anti-cheat system was hacked awhile ago, and you sometimes still encounter wallhack/aimbot combos in CS (the system is a good deterrent, just not enough).

There's lots of ways to create an anti-hack application, and even more ways to go around it.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[statusbar]

How many games do you know that use the Quake3 engine without even minor tweaking of the engine?

I believe Urban Terror is one, and for me, the only one game that I still play!

--jeff++

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'm suppose what I'm really wondering is why artists aren't using the GPL-ed engine to showcase their work (which wouldn't be Q3A, necessarily, but a whole different universe, say, just using the engine.) Seems like this could erupt into zillions of games. Or not.

But still, why not? Take 3 or 5 or 7 graphics design majors at your medium sized college. How hard would it be for them to release? Do they still programming support? How much? Can this be automated?

mmmmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else feel like quake sauce on their chips?

-Sj53

punkbuster not included

[Anonymous Coward]

the release "will not include any PunkBuster stuff in it".

what is punkbuster?

Re:punkbuster not included

[The Evil Couch]

anti-cheating/hacking program that was born from the cesspit that Counterstrike became IIRC, and is now the industry standard for preventing cheating and hacking in online first person shooters.

Re:punkbuster not included

[bcmm]

Anti-cheat. Haha.

It's crap at that, but it's very good at stopping people using duplicate CD keys. Which is a shame, because I see nothing morally wrong with two people on a LAN using the same copy to play on a server.

I hope this release helps kill off punkbuster usage on Quake 3 servers.

Re:punkbuster not included

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't even good at that, because the server can choose not to use it.

Re:punkbuster not included

[nunchux]

Punkbuster... Yeah. I guess it works some times. But I've also been booted for being a Mac user (and thus a version behind), booted for using a CD key that was compromised (on a game I paid for, at that... good luck working that situation out), booted because some griefer accused me of cheating because I got off a lucky sniper shot or something. And when you're marked a cheater in one server, you can be marked a cheater in ALL servers-- making the multiplayer mode of a game I paid full price for worthless. I'm looking directly at you, Soldier of Fortune 2 (not my only punkbuster game, but the one where I had the worst problems.)

Of course, that could just be my experience... Maybe some of you love punkbuster. But IMO nothing works better than alert administrators monitoring their servers. A pain, I know, but sharing this task is something that makes a room a community. I keep coming back the the game Red Faction... It's not the newest, or even the most fun, but it doesn't use punkbuster and the admins of the servers I frequent are diligent and fair when it comes to booting modders and abusers.

Re:punkbuster not included

[Sigma 7]

anti-cheating/hacking program that was born from the cesspit that Counterstrike became IIRC, and is now the industry standard for preventing cheating and hacking in online first person shooters.

It's also reported to be ineffective.

The initial version of PB, which appeared on CS servers, picked up a reputation for kicking players for setting cvars to non-default values, even when they wouldn't be in use normally. (e.g. saying which yaw a third-person camera should point at, even when the cvar for the camera was turned off.)

My last problem with PB - I've seen it attempt to kick me 120 times in a row because of "No packet flow". Not suprising, since I was the listen server. (It updated successfully, but that error message shouldn't have appeared in the first place.) It's also capalbe of launching easily, but requires shutting down the game in order to diable PB.

I guess that's why the other major games (such as Half-Life and UT series) have stuck with their own custom anti-cheat protection. While they aren't necessairly more effective, they both feel more trustworthy because they don't have a rash of false positives (or at least no recent false-positives).

This is the reason

[Aggrajag]

This is the reason I actually buy every title from iD Software, even if I don't like the actual game (Quake 3, Doom 3).

Re:This is the reason

[Vampyre_Dark]

Even if I don't like the actual game

A fool and his money are soon parted?

Re:This is the reason

[TrappedByMyself]

This is the reason I actually buy every title from iD Software, even if I don't like the actual game (Quake 3, Doom 3).

Ugh, why not give the money to charity, or support a struggling project? You know, people who actually need it?

Re:This is the reason

[verbatim_verbose]

That's very nice of you, but if you don't like the game, wouldn't it be a better gesture to donate the money to an open source project? id has plenty of money... a game purchase is a drop in the bucket to them compared to people working on Free software.

This would probably be a more practical gesture if you want to support open source. (Which, I can't tell if you do or not - but still, just a thought.)

Re:This is the reason

[Aggrajag]

I pay my taxes (which here in Finland means that some of my money goes to the poor and needy) and I have donated to several FOSS projects. Supporting iD software does not exclude me from donating money to other things but I guess that is only obvious to people who can actually think.

Re:This is the reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, nice one - glad I checked your response before mentioning something myself. :)

People - spend your money how you want to, after all, you worked for it. I donate to various causes, and it irks me to no end to see that kind of wannabe moralistic blackmail crap. :P

Re:This is the reason

[TrappedByMyself]

that is only obvious to people who can actually think.

Oooh, I'm stupid. Woohoo!
Well, you've got me nailed, but I'm still trying to figure you out. You proudly buy products you don't like from people who are filthy rich?
Said another way, Carmack builds a new engine, makes millions from it, slaps a game around it, makes millions more. When he's squeezed an engine dry (keep in mind Q3 source was delayed because there was more money to be made) he releases it to the community under the GPL. No loss to him, great PR move. Because of his grand self sacrifice you give him your money even though you think his games stink.
While I respect your freedom to do this, I still don't get it. If I find an old pair of pants which doesn't fit me anymore and give it to a hobo, will you send me a check?

Re:This is the reason

[Anonymous Coward]

try looking from a little different perspective. He and I are supporting that we belive is acting ethically and would serve as a good example for other companies. We buy thier products in the hopes that other companies will see thier succes and emulate their ethics instead of trying to lock everything they own in a vault for all eternity.

Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[deVoid99]

If you can't wait for the Quake3 source, I've already replicated most of the Quake3 engine's features, and released source & binaries.

DXQuake3 : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/
DXQuake3 features : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/dxquake3_feature s.htm

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, but it does conflict a bit with some of the appeal of Q3: Being based on OpenGL so as to be easily cross-platform.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[MaestroSartori]

Nice feature list, and I'm sure it all works fine.

However...

Quake 3 also runs on Linux & Mac. Not to denigrate your project whatsoever, but it *is* DirectX and thus (depending on how you've organised stuff) might not be straightforward to port.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Oscar_Wilde]

A Quake III Engine in DirectX.
 
Forgive me if I don't jump for joy.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one reason id Software is so great. They're committed to using the right API. None of this fly-by-night DirectX crap from Microsoft. These people have done development on Unix-like programs, so they're firmly grounded in multi-platform code. Too many gaming companies just completely ignore that.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[DigitalBubblebath]

Awesome, what a cool idea for a project. Nice work!

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent was probably trolling but the point really isn't all that bad: you can't compare a mature, cross platform game engine to something that can only be used on Microsoft Windows.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[turgid]

Next you can write a cross-platform Direct X library that uses OpenGL as a back end. That would be very useful indeed.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Jugalator]

It'll run great in Windows Vista though! :-p

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste? As a DX programmer, he'll actually be able to find a job. OpenGL is legacy nowdays in the game business.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, well, since EVERYONE ELSE who replied to this post are typical slashdot whiners to the point of it being embarassing to admit that I visit the same website, *I'll* at least have the decency to say hey, nice work.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[2nd Post!]

Why is OpenGL legacy; just because you say so?

DirectX isn't the end; especially since the two biggest game platforms out there don't support it: Gameboy Advance and Playstation2. Programming in DirectX limits him to PC games.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Zebedeu]

Agreed.
Very nice work, and impressive use of the resources that you had available.

Congratulations!

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the FAQ: "you should be able to play DXQuake3 on any computer you can run Quake3 on."

As others have mentioned, simply by going with DirectX you have already failed. The fact that you appear to now be legitimately part of the industry and yet not understand that terrifies me.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

I briefly read through the source code of many of your files. I am quite impressed with your work. I wonder how many of your detractors here took any time at all to download and browse the code. I appreciate that at the top of many files, you have links to references that will help aspiring games programmers. I would have hoped for more comments and particularly documentation files to explain what you have done and how it all works. Forgive me if it is in there and I somehow missed it. I browsed through many files and looked for the familiar README that most projects have. I wish I could do what you do. Good luck with future projects and employment. There is no other justification needed for this sort of work other than it gives you the experience of doing it and it is a work of art to add to your portfolio to show those who need to evaluate your abilities.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[ildon]

No, because he did this as a personal project to learn/practice coding D3D.

Re:Licensing

[Coryoth]

The licensing scheme will, of course, be of an utmost importance to the community of developers and the "article" doesn't say anything about it. Let's hope it will be a truly free license, preferably GPL, so that the source can actually be modified and re-distributed.

Well the Doom, Quake, and Quake II source were all released as GPL, so I'm unsure why you would expect Carmack to suddenly change his mind and go with something different for the Quake III source.

Jedidiah.

Half-Life 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder when they're gonna release that source... oh wait.

Re:Licensing

[NeoChaosX]

Of course it's going to be GPL. Carmack release the Quake 1 and 2 source code under the GPL, so why wouldn't he do the same for Q3?

Q3: Arena

[Buster Chan]

I was just playing QUAKE 3: ARENA on-line on my Dreamcast earlier today. Those servers usually have enough people online at any given moment for pretty decent games, but does this mean that there'll be more servers, and more people? That'd be great!

Re:Q3: Arena

[Agret]

No as the Dreamcast uses different servers to the PC version afaik. Also, it's just the engine not the entire game.

Re:Q3: Arena

[Buster Chan]

Oh. Thank you for your very informative answer to my question!

Re:Q3: Arena

[sbma44]

there are still servers for DC quake?

Re:Q3: Arena

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the entire game.

In the words of Ali G...

[hoka]

Respekt!

Re:In the words of Ali G...

[DanUK]

you plum

Re:In the words of Ali G...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's Ali G been up to lately? About a year ago he was a huge fad at my college. Has he come out with new episodes? Has his Borat movie come out yet? Inquiring minds want to know.

It's funny how Ali G was all the rage for awhile, everybody was doing Borat impressions at parties, then one day the time came when such impressions would be greeted with, "man, that's getting so old, just give it a rest.."

I'd reckon that's how the British must feel about him. I mean, he only recently got exposure to the American audience, so here in the US we had our Ali G fad recently.

I's here wit me main man, Pat.... Boochanan. Him be well important wit da politik, so you betta rekognize wot him be saying, innit?

Then he asks him if Iraq has any BLTs, and he says, "well, the problem is if Saddam tries to get BLTs..."

Re:In the words of Ali G...

[GraemeDonaldson]

Haven't seen the character of Ali G in a while myself, but Sacha did the voice for the lemur King Julien in Madagascar. Hilarious!

Re:In the words of Ali G...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ali G - "R - E - S - T - E - C - P - A, what does that spell?

Politician - "... Restecpa..?"

Ali - "Yeeees... Restecpa. People have to restecpa each other!"

Re:In the words of Ali G...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ali G was in Dallas a couple weeks ago trying to hitch hike a ride on one of the freeways. He had a problem with people recognizing him, and had to tell a few people to buzz off 'cause they were ruining his attempted hitching.

He also did a piece at a local boxing ring as Borat. He played like he couldn't even punch and kept falling over. Someone else in the class mentioned to the producer, "Isn't that Ali G?". The producer flipped out. "NO! NO! It is not him!"

It was all in the Dallas Morning News a couple weeks ago. Apparently he's trying to film more shows but his contract with HBO is up and I don't know who's funding him now.

Re:Licensing

[Antony.S]

He said in the keynote that it would be GPL (and then he went on for the best part of 5 minutes talking about how much he loves the GPL etc).

All right!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now maybe someone will finally put it to use in a real game.

Nosferatu Total Conversion

[88NoSoup4U88]

This vampire themed Total Conversion looks very promising. They were waiting for the source to be released, so they can release this game for free.
They made some nice changes to the engine : a particle engine, Ingame video playback, Cube maps, Specular maps, Lightblooms and some more modifications.

Have a look at this screenshot or even better, the videos

Re:Quake engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

UE2.0, sure. HL2? Who gives a fuck?

Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[SynapseLapse]

That would be sweet: http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[Pxtl]

Fsck that. Tenebrae is a friggin' techdemo. I want to see something actually useful... like all the huge Quake3 TCs released as standalone opensource games and bundled with Linux distros.

For shit's sake, Quake 3 was the first Id game to actually support mods as first-class citizens with their own keybinding menus and stuff. The Q3 TCs are an order of magnitude more complete than the Q2 ones because of it (Action Q2 is nice, but having to use the console for everything is inexcusable in a modern game).

Plus, Q3 allowed for replacement of all major media in game, without even modding. This means that there are already numerous replacement collections of player models and weapon models available on Polycount (not having monster models makes it easier) and maps on various mapping sites. As a result, all you'd have to replace to make a FreeQ3 TC would be the textures and sounds - everything else has been done already (whereas Q1 didn't have prevalent player-model and weapon-model replacements at the time of opensourcing).

This is by far some of the best news the opensource gaming world has ever seen. I can't wait to see this capitalised on.

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[Guspaz]

Why bother. Make a mod for Enemy Territory. It's based on the Quake 3 engine (though more advanced of course), supports mods, and it's free to download. Why bother messing around with building a full game with a bare engine when you can borrow all of ET's assets?

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[Pxtl]

Because with Q3 being free-as-in-freedom, your derived games will be actually opensource, instead of simply free-as-in-beer. If I have to explain the importance of this distinction, then you're on the wrong website.

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[Guspaz]

Perhaps for a select few total conversions that really don't rely on many of Q3's assets. However, it is much easier to make a mod using existing assets than to try to replace every single one of them. Opensource isn't a magic bullet that makes all the world's problems go away. Only Q3's sourcecode is to be GPL'd, not any of the assets/contents.

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[ArcticCelt]

"...games will be actually opensource, instead of simply free-as-in-beer..."

I think you meant "...games will be actually opensource, LIKE free-as-in-beer..."

A shameless site plug

[Ndr_Amigo]

One site to keep an eye on for your Quake3 source needs is QuakeSrc, particularly the forums.

Most of the current Quake engine moders hang out here.

Obligatory Futurama quote....

[EvilCabbage]

"Good news everyone!"

Re:Obligatory Futurama quote....

[ehlo]

actually, "good news everyone!" was always used in conjunction with that a new delivery was to be made, often to places like "the forbidden sector" or the "place of no return".
"good news everyone!" was always detested by the crew.

In other news.

[jotux]

3D realms just announced they are about to start writing the source code for Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:In other news.

[cortana]

How much have 3d Realms sunk into the DNF cesspit so far, and is this number greater or less than the amount of money that they could possibly hope to make when they release the final game?

Re:In other news.

[EnderWiggin99]

None. Read GP post.

They haven't started yet. :)

Re:In other news.

[petermgreen]

iirc 3DR is a private company and as such thier finances aren't public so its hard to tell.

one question for everyone

[MySchizoBuddy]

Doom3 is opengl game engine and directx interface. what does that mean. Its rendering in opengl, and then converts the calls to directx and let directx display it. I'm confused.

Re:one question for everyone

[_Shorty-dammit]

"directx" isn't just graphics, it's sound, input, etc. Doom3 uses opengl for graphics, period. It doesn't get converted to anything else, there'd be no point in that at all. It might use directx for other things besides graphics perhaps, mouse input, keyboard input, sound, etc.

Re:one question for everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

D3 uses OpenGL for rendering, but on Windows it probably uses DirectX for some other stuff, since DirectX also covers audio, input etc.

Re:one question for everyone

[MySchizoBuddy]

and opengl driver is already in winxp, or they r included with the graphics card.

Re:one question for everyone

[MySchizoBuddy]

how does doom3 work under xbox. xbox doesn't have opengl.

Re:one question for everyone

[Tim C]

Yes, iirc XP ships with OpenGL support, but no-one who's planning on playing Doom 3 is going to be using it, as it won't be accelerated (it's purely a software implementation, as it has to be, as you can't guarantee that the machine has a GPU, let alone a specific type...). Graphics card drivers all provide support for OpenGL that replaces the system default.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

He even *said* it would be GPL at the keynote.

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[_Shorty-dammit]

uh, id's been releasing the source code to their engines for a long, long time, and they're just continuing to do so. Why on earth do you think this is some abnormal event for those guys? It was already slated to be released a long time ago but was pushed back because of a new licensee, as someone posted a little ways up to remind everyone. No matter how dated the engine may be in your mind (really, it's mostly texturing that makes it look dated) there's still going to be a lot of interesting code to learn from. Zoner.

Re:Payback for banning

[_Shorty-dammit]

or you could grow up and get on with your life, heh. Why would you even give a rat's ass anymore? You'll find that *not* acting like a fool will get you not-so-surprisingly few bans...

Give me Quake III on DEC Alpha or give me death!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Alpha Troll hath sp0ken!

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it has a lot of significance. The reason why we are continuing to be able to enjoy the classics like Quake I and Quake II is because the very fact that the source code was released and enthousiasts are able to pick it up and maintain it for newer operating systems. It makes a game immortal, else it just would sink into oblivion.

On other news, just because it doesnt have the latest and greatest whizbang features doesn't mean it isn't great fun. I hope this will be yet another boost for Q3 Engine development.

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[Cabewse]

It might be because they have a new showy engine to sell. And by releasing the source code, id's allowing the community to improve upon the engine. If Tenebrae can be made out of the Quake 1 engine, imagine what could be done with Quake3?

Here is one, titled Tremulous.

[NRAdude]

Here are screenshots and downloadable media of Tremulous, currently a Quake3 full conversion that would benefit perhaps of being released as its own game.

Re:Here is one, titled Tremulous.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think linking to a screenshot page from slashdot is a wise choice.

Re:Here is one, titled Tremulous.

[Timbo]

Um yeah. Tremulous is really good. You should all play it. :paranoid:

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better free engines exist? I think not. There are rendering engines (ogre, irrlicht, OSG etc) with more features, but Q3 is a complete game engine, not a rendering engine. Show me a gpl project with the same quality of networking, toolchain, physics, gamelogic, plus a faster and more well featured rendering engine, and I wont be exited over Q3.

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

q3a already runs on linux.

Thanks id

[ribblem]

I saw the source for Quake 3 long ago since I work for an IHV. I think the biggest benefit it will have over its predecessors is that it is much cleaner and easier to understand/modify (at least from my brief examination it seemed this way to me). It should be very straight forward to add in VBOs which numerous licensees have done. It will be a little more work to cleanly add fragment programs, but still not bad. Again licensees have already done this proving it's doable. Adding in stencil shadows really shouldn't be too much work. I'm sure adding FBO wouldn't be much work either, but depending on the effects you want to use this for they could take some effort. While I'm not as well versed in physics I imagine someone should be able to expand the physics engine of Q3 to the now popular rigid based per triangle collisions.
At this point for tons less work than writing a game engine from scratch you'd have a very nice modern engine for whatever you want as long as you release the source with it.
Thank you id Software.

Re:Thanks id

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw fragment programs and stencil shadows, I just want a server browser that DOESN'T SUCK ASS.

Re:Thanks id

[MP3Chuck]

The engine already has sencil and volumetric shadows. cg_shadows '0' = No Shadows cg_shadows '1' = Blob Shadows cg_shadows '2' = Volumetric Shadows cg_shadows '3' = Stencil Shadows

Re:Thanks id

[Guspaz]

Only on models, not the entire game world. And last time I tried to enable them, shadows were super buggy, madly flashing in and out of existence in parts, and distorted.

Re:Thanks id

[Guspaz]

The later iterations of the Quake 3 engine had a much improved server browser. It has yet to be seen what version/branch of Quake 3's source will be released.

Regardless, the server browser is such a minor part of the engine, and it's a truely trivial addition to make.

XBOX Doom 3

[Phil John]

was quite heavily re-written (hence the delayed launch date) by a company who was already au-fait with xbox development. I suspect they ripped out carmacks opengl code and put in a direct-x replacement, converting shaders manually etc. They also didn't have to deal with creating different render paths for different hardware (geforce 3 vs geforce fx vs radeon etc.) and only stuck to the nvidia card in the xbox, therefore reducing the amount of work required immensely.

Re:Quake engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

"HL2? Who gives a fuck?"
More than for UE2.0, that's for sure :)

Re:Quake engine?

[EnsilZah]

HL2 might not have been very impressive graphic-wise, but i found the facial expressions and the way people reacted to you when you walked by added alot.

Let me clear this up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Heya, Ghostface here (leader of the Nosferatu Team)

No we are not really waiting for the Quake3 src in order to release Nosferatu for free. The game is based upon a heavily modified version of the Qfusion Engine which in turn is based on the Quake2 sourcecode.

Engine : Quake 2 -> Qfusion - > Nosferatu Engine

No Quake3 in there ;)
We just use some data formats from quake3 :)

Re:Let me clear this up:

[88NoSoup4U88]

Oi, sorry for misinforming there :/

Damn, and all this time I thought you guys were going to use the Q3 engine : Am I crazy, or have you guys changed plans ? I would have sworn I'd seen that you people would be using that engine.

Anyways, kudos to you all, and it looks very promising.

Re:Let me clear this up:

[Anonymous Coward]

We never intended to use the quake3 engine. We just said that our current engine (the one based on qfusion/quake2) is able to do everything that the quake3 engine can do - and alot more :)

Re:Licensing

[mindwar]

you'd get a chance to actualy see the source code and you fucking nerds start fussing about licences. how many other big games actualy do this?

w00t

[bart416]

Did anybody say something about steal the render engine and put it in your own game? XD

Hmm, I don't know... 8-(

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes when people do something that great, perhaps that's because they're planning to do something dangerous...

I hope it's not the case with Mr. Carmack...

native alsa sound support!

[Internet_Communist]

I hope this means someone will add native alsa sound support. Who needs oss kernel emulation w/mmap?

maybe quake 3 will finally work with dmix.

Re:native alsa sound support!

[bcmm]

I know this is not tech support forum, but this is obviously going to take time to fix, so for now:
Has anyone got a good way to work around the problems with ALSA? The only success I've had has been with artsdsp, but with that the sound lags 2 secs behind gameplay, which is too distracting. Anyone know a way to make arts react a bit faster?

Re:native alsa sound support!

[bersl2]

You mean besides not relying on onboard sound or even some discrete sound cards, which do DSP and mixing in software, a la winmodems?

I suppose you could run JACK as a real-time process. This way, sound doesn't get preempted.

Re:native alsa sound support!

[Internet_Communist]

Maybe I mis-understood you but software mixing = dmix, which requires quake3 to be using the alsa-lib interface (or a wrapper to it, none of which work very well.)

Not much on board sound can do hardware mixing, which is what I think you're talking about. Most onboard sound these days uses the intel8x0 alsa driver which has no hardware mixing support. The only onboard sound I've personally come across that could do it is my laptop which has a CS46XX based chipset in it. As for sound cards, yamaha chips, trident 4wave,and emu10k1/2, and the above mentioned cs46xx are the majority of cards that support it. There's probably a few I'm missing. Also my echo mia midi supports 8 virtual outputs (that's 4 in stereo) which is useful but it doesn't work quite the same way, though I do admit it gets me around this problem, somewhat. I then run into a bug where if your rate isn't a multiple of 22050hz, like 48000 or 96000 certain sounds will lock up quake 3.

I still think quake 3 needs alsa support. Doom 3 has it, though that's not exactly the best comparison....

Re:native alsa sound support!

[Anonymous Coward]

oss2jack can emulate most OSS calls (including MMAP for quake3) with very low latency, using the JACK audio server.

Re:native alsa sound support!

[bersl2]

I do not dispute that Q3 needs ALSA support. I know there are many issues with software mixing. I myself have a CS4630-based card, and I love the thing.

The great-grandparent poster was asking about how to get rid of 2+ sec. xruns. I say to either use a sound server that is meant to do low latencies, such as jackd, or to get a real sound card.

No, I don't know that he uses a crappy sound device for sure. But given the ubiquity of software-driven sound processing, I find it probable that this is his problem.

Re:native alsa sound support!

[SPY_jmr1]

I don't know about Q3, but I know I have RtcW:ET dmixing itself. That is not to say that it is perfect, ET using also tends to lock up and no one seems to know why. So maybe the source code can be ported to ET and its problems fixed.

PS: ALSA 1.0.9 seemed to have added some dmix improvments as well. It did for me anyway, but I don't have to wrap things anymore to get them to work.

And if you actually want to read the comments...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you actually want to read Carmack's comments it's helpful to have a link to them rather than the Planet Quake homepage:

http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=10 68

More companies should follow.

[RoadWarriorX]

I think this is one of the great examples of the balance of free software in a business market. The software companies always state that the number one reason why their never release the source code of their product is that they do not want to loose their intellecutual property...ever.

Id has enough sense to realize that there is a point in a piece of software's lifecycle where their innovation has made "enough money". So, they can release their Quake X engine under GPL to benefit the community, while at the same time their can still license the core engine to commercial product. The release of the GPL engine gets people motivated to use the engine in new, innovative ways. They see the code, they understand the code, then they may use it in their project. No matter if the project is GPL or a commercial venture, Id provides the options! Isn't that great?

It's that time again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for Quake III to do what happens to all outdated game engines: get ported to Dreamcast and Xbox.

Modifications

[ThePyro]

Kindof. He mentioned that the PunkBuster stuff will be removed from the code, so that people can't compile their own versions for the purpose of cheating.

Re:Modifications

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. I was under the impression the punkbuster stuff is third party, which would explain why they removed it.

Re:Modifications

[MsGeek]

Punkbuster is third-party and also closed-source.

This now means that any anti-cheat system for the opensourced Quake 3 is going to have to be written from scratch. Gentlemen (and Ladies) start your editors...

The moral of the story is:

[Fuzuli]

You can be a nice guy, even if you have millions of dollars. Although there are some posts which discusses the significance of this release, years after the game went out, i feel like i should remind you guys: this is not a donation to poor software houses so that they can come up with a new hit.
This is about letting some other (even if they are in the software industry or not) guys learn something from what you have done.
Carmack has been one of the legends of the genre, and even if his usual habit (create the best visual environment possible, and go on) has started to loose it's success (half life vs doom 3) there is no doubt that he is very very good programmer. For a lot of other programmers, it's a good oppurtunity to see what kind of tricks he's been doing.
The release is late, but this makes it fair for the companies who paid to licence the engine. If you can't make money from a source code in 4 years after you've bought it, than you have much more serious problems than this release. It's kinda sad to see all those complaints, since Carmack has no obligation to release code, and he gets complaints instead of thanks when he does it.
I'll possibly never compile the thing since i don't have time for that as an "enterprise developer" (oh god, why did i fail so badly?), but it'll feel good to have source code of quake 3 somewhere around my hard drive.
Whatever, good work Mr. Carmack, thanks..

Re:The moral of the story is:

[phrasebook]

You can be a nice guy, even if you have millions of dollars.

Or maybe: you can be a nice guy, when you have millions of dollars (and you've gotten over the Ferrari thing).

AltTab!

[Snaller]

I home someone will fix that damn idiocy that the user can't Alt-Tab - That is so lame.

Re:AltTab!

[AoT]

That will not happen until you get rid of windows.

Re:AltTab!

[Snaller]

Living up to your sign I see.

Re:AltTab!

[AoT]

you mean .sig I assume? ;)

Re:AltTab!

[Snaller]

Hey, I'm tiered ;)

Great news for artists and researchers.

[delire]

We host and or link to about 120 game-based artworks many of which are built on/for Quake3.

Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP. This has resulted in game-based artworks that rely on proprietary third-party engines having less-than equal opportunity where other mediums are concerned.

This is welcomed greatly in the art world. True to form as always, thanks John.

Re:Great news for artists and researchers.

[justins]

Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP.

Is that just another way of saying they didn't want to pay to use the technology, like a game publisher has to?

Keen?

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

Yeah, this is great and all... but how about they release the Commander Keen source code already?

Re:Keen?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have only one word for that: Word!

Setting the example

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great, I'm now inspired enough to publicly release the source to my Hello World program written in VB.Net. May the world rejoice.

Re:Quake engine?

[leathered]

Ah yes, the HL2 engine, which judging by the leaked alpha version still contains Quake 1 code.

Re:Uh, it's been out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

quake4 coming soon ?

[Abnormal Coward]

Does the open sourcing of Quake3 engine mean Quake4 is coming soon, I hope so, always liked Raven games.

Re:quake4 coming soon ?

[k_187]

probably, but they usually do this when their new engine has been out for a while, and doom 3 shipped a year ago.

Re:quake4 coming soon ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have serious anger management problems. You should seek professional help.

Re:quake4 coming soon ?

[joeljkp]

It's coming.

Here's some gameplay videos.

Re:quake4 coming soon ?

[Guspaz]

As Carmack has said himself, the Quake 3 source was supposed to be released as soon as DOOM3 was released, however Carmack underestimated the life of the Q3 engine. When D3 shipped, there were still new Q3-based games in development, and it wouldn't have been fair to the licencees.

Obviously the last of the Q3-based games have now shipped.

Dopefish lives.

[ikkonoishi]

They can't release it.

Dopefish ate it.

These guys are teases - relieve the shareware

[bigbinc]

They release the source, but they don't release the shareware code and binary formats, so we
can hack the games.

So, I say if you release the games, this will be really exciting.

Re:These guys are teases - relieve the shareware

[Anonymous Coward]

The binary formats will all be in the code...

Re:These guys are teases - relieve the shareware

[mabhatter654]

Actually, you are correct, they aren't releasing the Quake 3 GAME GPL'd just the source code of the game. It won't be playable without maps, artwork, models, etc.. that is under normal copyright in the game.

Re:Uh, it's been out.

[UfoZ]

That's the game source and it's been out for years, genius.

Id is planning to release the entire engine source this time, much like they've done with Quake 1 and 2 and various other older games.

Your reasoning (was Re:A reasonable model)

[Laebshade]

Your reasoning/idea sounds awfully like the idea behind copyrighted material entering public domain.

Uh...

[Dthoma]

...you realise that only a poorly-coded game can be used to cheat in multiplayer, right? Any sane coder will keep the game state entirely in the server, so it's impossible to cheat by "hacking" the source at the client's end.

Re:Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

... you do realize that only an idiot would state that a multi-player FPS could be entirely server-based?

Re:Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of multiplayer games are hosted by the 'clients' as well. i.e. i start a multiplayer game and people connect to 'my' system.

Re:Uh...

[cortana]

Yes, I can't wait for the day when we all have Internet connections capable of carrying 1280 * 960 * 24 bits * 60 frames/sec = 211 MB/s of video data. Oh, don't forget the 44 KHz * 16 bits * 6 channels necessary for audio. And it must have zero latency, so that user input has an immediate, and immediatly displayed, effect on the game world (even while everyone else on your street is maxing out their pipes, leaching music and movies off BitTorrent)--so you can forget about ever playing a game against anyone on a different continent.

Even then, cheaters would programs to analyses the video feed as it comes in, recognising enemy players and aiming and firing at them.

Re:Uh...

[cortana]

Oh, I forgot to mention that with this idea, to run even a modest, 32 player server, would require 6784 GB of bandwidth.

Re:Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG you've solved the problems of all of the FPS games ever. They just have to *code* better.

No further need for punkbuster!

Thanks!

Re:Uh...

[UnknownSoldier]

> ...you realise that only a poorly-coded game can be used to cheat in multiplayer, right? Any sane coder will keep the game state entirely in the server, so it's impossible to cheat by "hacking" the source at the client's end.

How many games have you actually shipped?

This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick off

[Thilo2]

Especially in germany - where there is an age restriction on the Quake3 game and you cannot easily buy it. For instance, the Quake3 mod Padmod which can be found here http://www.worldofpadman.com/ has astonishing artwork while at the same time being without blood and from the concept suited for children (it's still fun for adults though). Unfortunately, the MOD does not have many gamers right now - one reason for this is certainly the ban on quake3 itself. With a seperate build one can now circumvent this ban which will hopefully bring new users to mod projects like these.

Screw that I want TF2

[Bender Unit 22]

damn Sierra has deleted their tf2 homepage, it was there half a year ago.

Punkbuster is shit

[cortana]

It was so good at its job that Valve ditched it in favour of their own anti-cheating system (which is also shit, but that's another point).

Re:Punkbuster is shit

[OldeTimeGeek]

Why is it shit? Because it doesn't work or it works too well?

Re:Punkbuster is shit

[cortana]

I never played a game where it kicked legitimate cheaters. The worst was with a mod called True Combat: it would kick *everyone* from the server, a few minutes after they joined, for alleged cheating!

I wouldn't have cared, except that it was impossible to turn off once turned on. Even removing the commands that enabled it from the server's config files and restarting the server didn't do it. I know this sounds crazy, and if I came accross someone raving about how it posessed his PC I too would discount that someone as an idiot... nevertheless, that was my experience with it.

Re:Punkbuster is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

PB only catches public cheats (and not even all of them). If someone writes a wall hack or an aimbot and keeps it to himself, PB will never catch the punk.

Time to buy a joystick

[inode_buddha]

Time to buy a joystick, does anyone know where to get a SideWinder?

Re:Time to buy a joystick

[King_TJ]

Heh... I have a MS SideWinder joystick over (original model with the 15-pin gameport connector on it, and convertable to USB with a little "dongle" adapter), as well as an MS SideWinder gamepad.

I actually wanted to sell one or both of these a while back. Had 'em on eBay and got no bidders, even at $1 plus postage. So I figured nobody wanted used joysticks anymore or something?

Seriously, if you're seeking one out - I'd be happy to sell you one of mine. I got a couple Logitech wireless gamepads I use now.

But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

When Quake III was released, it was a closed source game that ran on Microsoft Windows.

I thought that the general Slashdot consensus was that GPL-licensed, open source development under Linux yields better quality products. If that's so, where are the open-source, first-person shooters that must already put Quake III to shame?

Prediction: Quake III will be released under the GPL, just like the previous ones, and a bunch of open source fanatics will slave over it, never really understanding how it all works. They will make trivial changes to it before losing interest and no viable, popular products will ever come of their efforts.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[XpirateX]

If I had points, I would mod you up. I completely agree. Although some work has been done with Quake I (Nexuiz for one), there really hasn't been anything ground-breaking done with any already existing games in terms of creating a new game. Imagine taking an engine (like QII or QIII) and making a completely new game that is commercial quality released under the GPL (or similiar license). I'm not holding my breath.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[2008]

1: Q3A had a linux port pretty quickly (maybe not at release, I don't remember)

2: That doesn't apply so much to games, the distributed development model is less effective since you need a coherent structure. Also budding game developers tend to mod on commercial engines (e.g. Counter-Strike on Half-Life), for the installed base and because they can re-use game assets.

3: For the amazing stuff people have done with the Quake 2 engine Nexuiz, which has ~quake 3 model/level quality and ~doom 3 effects (and system requirements, sadly). It's entirely "viable", as in I've joined servers full of people and had fun playing. I don't think it's popular compared to the big commercial games - but it's had zero media exposure and isn't sold in game stores, and still had 250000 downloads! I wouldn't say it puts Quake 3 to shame, but it's worthy competition.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

1: Q3A had a linux port pretty quickly (maybe not at release, I don't remember)

It was a closed source release done by the publisher. I have the metal-cased Linux version which I bought for $2.88 from MicroCenter with a sticker saying you could convert it to a Windows version with a download -- because Linux users wouldn't buy "evil" closed source software.

2: That doesn't apply so much to games, the distributed development model is less effective since you need a coherent structure. Also budding game developers tend to mod on commercial engines (e.g. Counter-Strike on Half-Life), for the installed base and because they can re-use game assets.

Then let's leave the "budding" newbies out of this. How many experienced game developers have come up with open source games that rival the quality of Quake III?

3: For the amazing stuff people have done with the Quake 2 engine Nexuiz, which has ~quake 3 model/level quality and ~doom 3 effects (and system requirements, sadly). It's entirely "viable", as in I've joined servers full of people and had fun playing. I don't think it's popular compared to the big commercial games - but it's had zero media exposure and isn't sold in game stores, and still had 250000 downloads! I wouldn't say it puts Quake 3 to shame, but it's worthy competition.

It is an interesting derivative, but it's not exactly an all-new game. Nor would I say that it has Quake III level graphics. They are good, but not that good. And why has it had "zero media exposure"? It's not like open source projects are shunned by the media. We've seen no small amount of attention paid to Firefox, Mozilla, Linux, OpenOffice.org, Apache, etc. Congrats to them for their efforts and thanks on behalf of those who enjoy playing it, but let's see a viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys. And I mean one developed from the ground up as open source.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[justins]

Congrats to them for their efforts and thanks on behalf of those who enjoy playing it, but let's see a viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys. And I mean one developed from the ground up as open source.

The problem is that the "open source" nonsense is just fucking irrelevant one way or the other. Make a killer new game engine, something competitive with Doom 3, and release it under the GPL. What have you got? Not much.

The difficulty in getting a killer new game out is in the content and design, not the cost or difficulty of creating a game engine. Look, there are plenty of mod teams that have access to the doom3 engine's features already. They won't match the commercial doom3-based games, and it's not because they have a game engine which isn't competitive. It's because the game engine is largely irrelevant.

To get a "viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys" the first thing you need to do is convince professional artists and level-designers to work really hard for free. Good luck with that.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[tepples]

where are the open-source, first-person shooters that must already put Quake III to shame?

Have you played with the cube engine lately?

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

To get a "viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys" the first thing you need to do is convince professional artists and level-designers to work really hard for free. Good luck with that.

Professional artists and level designers are too smart to undermine their income by giving away their labor for free. Maybe software engineers could learn from them.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

Have you played with the cube engine lately?

With graphics like this, I'm sure that Carmack isn't "quaking" in his boots.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Prediction: you will be a huge faggot that always whines when other people want to waste their free time doing something that you can't relate to because you're a faggot and all you care about it buttsex with your boyfriend, faggot

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[justins]

Professional artists and level designers are too smart to undermine their income by giving away their labor for free.

Strictly speaking that's not true. A lot of video game artists get their start giving their work away, in mods and such. They just don't do it forever...

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[dvdeug]

a bunch of open source fanatics will slave over it, never really understanding how it all works.

I think it very clear that the previous ID software releases are well-understood, code-wise. The problem is not and will not be the code; the problem is that the lack of good 3d models.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many gay users on Slashdot and we all find your homophobic bullshit to be out of place and childish. If you were more confident in your own sexuality, you would not be so threatened by ours. Grow up.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, do the smell of farts give you a hard on? I've always wondered if you gays found farts erotic - you know, if you sniff the ass scent from a hot guy do you think, "yeah, I'd like to stuff my pecker into some more of THAT."

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, does the smell of a used feminine napkin give you a hard-on? Do you think "yeah, I'd like to stuff my pecker into some more of THAT"? If a straight guy takes his wife/girlfriend/hooker from behind, does the smell of farts give him a hard-on from that day forward?

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Sigma 7]

2: That doesn't apply so much to games, the distributed development model is less effective since you need a coherent structure.

In most of the Quake engine-level mods I've seen, a coherent structure is formed within individual dev-teams. These dev-teams then proceeded to combine information and produce a Quake Standards Group to ensure that the Quake enginges remain as fully compatable as possible, by showing which builtin functions should be asigned to a given Quake-C builtin call, and so on.

3: For the amazing stuff people have done with the Quake 2 engine Nexuiz,

Nexuiz is based around Quake 1, Normal version. You can tell by the fact that it uses Quake-C, as well as the lack of predictive netcode (e.g. you have to wait until the server acknowledges weapon change before it is recognized on the HUD.)

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Criterion]

You do realize, don't you, that the graphics are not an indicator of the quality of the engine, but the quality of the artist?

I looked at other shots there, and it really doesn't look half bad. Could be very fun to play around with.

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

You do realize, don't you, that the graphics are not an indicator of the quality of the engine, but the quality of the artist?

Then you should do Quake III Arena quality graphics using the engine created for the original Duke Nukem 3D. The graphics are only as good as the weakest link, whether that's the graphics engine or the skill of the artist. I can't tell by looking at screenshots.

I looked at other shots there, and it really doesn't look half bad. Could be very fun to play around with.

I, of course, picked a shot which I thought best supported my position. I agree that some of the graphics look pretty good and that the game might be quite enjoyable. But I don't think that it's of the quality where ID Software and the big names have to worry.

My whole point in all of this is that Slashdot is filled with people who swear that the best of all possible software is open source and that open source is the best model for software development. Yet the same people get all excited when an end-of-life video game's previously-closed-source code is put under the GPL. Well, if open source leads to better software, then why isn't there a better game (or at least engine) already out there that was developed from the ground up as open source?

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[fmaxwell]

The problem is not and will not be the code; the problem is that the lack of good 3d models.

Why? Are computer artists too smart to give away their work? Gee, maybe some of the software engineers and wannabees on Slashdot could learn from those computer artists...

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the general Slashdot consensus was that [...blah blah blah...]

Since when has Slashdot had a consensus about ANYTHING?

Very unlikely...

[Robotron23]

There are a few reasons why Democrats playing to centre and hardline Repub's won't criticize modding...

Firstly, it's unlikely persons using these mods will release their work and charge money for it. It'll likely be on some random mod site. Thus it'll be obscure, and downloaded by thousands...as opposed to bought by millions.

Second, most modders will likely map out the content and include an age warning, EBRSM or not.

Third, FPS games don't often include nudity/sex (which is what sets the vultures off nowadays), the only FPS i remember having some pixelated nudity was Duke Nukem 3D which is now a decade old. When they do, its as a bit of humour, not as a minigame or other unlockable feature.

And lastly, the whole matter of criticizing games made from scratch by a fan/group of fans is too obscure. Joe Sixpack will more likely be scratching his head wondering how/what the Quake 3 Source code even is...let alone how people use it. I mean even the Hot Coffee "scandal" wasn't that big a story, it was more slow news day material than anything else. And besides, most US networks are too busy scaremongering to give a wooden nickel about modified game sex.

Oh and to close, in the unlikely chance of any small-time mod game is reported on as contravertial, tonnes more people will download it to see what all the fuss it about! Its a winning situation from the modders point of view anyhow.

Yay! New Amiga game

[porneL]

That's how AmigaOS gets new games these days.

Not a noble gesture. Not news worthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all of id's other engine release, this too you will be forbidden from using to create commercial games.

I bet young aspiring game developers everywhere (like me way back when the Wolf 3D source was released) are salivating at the idea of having a real 3D engine to use for their commercial products... ...only to be SEVERELY dissapointed when they read the license agreeement that says you may not use the engine for anything you intend to sell.

Shame on ID for riding the support of thousands of people making mods for their games and then giving nothing tangible back to the community. There are no secrets of 3D rendering which this engine will reveal. It's old technology.

All this does is give a sales boost to ID by getitng their name out there on all the websites and encouraging more people to work for free developing free content with their name and engine attached to it.

Where are the slashdot articles about stuff like Blitz 3D which is actually useful to independent developers?

q3 + r300 = good

[nuxi_problem]

This upcoming release of the Quake 3 source code coincides nicely with the latest r300 project update (http://r300.sf.net/): the open-source ATI R300 drivers (for Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700 and 9800 cards) have been moved into the Mesa CVS at http://freedesktop.org/.

See http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon for more info about Radeon cards and chipsets.

Re:q3 + r300 = good

[Anonymous Coward]

the open-source ATI R300 drivers (for Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700 and 9800 cards) have been moved into the Mesa CVS

As somebody who used to prefer ATI cards and for the last two years has gone NVIDIA due to Linux/FreeBSD support, I gotta ask: do these cards perform decently under Mesa?

Re:q3 + r300 = good

[vranash]

Quake3 @ 90FPS on my 9800, but it hardlocks after like 30 seconds of OGL, and it's supposedly a 9800 only 'feature', so I can't comment on the other cards, except that as far as dri-devel goes they don't seem to have as serious of driver issues.

Re:q3 + r300 = good

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, basically open source sucks.....

Re:q3 + r300 = good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried the DRI drivers with a PCI 9200.....they don't seem to be very usable for real gaming(Cube, Q3, etc.). It's pretty disappointing.

that's"we" love pure c code

[aCapitalist]

n/t

Quake3-based Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is free

[Anonymous Coward]

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (wolfet) is a WWII multiplayer game that I believe is more fun than Counterstrike or Medal of Honor (multiplayer mode).

The only other multiplayer FPS that required as much teamwork in order to win is the free Half-Life mod called Natural Selection. Simply amazing mod. One team plays aliens while other plays humans.

WOLFET was originally set to include both single and multiplayer modes--my understanding is that when they ran into problems completing the single-player mode, they decided to distribute the multiplayer game as a free download.

I've run the server on Linux but have only tried playing on Windows.

Highly recommended (remember to apply the latest patch and download some custom maps). There are also many mods available too.

http://www.enemy-territory.com/
http://www.splashdamage.com/modules.php?op=modload &name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownload&cid=7

Old news?

[XpirateX]

I submitted this story about 7 months ago: Quake III Source Release Delayed Sunday January 02, @01:42AM Rejected

It's all available in his blog

From January:
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 isnt the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but Im 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 wont be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I wont 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.

Camack is so fucking boss

[aCapitalist]

He's 35, like Linus (Linus got his masters), carmack did a semester an a half. these guys are hardcore hackers. just pure let's push the fucking envelope and getting rich at the same time.

carmack is way beyond linus. carmack is in a world beyond himself. the dude writes engines (back in the day, before he had kids) like you wipe your ass. always writing engines to push the envelope. even sweeney considers carmack god. the dude is just a fucking machine.

thank you john, from another 35 year old...how time flys.

Re:Camack is so fucking boss

[aCapitalist]

Oh John, since your a family man now and you've ditched at least one ferrarri, did you pick yourself an H3?

Re:This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick o

[satoshi1]

WoP would definitely benefit from this. This mod (total conversion?) is one of the best out there. As you said, though, it's a shame that no one plays it.

Important Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it going to get converted to Delphi?

Re:Uh, it's been out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you can't really blame me since it's called "Quake 3 source" and all.

Xbox 360

[Anonymous Coward]

"Carmack heaped praise on the decisions that Microsoft has made with the Xbox 360. "It's the best development environment I've seen on a console," he says. Microsoft has taken a very developer-centric approach, creating a system that's both powerful but easy to code for."

Re:Quake engine?

[ShyGuy91284]

I do for one. Although HL2's scenery may not have been quite on par with Doom 3 (not to mention Doom 3's excellent lighting system), as another reader stated, it's facial animations were unparalleled. It also is compatible with Direct X 7, and will run on pretty old machines (although not as pretty). I think that's the real kicker, that it can look that good, but still maintain good compatibility with old hardware if it comes down to it.

Map's 'n stuff

[headkase]

What I would like to see more companies do is license their artwork and map geometry under a creative commons type license. It would be really nice if the complete quakes 1-3 were free for non-commercial use and modification.
And what I would really love to see as I'm not that good at managing my own memory is a python engine embedded within the quake 3 engine. Then I could program all my slow high level ai and use quake 3 as a visualization engine either in real time or by generating demonstration files in a machinama kind of way.

Allegiance

[iGN97]

Even Microsoft does it! The superfansastic MMO-tactical space shooter Allegiance, developed by Microsoft Research, is released with source. It seems to still have a large following, and I've been meaning to pick it personally. It gives me sort of the same feeling I got from reading about the "Battle Room" in Ender's Game.

Check it out at: http://www.freeallegiance.org/

Beware, it's a very complex game and it will take you some time to learn if you should decide to start playing. And considering that the current crop of players probably has 3+ years of experience, I think you'll find the competition a little better than your average AI. ;)

All in all, it's my favorite PC game of all time, next to Shiny's excellent Sacrifice.

Re:Allegiance

[X0563511]

It's also a bitch to get working behind NATs and firewalls. Seriously, why does a client need opened incoming ports?

Re:Allegiance

[Anonymous Coward]

It's NAT we don't need. Push IPv6. I have my own net with 2^80 directly reachable addresses. Have you?

WHERE IS YOUR TITLE IN ALL CAPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when people break with tradition. Yes, the profanities and obscene statements are there, but as for initial presentation, you fail it!

Speaking of failing it, Albert, what do you think of the recent uprising against Zonk?

--
Trolling all trolls from 1992_Called to Zonk

Uhhhhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because we don't have Carmack, Duh!!! He's a God, didn't you know that?

*ahem* anyway I'll wager the real reason is: You're looking in the wrong place. Sure, there haven't been any first person shooters to put quake 3 to shame. But there have been some pretty impressive 3D engines developed in Open source, as well as video games implementing those 3d engines (planeshift is one up and coming mmorpg).

One thing you forget, is that Video Games take a lot of resources to create. Also it takes focus, dedication and good planning. Most of that is indeed lacking from many people doing video game development in the open source world, mainly because they don't have the threat of the Pink Slip over their heads; they're doing it out of their free time.

What's with the harsh tone? Do you not like it when people do things for fun, and in their spare time? I don't think anyone's trying to be the biggest and baddest video game creator. If they were they'd be working with Blizzard or ID or something.

There are just some people who really like doing this in their spare time. Also, it's good for them to get the experience for later jobs in the game industry.

Re:Uhhhhhh

[vranash]

Just FYI, Planeshift is only as open source as Quake1/2/3, in that the source code to the engine is open source, but the datafiles for it ARE NOT. This is one of the big drawbacks to it and why I don't personally play/support it.

Re:Uhhhhhh

[fmaxwell]

That's because we don't have Carmack, Duh!!! He's a God, didn't you know that?

Neither do the folks who did the Unreal series -- and UT2004 is every bit as good a game as Quake III Arena.

One thing you forget, is that Video Games take a lot of resources to create. Also it takes focus, dedication and good planning. Most of that is indeed lacking from many people doing video game development in the open source world, mainly because they don't have the threat of the Pink Slip over their heads; they're doing it out of their free time.

I didn't miss that at all. It's just another reason why closed source continues to dominate. And I don't agree that it's the "threat of the Pink Slip" that keeps most people working. It's getting compensated for their labor, something that doesn't happen often in the open source development world.

What's with the harsh tone? Do you not like it when people do things for fun, and in their spare time?

I have no problem with people dabbling in things for fun. I'm dabbling in photography and don't expect to be the next Ansel Adams. But neither do I claim that screwing around in your spare time is the best way to create professional quality photos. The only thing that annoys me is the constant bellowing from some of the strident open source proponents about how open source is the best software development model. It's usually not. Where would OpenOffice be without Sun's involvement? Where would Mozilla be had it not had funded development from AOL?

Re:Uhhhhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

"The only thing that annoys me is the constant bellowing from some of the strident open source proponents about how open source is the best software development model."

Well, reply to those people directly instead of shouting your challenge into the slashvoid. Let them stick their heads above the parapet before you shoot... all you've got here is a bunch of reasonable responses from non-zealots*. No bellowing.

*and tepples, who's some kind of weird meta-fanboy... his posting history is quite a laugh.

p.s. UT has CliffyB, who is certainly at least a demigod. And that parent AC was almost certainly joking.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Licensing

[Jagasian]

It is more complicated than that. He was saying how great a dual licensing option is so great. You can do it completely free if you go with GPL, or you can go free in the beginning with the GPL and right before you start selling the game, you can buy a license from Id Software that lets you keep your source code closed.

Source Code Released

[ooh456]

Figures I just bought the game last week.

Re:Source Code Released

[capt.mellow]

you didn't waste your money--the source code is to be gpl'd, but not the maps/models/textures/sounds/etc.. you'll need that disc to be able to play whatever source ports come out. it will be the same as it was w/ the doom and quake/quake2 source releases.

happy birthday Chris! :)

[ed1park]

I'm not sure if the timing is coincidence, but it just so happens to be Carmack's son's first birthday.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack

and here's a link to his blog:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent %20Updates

Bad for the players

[RedACE7500]

I remember when they released the Q1 source code. I still avidly played Quake 1 (Quakeworld Team Fortress) and it completely killed the game due to rampant cheating that followed.

Re:Bad for the players

[springMute]

I would wholeheartedly disagree with you. Cheating has always been rampant with Quake 1. Open-sourcing it didn't kill the game. If anything, the release of Quake 1 source allowed great, SECURE clients to be released like Mqwcl and Fuhquake, which kept their security verifications outside of the main EXE and not-open.

Slightly OT: Other Uses for the Engine?

[nurb432]

I'm curious if there are projects out there using the existing 3D engines ( and soon this one ) to produce things other then kill or be killed games?

Perhaps walk thru mazes, adventure type games ( like the old space quest series ) etc..

Not everyone gets into blowing imaginary creatures to bits and watching the blood run, but appreciate the effort going into the rendering code...

Stuff

[Devistater]

First, there's some good info on this link (thanks to another /. post in this thread):
http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=10 68
Like "Barring things like getting the GPL license all squared away, Carmack told the crowd the Q3A source code could be released as early as next week."

So for all the people asking about GPL, yes it will be GPL, just like all the past id ones.

Second, id deserves major props for doing this. Sure Q3 is a bit old but you know what? Its still played.

http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/
The 5th most played multiplayer online FPS in the world right now is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Which is based on the Q3 engine. Probably its that popular because its also a free standalone expansion :)

Some other titles:
Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Star Trek: Elite Force.

Medal of honor holds position #9, Q3A holds #10 and expansion to MOH holds #11.

So with Q3 and its liscened games holding 4 out of the top 11 most played online FPS slots (and it could be more, I dont know if any of those other top games are based on quake 3, I know that half life is based on q1 stuff and it and its mods are still #1), I'd say its still dang popular. So all those comments about "this is old and wont matter" I dont think thats true.

I love the model of getting the majority of money from a game/engine and a few years later releasing it as GPL. AND they continue to sell liscenses to people for engines they have GPLed in case a company doesn't want to release as GPL a game they make based on it. I wish more companies would do this. Anyway, again, major props to id.

Re:Not a noble gesture. Not news worthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you will find thats bollocks. You CAN create comemrcial programs based on the code..

QuakeR 3

[Savantissimo]

The GPL is ideal for my idea: "QuakeR 3", a pacifist, consensus-based, silent-meeting online community with gibs and railguns. (still some design issues to be worked out...)

Re:QuakeR /3

[Savantissimo]

Drat. let's try that again with an ecode tag:

The GPL is ideal for my idea: "QuakeR <3", a pacifist, consensus-based, silent-meeting online community with gibs and railguns. OK, there are still some design issues to be worked out...

gfds

[dirker]

Its about freakin time,now us mac users will actually be able to run a dedicated server with punkbuster.

Re:gfds

[dirker]

Booo,they aint even gonna release the PB stuff.Looks like us mac users will never be able to run a punkbuster server

Re:Slightly OT: Other Uses for the Engine?

[DaCool42]

I've always thought that the halflife source engine would be great for a myst style game.

if...

[KillShill]

copyright laws were anywhere near sensible, we'd be getting the source code for all programs on a regular basis. not that i'm trying to diminish iD's contribution but let's keep things in perspective. or as they used to say "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on".

engines nowadays are far more advanced than q3's, so it isn't very viable for most commercial ventures. still it's quite a nice little engine that runs beautifully on current and older hardware.

good job iD.

I hope we soon see....

[Anonymous Coward]

Browser plug-ins based on this engine -- to deliver in reality all they hype that VRML once promised.

Google-map's enhanced with all the abilities of Google Earth through this browser.

KDE or Gnome or some other desktop using this as a core of their 3D interfaces.

Any other possibilities for this engine outside of gaming?

Think PS/3 + Linux

[tolkienfan]

You'll be able to build on the source code base to create some AWESOME effects with the cell processors, on top of the existing structure.

Realtime texture map generation, natural sounding audio effect, all kinds of things become possible.

full id keynote coverage

[ruiner5000]

another rejected submission with full details including the announcement about source submitted last night.

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=169&pag e=1

It is another hot August in Texas, and that means Quakecon. The highlight is always the id presentation topped off with programmer and rocketeer extraordinaire John Carmack's chat with the audience. We will find out more about Quake 4 including viewing the E3 trailer. We will find out about what Carmack thinks of the hype surrounding the next generation consoles. John will also reveal how he feels about current CPU and GPU technology. The benefits and challenges of multithreading will be covered as well his thoughts on dedicated physics cards. Also don't forget about the latest on Armadillo Aerospace, what car John is driving, and why he thinks cell phone gaming in the next year or so could be where we find our next new gaming genre from. Hold on as we dig in deep to another information packed id Quakecon presentation and the first live John Carmack game tech talk and Q and A session since 2002.

Don't forget ROTT

[Mr2001]

Rise of the Triad source code

For those who've forgotten, ROTT was intended as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, but eventually became its own game. It still has Wolf3D's orthogonal walls, but it gained outdoor areas with sky, varying heights (platforms you can walk over or under), new weapons, and multiplayer modes. In fact, ROTT was the first FPS with a Capture the Flag mode.

Re:Don't forget ROTT

[wampus]

Let's not forget Shroom Mode and Dog Mode... first FPS to let you use illegal drugs and then go bite people.

Re:Don't forget ROTT

[CoderJoe]

ROTT was not from id software, but rather 3D Realms (the people behind Duke Nukem), so it couldn't have been a sequel to Wolf3D.

Re:Don't forget ROTT

[Mr2001]

Yes, it was originally intended as a sequel. 3D Realms is a division of Apogee, but it wasn't formed until after ROTT came out. Apogee published Wolf3D for id, so they're not entirely unrelated.

What is the source code license?

[jbn-o]

Under what license is the source code distributed? The site you pointed to appears to require registration in order to download the source code. Also, that site will not accept accounts registered to anything at dodgeit.com (a throwaway read-only email provider).

Re:What is the source code license?

[iGN97]

Not sure about the license, but I suppose it is somewhat restrictive. The point with having source code to a game like Allegiance isn't really to benefit from great technology in other games, but allow you to keep playing a new versions of a great game for free.

Regarding registration on related sites, I think you might have some trouble using anything that is remotely "throwaway"; at one point you actually had to be able to prove you were an american citizen to be able to register, using Paypal attached to a US account, IIRC. The people who are still playing seem quite happy about the current state of affairs, and people registering from bogus accounts could really kill the experience in a game which relies so much on team play.

DOOM spiral

[Sithgunner]

ID has put a chain of event on us how much the ogirignal DOOM can go look good on the later technologies.

Yes, it was one of the best game invented, only lacks a little graphic-wise atm.

I hope to see some coders come up remake it another open sourced DOOM port =)

Re:Payback for banning

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Dumbass.

Instead of just being pissed off at a few quake servers, you'll instead go the full monty of "ban"-dom and commit a felony instead?

I guess being thrown in the pokey could be considered a ban too.

MOD PARENT DOWN!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We do not need this kind of hate speech on /dot. If you would not tolerate the words nigger, spic and chink, then moderate people down who use the word faggot.

This is good news

[jonwil]

Lets hope this covers all of Quake 3 (including Arena and Team Arena) and that other Quake 3 engine licencees (e.g. the creators of Return To Castle Wolfenstein and RTCW: ET) share (now that they can) some of the improvements they have made on top of the vanilla quake 3 engine (not to mention allowing more games to become "open source" too)

Re:Licensing

[Biogenesis]

1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime therefore all odd numbers are prime.

we don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't played a video game since I switched to linux in '99.
I didn't switch because it was cool, but because I hated windows and I hated the game companies and their code wheel philosophy. Recently, I tried to see if I could get get GR2, because I am jonesing really bad for a game. I'd even install XP and everything... but it took 30 minutes to figure out that it was xbox only - you can't go to the game producers page through a GR portal without having to click through all their crappy soft. They don't say up front anything but, 'allright! Ghost Recon 2 !!!!!!' so anyway, it turns out you can preorder #3, etc.
It's just a bunch of cheaters anyways, why go through all the trouble. I hate games again.

With open source you don't have to wade through a bunch of lies and marketing to get what you want, I wish they /would/ write a game 'tho. I want to kill somebody. I think the OSS ppl are too nice to kill and don't want games for that reason.

NAT not needed?

[StupidKatz]

So, with IPv6, I can just hook up my sole XP SP1 machine directly to the Internet and rest assured I won't get hit by the next automated exploit scan/attack?

With IPv6, my ISP will automagically give me as many public IPs as I want, free of charge?

With IPv6, I will suddenly have a use for more than 254 IPs (which I already have behind my router)? Oh, and I'll need more than one "directly reachable" IP?

IPv6 is a good thing, but you'll get my NAT/PAT router once you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Re:NAT not needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, with IPv6, I can just hook up my sole XP SP1 machine directly to the Internet and rest assured I won't get hit by the next automated exploit scan/attack?

With the stateful filter in place that you just as well need with NAT? Of course.

With IPv6, my ISP will automagically give me as many public IPs as I want, free of charge?

Theoretically there are 2^48 networks of 2^80 size, i.e. more networks of vast address space than there are single addresses now. Address assignment won't be the problem. Actually I got two address spaces of that size, one native over PPPoE where I just pay traffic and one as a tunnel where I pay the underlying IPv4 connection which is flat. Check http://www.sixxs.net/ some time.

With IPv6, I will suddenly have a use for more than 254 IPs (which I already have behind my router)? Oh, and I'll need more than one "directly reachable" IP?

Please not the "who has use for it" argument. Most useful applications only come up after the possiblity is there.

IPv6 is a good thing, but you'll get my NAT/PAT router once you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Your loss.

Will we see a PSP Port of Quake 3 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it likely we will see a PSP Port of Quake 3, we have had a Port of Quake and i know the Dreamcast with less power (but professionsl coders) had agood port of Quake Arena?

But it used to be widelly distributed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think it very clear that the previous ID software releases are well-understood, code-wise. The problem is not and will not be the code; the problem is that the lack of good 3d models."

Wow! I think that requires 'get a real job' artists. The one's we disparage on a regular basis, and distribute their work without permission. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.

Re:Quake engine?

[Breakfast Pants]

Did valve actually have a license to do this? From what I read near the beginning of the development they were going to be going solely with their own engine, from scratch.

Giving voice to what everyone is really thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Those projects are fucking stupid.

Re:This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick o

[Anonymous Coward]

I will definitely try this one out. Looks awesome.

A standard TC?

[gr8_phk]

Would it be possible to have a vote or something to set up a "standard" total conversion? This way Linux Distros would know what to package. I'd really like to be able to "yum install quake3" on Fedora. I always thought a good 3D game should be included in every distro just to show off how cool free software can be, and to provide a way to verify 3D drivers are working.

FC3 came with BZflag, which kinda fit the bill. But they've removed it now - along with all screen savers, so there's no OpenGL apps by default.

Re:A standard TC?

[Pxtl]

Given that "standard" mods have been available for Quake (OpenQuartz) and Doom (FreeDoom) and I don't know that those are in Yum yet either, I doubt it.

Re:A standard TC?

[CaptnMArk]

What the hell are the 4CDs now for?

>I'd really like to be able to "yum install quake3" on Fedora.

Seconded. But we'll see how useful the newly released code is without punkbuster.

Re:A standard TC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom is in Debian now; you can actually "apt-get install freedoom" and get a playable Doom game. (However, Freedoom is incomplete and the difficulty curve in the levels isn't exactly so friendly yet...)

Re:Not quite.

[Guspaz]

There are implementations of DirectX for linux, so I'd say it's no exactly sabotaged... But lets face it, linux gaming in general isn't a very large market.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it should or shouldn't be, only from a pure marketsize standpoint. Most gamers use Windows, and most linux users don't play games. There isn't that much overlap (though there is certainly some).

Re:Slightly OT: Other Uses for the Engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not everyone gets into blowing imaginary creatures to bits and watching the blood run, but appreciate the effort going into the rendering code...

Well, there's just not a real big market right now for games made for WOMEN.

Re:Slightly OT: Other Uses for the Engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Sonic Robo Blast 2 which is using a really hacked up Doom engine for a Sonic game. Unfortunately the game data runs afoul of just about every copyright in the known universe, otherwise it might be really neat.

I don't know of anything like this based on the newer engines.

Well, if you read his FAQ...

[ashpool7]

"I'm currently busy making really cool games at Rare"

Which might explain where he's using his DX talents...

Re:Well, if you read his FAQ...

[2nd Post!]

Which makes his comments even more suspect :)

He works on Microsoft/XBox games, which are FAR from dominant. If you specialize in DX, you are limited to Windows and XBox, both of which are dwarfed by:
PS1
PS2
GBA

So it just exposes his bias, without actually providing any weight to his claims.