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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. "
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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.
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.
Game dev and music blog
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.
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... :)
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
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..
"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.
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MadDwarf
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.