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Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the way-better-than-any-textbook dept.

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. "

15 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Will it be modified? by mattdev121 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    --
    mattdev@server$ touch /dev/genitals
    cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
    1. Re:Will it be modified? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Will it be modified? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Will it be modified? by leathered · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
    4. Re:Will it be modified? by bani · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.
  2. Excellent! by destx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. A reasonable model by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
  4. This is the reason by Aggrajag · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  5. Can't wait? Do it yourself. by deVoid99 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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

  6. native alsa sound support! by Internet_Communist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --

    If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
  7. Great news for artists and researchers. by delire · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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.

  8. Re:Now... by blechx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  9. This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick off by Thilo2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Let the race to port this begin... by Krunch · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
  11. Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3! by Pxtl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.