Slashdot Mirror
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. "
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
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
cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
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...
Cool! this also means projects like DEVMAP and QQQ can be released to a bigger audience
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.
as always, filerush has got the goods: clickies
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 At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold.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 Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced?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
We can finally have Quake 3 on linux!
Oh, wait...
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.
Have you metaroderated recently?
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).
DXQuake3 : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/e s.htm
DXQuake3 features : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/dxquake3_featur
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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?
One man's selflessness is another man's annoyance.
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.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
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).
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
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.
3D realms just announced they are about to start writing the source code for Duke Nukem Forever.
"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.
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.
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.
I am NaN
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
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.
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:
0 68
http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=1
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..
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.
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.
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.