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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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.

Cool

[mistermark]

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

torrent of carmacks keynote

[i88i]

as always, filerush has got the goods: clickies

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

[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.

Now...

[iignotus]

We can finally have Quake 3 on linux!

Oh, wait...

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

[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... :)

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).

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: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.

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?

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).

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

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.

In other news.

[jotux]

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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..

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.