Quake 3: Arena Source GPL'ed

inotocracy writes "At John Carmack's Quakecon 2005 keynote he promised that the Quake 3 Arena source code would soon be released-- turns out he wasn't just pulling our leg! Today it was released, weighing in at 5.45mb, it makes for a quick download and a whole lotta fun. Developers, start your compilers!"

Comments

Mirror, sans registration...

[Dave2 Wickham]

If you don't want to register, but also don't want a capped download: Demon FTP.

BugMeNot

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, http://www.bugmenot.com/ to get the download at more than 50KBps without having to sign up.

Hmm

[PsychicX]

I've been poking around the source since yesterday afternoon (late as usual slashdot) and it's generally MUCH cleaner than Q2. Things are well organized, categorized, and sensible. The id penchant for clumping a dozen header files into just one continues, but overall it's easy to find the code you're looking for. Hell, it took me 3 days to find the BSP code in Quake 2 because they had called it model_t or some such meaningless thing. I can see why Q3 was so popular for licensing, despite being in C. Indeed, it's some of the cleanest C code I've seen laid out to date. Naturally there are hacks here and there, and a few very weird design things...and the C versions of what would in C++ be inheritance and aggregation are hilarious. Overall though, I think this code is going to go a lot farther than Q1 or Q2 source ever did. Compared to everything else out of id, this source is really quite nice. No stretches of pages of uncommented assembly code. Most functions have documentation if it's not obvious what they do. All of the members of the major engine structs are well commented, for the most part.

In short, I like. 1 thumb up. (Hey, it's still C, and I'm a C++ guy in and out.)

Mirror without the BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirror

Re:Real download link

[cortana]

Never mind, here's a link for UK readers.

Re:UT forever.

[PsychicX]

It's 5MB after it's been compressed into a zip. As you may or may not know, zip compresses text really well.

The uncompressed size of the source is just over 35MB.

Filerush.com torrent

[rg3]

Here's a link: http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=quake3 -1.32b-source.zip

Tip for compiling on linux

[jayslambast]

While most of you probably know this, you have to do one thing before compiling the code. The '.md' files in the lcc/src need to be converted to unix end of line characters, otherwise one of the lcc compiler programs will barf. To fix this, jump into the lcc/src directory and run this little perl function on all the files in that directory.

cd lcc/src
tcsh
foreach i (*)
perl -p -e 's/\r/\n/g' $i.unix
mv $i.unix $i
end

and btw, if there is a nice unix utility that already does this, let me know.

eh... no need for perl here

[jbellis]

find lcc/src | xargs dos2unix

that's all you need

Re:Nice

[jericho4.0]

That's Carmacks magic number! Of course it doesn't need commenting!

It's the first guess for finding an inverse sqare root using Newtons method. We're still waiting for a mathamatitian to tell us if it's the best choice, but it works. That's one of Carmack's claims to fame in the CS world.

Re:Nice

[jericho4.0]

(replying to my own post)

float InvSqrt (float x)
{
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}

It runs much faster than math.h, and it's very usefull.

This paper says that it was first found in the Quake 3 source. I guess it's in the SDK somewhere?

I wanted to add, too, that this is an example of why companies don't release code. They view things like this as secrets to be kept. Kudos to Carmack for having the confidence.

How to compile this on Linux

[jcdr]

Tested on a Debian Sarge:

# Get the code
wget ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/quake3-1.3 2b-source.zip
mkdir q3a
cd q3a
unzip quake3-1.32b-source.zip
cd quake3-1.32b

# Transformation for UNIX
find -type f -exec dos2unix {} \;

# Compiling
cd code ./unix/cons

# Result
cd install
find -ls

# Install the packs
# You needs to original files!
# I do not find them in the source.
cp -a /usr/local/games/quake3/baseq3/* ~/.q3a/baseq3/

# Playing ./linuxquake3