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A Look At Free Quake3 Engine Based Games
Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, nearly two years ago. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."
Not really. The Inq also posted a similar article. Not to mention that two of the games that are mentioned were just released on April 1st.
Urban Terror has always been a quake 3 mod. Though there were some mods for HL that had a similar heritage (the post action quake 2 fallout)
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
You cannot "simply" ship a game stand-alone. Most of the modifications, and even if they are total conversions, still rely on a considerable amount of data shipped with the original game. Before a game can go stand-alone, you have to re-create all that data.
FTEQuake (http://www.fteqw.com/) supports Quake 1, 2 and 3 maps, and can connect to servers of all the different flavors of quake.
It's fun playing Quake 1 with shaders and advanced lighting. =)
Of course, I have to recommend CustomTF. =) (www.customtf.com)
The thing is that Warsow isn't really trying to 'get it.' Warsow was developed as a competitive game; it has taken its inspiration from 'professional gaming,' mostly from QuakeWorld and Quake 3. It wasn't really meant to be played by people who aren't familiar with that side of gaming, but it can certainly still be fun, and it wouldn't take long to learn how to play the game once you understood how and why things were the way they are. The weapons in Warsow are extremely nice and balanced. They are the Quake 3 weapons, for the most part, with something called 'super ammo' that you pick up around the map, allowing you more flexibility with your weapons (the lightning gun -- whatever it's officially called in warsow (I don't remember) -- will shoot straight once you obtain super ammo, the railgun (electrobolt?) shoots instantaneously across any distance with the super ammo), and it adds more skill to the game. The movement in Warsow is not based on Quake 3 movement, but it is based on the movement from QuakeWorld (a modification of Quake 1), and maybe somewhat inspired by the CPMA modification for Quake 3 (whose movement was based on QuakeWorld movement). It is not like baseq3/vanilla Quake 3 movement, where you have 'strafe jumping' (and circle jumping) which is done by jumping while holding alternating directional strafe buttons in rhythm with gait. The CPMA/QuakeWorld/Warsow movement does not use strafe jumping, but something called bunnyhopping -- where some aspects of strafe jumping as still used, the movement system differs in that you must look in the direction to strafe jump, and you do not have to cease your cadence in order to make a sharp turn. It can be highly effective in a competitive match once this difficult skill is mastered. There are probably how-tos on the Warsow site forum, if you're interested.