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A Look At Free Quake3 Engine Based Games

Posted by Zonk on from the free-as-in-frag dept.

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."

7 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. id Software Rocks by time$lice · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've always admired id for releasing their engines after the game has lived its life. I feel that they're giving back to the community (at least in some small way). The Q3 engine was the bomb back in the day. Now if some of the competition would follow suit. :)

  2. Interesting timing! by psxman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2007/04/quake3-total -conversions.html

    Come on, dude. Give credit to the source of your post.

  3. Two others... by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nexuiz and Warsow are both superior graphically to about anything listed on there, and both include advanced engine features such as dynamic lighting. Nexuiz is based on a (heavily modified) Quake 1 engine, with QuakeC support still intact for ease of modding, and Warsow is based on similar modifications for Quake 2.

    nexuiz.com
    warsow.net

    1. Re:Two others... by Cthefuture · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Thanks for pointing those out. It has been a long time since I played around with this stuff. It's neat to see people are still working with it. Years ago I did mod development for all these engines (I have done projects for Q1, Q2, Q3, and UT).

      The main problem is most of these projects don't "get it" when it comes to game feel. I just tried both Nexuiz and Warsow and they both feel exactly like Quake1 and Quake2. Some of the graphics are updated and they have added a few effects but it looks exactly like the original. That is, dated. Also the movement feels exactly like the originals which is probably on purpose but compared to a more modern engine like Quake3 the movement feels very rigid and forced. I guess my point is while they do some updating, they don't really go far enough to create something that feels right and good. I mean they have the whole frigg'in engine source available yet they don't tweak the feel of the game. Back when I was doing mod development I would have killed for access to the engine source so I could make the game feel just right.

      Nexuiz is kinda meh but I like the cartoon shading in Warsow.

      --
      The ratio of people to cake is too big
  4. Nexuiz is incredible. by CelticWhisper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seconded for fucking truth. Nexuiz is the most fun I have had with an open source game in the history of ever. I had a LAN last October wherein we played Nexuiz for most of the night (amidst filesharing, Xbox games, and food and conversation) and it was an absolute blast. The couple of LANs before that, while great in their own right, weren't as cohesive when it came to everyone getting into one game.

    I experimented with Cube, but found that it wasn't as seamless for LAN play as Nexuiz, and some of the levels (at least in SP and where bots are concerned) were sadistically difficult. As I described it in a forum post, "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye."

    The great thing about Nexuiz is that it combines:

    • Variety (there are plenty of levels, weapons, and tactics to keep it interesting for arguably longer than even a UT session, and the grapple can make certain levels positively insane)
    • New/cutting-edge/recent/advanced/$SYNONYM_FOR_GO OD graphics tech (HDR, dynamic lighting, bloom, etc. for boxen that can handle it), and
    • Scalability (runs perfectly well on boxen that CAN'T handle the aforementioned glitz) to be playable by just about anyone on just about anything.

    One of the problems we had in some of my LANs was that some people's computers, primarily the girls' laptops*, were underpowered for games like CoD, MOHAA, and the like. UT '99 ran fine, but you can only play an 8-year-old game for so long (stop throwing things at me, Starcraft fans, I know it's still awesome and I'm talking FPSes here. ...Stop throwing things at me, Deus Ex fans. ...Fine, you win) before you hunger for something new. Yet, when we played Nex, we had (among others):

    • My G5 Quad 2.5GHzx4, 2.5GB, GeForce 6600/256MB
    • My brother's AMD64 2.0GHz, 1GB, GeForce 6800/128MB
    • My AMD64 1.8GHz, 512MB, Mobility Radeon 9600/64MB
    • My Power Mac G4 867MHz, 1.5GB, Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Ed./128MB
    • My friend's Pentium M (slow)GHz, (meager)MB, (integrated)/(notenough)
    • A Macbook and a Compaq notebook, specs unknown to me
    • And my ancient test box: Pentium 2 400, 640MB, Radeon 9200/256MB in a PCI slot

    With the exception of my test box, which lagged pretty severely, Nex ran without a hitch on everyone's system. One person had mouse troubles, but she had the same problem with UT at a previous LAN, and was using a wireless mouse, so I'm chalking that one up to hardware.

    On top of that, it's cross-platform Win/Mac/Lin, so nobody's excluded. First person to say "I run BeOS you insensitive clod!" gets slapped with a large trout.

    Aaaaanyway, give Nexuiz a shot. It's great. And the blood effects are, put simply, a little frightening for an OSS project where people presumably work on what they like.

    * - Yes, I have girls at my LAN parties. Stop looking at me like that. You're creeping me out.

    --
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  5. More OSS graphics engines by Ceriel+Nosforit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know of Ogre, which is very, very pretty;
    http://www.ogre3d.org/

    And Crystal Space, which is very pretty, and also includes a game engine;
    http://www.crystalspace3d.org/

    If someone however knows of an OSS physics engine for games which does a bit of aerodynamics, please let me know. :)

    --
    All rites reversed 2010
  6. Re:Day of Defeat-ish alternative? by Taulin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you are in need of a gaming fix, and found FreeBSD to limit them, have you ever thought of putting together a cheap box to run an old version of Windows that supports all the game you want to play? I am sure you have reason to run FreeBSD as your primary OS, but I always read how people spend so much time trying to get their favorite games running on other OSs. It might be as simple as they don't have legal copies of Windows, etc... however, just a question. Not trying to stir trouble or anything.