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."

Comments

id Software Rocks

[time$lice]

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. :)

Two others...

[the linux geek]

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

Nexuiz is incredible.

[CelticWhisper]

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.