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Return To Castle Wolfenstein Source Code Released
geefau writes with news that id Software has released the source code to Return To Castle Wolfenstein (single player and multiplayer), along with Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, under the GPL. The linked article notes that "these only include the game source code, not the graphics. You need the full games for those."
Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but ... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?
Gamasutra ran a similar story back in August but there's no press release on id's site about such a commitment to the GPL. One would think that if this did happen at QuakeCon it would be on QuakeCon's news site. Did someone make an announcement and confuse Wolfenstein 3D with the later games or is there a legit place you can get the source with a GPL license alongside it?
My work here is dung.
Porting to Linux is on my mind.....
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Looking forward to seeing Wolf:ET and its mods getting the polish and extra features we've seen with ioquake3.
Title and summary are wrong: the article is not about Castle Wolfenstein.
Is there instructions somewhere on how to compile this and such on the different platforms?
Whenever ID releases stuff like this I'm interested in playing with it but after 5 minutes of not knowing how to build it I usually just give up and move on. I do admit part of the confusion is probably because I'm a .NET developer, and almost all my experience is with csc and VS. I guess I shouldn't say that on /., since I'll get trolled for being a MS developer, but..
ET itself has already been ported by iD software to Linux, the build environment should be there too...
I actually loaded up RTCW on both a Windows XP and Linux PC the other week as I was feeling a bit nostalgic.
It took a bit of Googling to work out how to get it to run on both platforms as even with the latest patched executables (v1.41 off the top of my head), there's some kind of buffer overflow that happens due to the large number of GL Extensions that newer graphics card announce to the game - it took a bit of hex editing on the executable to get it to run.
It should be a bit easier now it's Open Source as hopefully someone will fix this, and other, issues.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
eldavojohn, trolling? Say it ain't so!
The source code for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory was released under the GNU GPL on August 12, 2010.
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
Great releasing it as open source would attract more developers!
The COPYING.txt included in RTCW-SP-GPL.zip begins with a copy of version 3 of the GNU GPL, but is then followed by additional and modified terms, which suggests to me that it is not actually GPLed.
Valve and ID have pretty much redefined copyright law in their own way, much to the benefit of consumers and society as a whole. I can buy my ID games through Steam, and I know the moment I buy a new computer I can be running all my games again in a couple of mouse clicks. No complicated DRM, limited number of installs, needing my CD in the drive, or any other BS. It IS DRM but Valve have slowly earned the trust of users over the years.
Then after a number of years, when sales have long since peaked and dropped, ID release the source code. This fulfills the social contract whereupon we give copyright for a number of years on the software after which it drops into the public domain. A DRM-ridden binary blob from a long-defunct software house is hardly fulfilling their end of the bargain. Looking at the source code also gets people interested in writing graphics code or games, can be used for educational purposes, some of the useful algorithms can be re-purposed (and not necessarily in the same domain, it could be anywhere), and it can give a new lease of life to the game through enthusiasts.
I know if I was a games programmer who I would want to work for. As it is, I'll just be a satisfied customer.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
When I read the headlines here, I thought this was old news, even something that should be in history books. ID Software released the source code more than a decade ago for Wolfenstein 3D, so for those who have wanted to dabble in the software it has certainly been available for what John Carmack said was some awful code that he was embarrassed about even releasing because of how shoddy the work is compared to what he is doing now. Still, it was worth looking at then.
Still, the news here isn't that the source code is being released, but that it has been licensed under the GPL. That is real news here, and something worth taking a look at again. I'm not entirely sure that the effort is worth going over except for nostalgia as there are several other first-person shooter games that likely have a more modern and up to date engines.. including stuff already available under the GPL. I'm sure there are a couple of real gems in the source code worth putting into other software.
The awesome game urban Terror really needs a technology upgrade, I hop they glom on this and run with it. That would really rock.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I got the power!
You got the touch, you got the power!
That's the power of love!
Hold me closer and every minute of every hour, feel the power of love!
Fight the power!
Go, go Power Rangers!
It's not Castle Wolfenstein, the classic Apple ][ game, for which the source code was released; it was for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game for which Slashdot's use of the "classic games" story icon is dubious.
As pointed above in the comments, this was announced and released during Quakecon, in August. Soon after, the people behind the enhanced Quake 3 engine ioquake3 http://ioquake3.org/ have opened Mercurial repositories for iowolfet and iorctw, which you can browse here http://hg.ioquake.org/
This is their official announcement : http://ioquake3.org/2010/08/12/welcome-wolfenstein-enemy-territory-and-return-to-castle-wolfenstein/
Please, can we have the Doom 3 source code? The Dark Mod could be so much better if the devs had source access. Since we all know Thief 4 will be a consolized, uneditable mess, the future lies in The Dark Mod for us classic Thief fans. The original Thief games are buggy as hell on modern systems and the original publishers don't give a crap about us anymore. They refused to release the code for those Dark Engine games, so we have to do crap like disable multiple cores just to play them.
your contribution is much appreciated. I can't wait to see all the new ideas built off of this release.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Fuck off back to Rome, Your Holiness.
look again, now it's diamonds...
It was already released at least a month ago. In fact the renderer in ET has already been replaced with the XreaL renderer (http://xreal-project.net/) by now and people are already working on converting the stock maps using bump maps and what not.
This is one of the big reasons I love buying your games. They'll have a life after the original targeted platform passes because of continued efforts based on the code you release. :)
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Since all this political mire is becoming so deep I have been trying to think of a good game angle that would require minimal effort to roll out but could adequately ridicule politifools in a appropriately warped manner.
Imagine waxing all the idiots, elephant guns, mule launchers, exploding teabags, and another unelectable wannabe turned victim around every corner. Collect PAC money, rob the citizenry, pay off the mob, sell worthless stock, pull off billion dollar ponzi schemes and more.
The spewing of colorless metaphors, the wasting of valueless time. I have foreseen it.
One word... Android! Can't wait!
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Hopefully we see a 64 bit client now.
I don't fault ID for this but it was sure annoying having get a working chroot just to play these games back before debian and unbuntu started packing ia32-libs. Networking was easy, but 3d acceleration with binary drivers and sound were always a hassle.
Does anyone know any good non-bot servers for ET-Wolf? I have been itching to play this again but most servers I hit have no human players.
Also, please keep in mind that I am in the US. I don't mind playing people from other parts of the world, but I have noticed that many European servers block based on pings.
Hopefully, we will see a lot more open up once this game starts hitting our distro's repositories.
So who's got it? Of course, I'm talking about new music and graphics since the old ones weren't liberated.
Glad the code was though.