Doom 3 Source Code To Be Released This Year

An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack just confirmed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that the source code to Doom 3 will be released this year. The source drop will follow the release of their Rage game in October. Carmack has also challenged other game developers to release their old source code."

Comments

Old hardware

[Bradmont]

Man, one thing I loved about open source software is that I could run any of it on my out of date hardware! Curse you Carmack!

Re:Old hardware

[compro01]

How out of date is your hardware? Doom 3 was released 7 years ago.

Re:Old hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a point, but GP did make me chuckle. Doom 3 was the Crysis of it's day. In fact, Doom 3 is the reason I got into building gaming rigs. I would not be surprised to find lots of people still can't run it with their current equipment.

Re:Old hardware

[TheRaven64]

It works faster on a modern operating system, because of optimisations in the libc. For those who haven't taken a look at it yet, the main render routine looks like this:

memset(frame_buffer, 0, frame_buffer_size);

Re:Old hardware

[Nimey]

It could run. It would not run well. It wouldn't run particularly well on my old Radeon 9600XT.

Not that I would have played it much anyway. Never could get into a game whose main selling point was how dark it was.

Re:Old hardware

[shutdown -p now]

What are you trying to insinuate here??

That Carmack doesn't know about calloc? ~

Re:Old hardware

[vux984]

look at the line of code...

It zeros out the frame buffer. You know... so you get a completely black screen. And if that's the main render routine... lol... I thought it was quite clever.

Re:Old hardware

[hairyfeet]

Hey leave poor Nibbles alone you bastard! can't you see he is trying his little heart out? Maybe if you bought the poor little fella some real food instead of giving him the wilted lettuce from your BLT maybe he wouldn't be huffing and puffing, ya cheap bastard!

As for TFA? Let me predict what will come of it...a shitload of bad PVP arena battle bullshit, ala Q3 Arena which seems to be the standard template for FOSS games. Does the world REALLY need another teabagging fragfest? would it REALLY kill ya to make a game with story, originality, or does capture the flag give you such a stiffie you can't think of nothing else?

Seriously guys if you want folks to take FOSS gaming seriously another DM/CTF fragger crap ain't gonna do it. Carmack is nice enough to hand you the engine for free, how about marrying it to some good ideas? Why not make a spoof that takes the piss out of the current "must have teh relism" bullshit? Like instead of your screen going bloody when you get hit it turns pink and you look like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to other players so they can see what a big girl you are as you hide and wait for your health to regen? Or a weapon for the guys that you can't stand that throws dogshit and when they get hit enough the flies overwhelm them?

Use it for something original guys, don't just make another DM,kay? Surely there are enough FOSS guys with sick black senses of humor they could cook up something wicked. How about when your teammate does something stupid you can fill up your health and ammo for bitchslapping the stupid right off his dumb ass?

Re:Old hardware

[uvajed_ekil]

Yes, Doom 3 was both the bee's knees AND the cat's pajamas, in its day. But that was a long time ago when you speak to gamers about gaming rigs. 7 years may not seem like a long time, but think about it like this: how many video cards has a serious game addict been through since then, and how many games have surpassed Doom 3 in key ways? It was a fantastic game, and still is, but releasing the source code now, while a nice gesture, is not likely to spur any dramtic advances, since all legitimate developers have already gone well beyond what Doom 3 offered. Kudos to Carmack and Co. once again, but I have to admit this isn't exciting to me.

Re:Old hardware

[Squiddie]

I'm going to be honest with you, I love the idea of digital distribution, but Steam makes me sick. It's just DRM and people seem to love the hell out of it. GOG is what I wish digital distribution was like, and I'll say it now, I bought The Witcher 2 from them, and I'll continue buying from there if there is an opportunity. Steam? Never.

id Tech 5

[bonch]

I wonder if id Tech 5 will ever see a source release now that id is under Zenimax's wing. As for other developers releasing source, that's not always possible due to third-party technology licenses, ownership issues, and the source code flat-out missing (if I remember correctly, Rise of the Triad was missing for years until someone found it for 3D Realms).

Re:id Tech 5

[PhrostyMcByte]

As for other developers releasing source, that's not always possible due to third-party technology licenses, ownership issues...

id has those issues as well, though I'm told it was much less for Doom 3 than in the past. They have someone replace all the code and clean it up for public release.

Re:id Tech 5

[nschubach]

Heck Bethesda had that problem with Daggerfall... so they are in good company.

Still waiting on Commander Keen Source

[Emrikol]

I emailed Carmack in '06 about releasing the source code to Commander Keen, and I got this reply:

We sort of lost the source code to most of the early games, or I would have released them long ago.

When I emailed Romero about it, he replied:

Yes, I have the source but have to figure out if all of it is complete and buildable. I think it is from the last time I checked it out a year ago or so. And it's 99% coded in C with a couple asm routines. :)

I emailed Carmack back saying Romero had the code, and I emailed Romero back saying Carmack wanted to release it.

Never heard back from either one :(

Re:Still waiting on Commander Keen Source

[pak9rabid]

I'm impressed you even got that far with them.

Re:Still waiting on Commander Keen Source

[williamyf]

Unlike most modern games, were you have a clear separation of the engine from the ".wads/maps/music/textures/game files/etc.", in those early games, the game itself was interewined in the code.

If you see all the FOSS releases idSW has made over the years, the ENGINE soruce code gets the FOSS treatment, but the copyright of the game files themselves remains in the hands of the company, therefore, you still need to buy a copy of the game to play it legaly, even if you use a FOSS engine, or a port (my case on a MacBook).

So, most likey, they will not release that older code, not because they lost the source, but because releasing it in that case is to give away the game for free...

Cheers

Re:Still waiting on Commander Keen Source

[whoop]

Commander Keen is still all the Rage, and releasing it for free would cause a Quake to their business strategy. Oh, and CK is on sale on Steam today for $3.74 (and included in some multi-game packs). Releasing it now would just Doom their bottom line...

Re:thanks but no thanks

[PCM2]

Open Source is not a dumping ground for old and useless shit.

According to Wikipedia, an id Tech 4 game was released this year and there's another one scheduled for next year.

Good for John Carmack. This code base is past the point where it offers serious competitive advantage. The value of an id Tech 4 game today is based on how good the game is, which is really as it should be. So there isn't really much reason why it shouldn't be open sourced -- except that most companies "just don't do that."

Even if the code was "old and useless shit" (which it obviously is not), how many companies actually throw away their old and useless shit? Most hoard it like it's diamonds. So kudos to Carmack and co. for sticking to their guns continuing to challenge the industry to move forward.

Showboating?

[dstyle5]

Showboating by announcing the release of code for one of their games at their conference about their games? What better place to announce it? This is an announcement for fans as they will be the only ones playing with this code most likely. Hopefully once its released someone can create an enjoyable version of the game... ;)

Re:What are the derivatives?

[somersault]

Google/Wikipedia to the rescue!

Re:What are the derivatives?

[h4rr4r]

How much ram can darkness possibly need?

He gets it, he is awesome

[airfoobar]

It's a shame that a lot of old games (including DOS games, circa 1995) have been consigned to the graveyard of dead software, where they can't be ported/maintained because they have no sources and need emulation, they can't be bought except for second/third/20th-hand, they can't be copied/preserved because of copyright. It's shameful, really. I feel quite angry about that tbh, and I'm delighted to see game creators make an effort to release their code.

I sometimes see people arguing that releasing the code is impossible because some parts are based on proprietary code they don't have the rights to. I wish they would just cut that code out and release the rest. There are a lot of eager fans out there who would be very happy to rewrite that code and even develop drop-in open-source replacements that can be reused for other ports (yes, even entire game engines). Let's not let old games end up like old films, rotting away in the archives of underfunded libraries without anyone knowing they ever existed.

Re:He gets it, he is awesome

[devent]

You are not the only one that gets angry about the whole issue. Tell me how so heck does a copyright term of 70 years is encouraging developers to write games? In the current market a game is old after 6 months and after 2 years you can buy the same game for 10$ or less and after 10 years nobody ever will buy the game. So how are developers benefit from a 70 years protection?

Tell me, what game makes the original developer money after 70 years?

In my opinion the current years (from 1980 to current) will be called the dark ages of digital culture, because no game, no movie, will survive. The code will be lost in some safe because nobody cares and if the future generations like to know what games we played, they can only go to the illegal sites like http://www.abandonia.com/

It's like we wouldn't know anything about Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, because the code (words or notes) had the same stupid protection laws.

The only way the owner of the game is benefiting, is that nobody can take their game and port it and improve it. So they are benefiting because they hinder everybody else. You can call it greed and selfishness.

Re:He gets it, he is awesome

[airfoobar]

Gog.com lists about 400 MSDOS and Windows games, almost all of which will run without a hassle under 64 bit Windows 7.

Gog is great, but their catalog is limited -- there are literally thousands of Good Old Games missing, most of which they'll never offer because of licensing issues or because they don't run in Dosbox or because they don't think they can sell them. Those are the sorts of problems I'm referring to, which can lead to many of those games being lost.

The problem is that even the enthusiast finds it hard to warm up to a game with five to twenty-five year old graphics, gameplay and sound --- and that is not an easy problem to fix.

Your "enthusiast" is entirely irrelevant to my argument. I'm talking about preserving these games for posterity, regardless of whether they choose to enjoy them or not.

The Black Mesa total conversion threatens to become the next Duke Nukem Forever.

Again, that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about Valve releasing the source code of the original game, and volunteers taking up the maintenance of the engine and the task of untying it from the platforms and OSs it was written for. Think ScummVM, OpenMW, Spring, 7kaa, Duke3d, Quake, Hexen, etc etc -- there are plenty of success stories.

Re:An attack on the Valve SOURCE engine?

[gangien]

Not everything is a conspiracy.

Not everything has an alterior motive.

Your life mgiht be improved if you realize this.

Re:Who Does This help

[UnknownSoldier]

> Who does this help?
People who are curious about "How Things Work", specifically, "How Games Work"

Perfect example:
quake 3 fast inverse square root
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

> will anyone read through this code?
Most definitely:
  Game Programmers - Sub-Topics: Rendering, Networking, Audio, Physics, AI,
  Future game programmers
  Hackers

I've shipped numerous games. It is always a pleasure reading other people's game code -- just to see how they did things, read the comments, etc.

--
"Necessity is the Mother of invention, but Curiosity is the Father"
    -- Michaelangel007

Re:Who Does This help

[adamofgreyskull]

The reason for releasing source code as open source isn't so that you can download it for free, compile it, and have a working copy of Doom 3, it's so that people can look at the code, learn from it, port the game to new architectures or mod the source to add new features/take advantage of new technology. Several original games have been developed using previously released id source code: (Someone should really invent some kind of "Search" "Engine" for this internet thing...)
Nexuiz
Urban Terror
Tremulous

Sadly, I suspect that you won't appreciate the value of any of that, having phrased your questions the way you did.

Re:Who Does This help

[jaxa]

This helps The Dark Mod team, among others. There are many bug fixes and improvements that can only be made once the source code is released.

Doom 3 still looks pretty damn good

[dcl]

I fired up Doom3 on my current rig recently and was pretty damn impressed with how good it looked for a game released 7 years ago. It honestly looks pretty good next to modern games. Widescreen wasn't supported out of the box, but wasn't too hard to set up.

I think when it was launched no one was really able to play it on highest graphical setting due to video cards not having enough video ram. My R9700 pro only had 128mb, I think D3 needed 512mb?

In the spirit of opensource

[SmallFurryCreature]

Do it yourself.

What is stopping you? Or do you just talk though on a nerd forum? You do know that isn't very hard do you? We run scared of guys who dare to run with scissors and have pens in their shirt pockets with NO pocket protector!