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

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

[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:Old hardware

[compro01]

How out of date is your hardware?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

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);

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: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.