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Quake 3 Source Code Review
An anonymous reader writes "id Software has a history of releasing the source code for their older games under the GPL. Coder Fabien Sanglard has been taking it upon himself to go through each of these releases, analyze the source code, and post a detailed write-up about it. He's now completed a review of the Quake 3 source code, diving into the details of idTech3. It's an interesting read — he says he was impressed in particular by the 'virtual machines system and the associated toolchain that altogether account for 30% of the code released. Under this perspective idTech3 is a mini operating system providing system calls to three processes.'"
"Start your engines; I can't wait?" Dude, this was released years and years ago. In fact, the guy in the article previously reviewed the Doom 3 source code (which is much newer) and just decided to go back and do this old engine for completeness' sake.
Wikipedia has a list of games that already exist that are based on the GPL Quake 3 source. You need to crawl out from under your rock a little more often!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Just so we're clear, Quake 3 and its source code are NOT in the public domain.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Why use the quake 3 engine when you can use the newest unreal engine with all the tools the professionals use for free?
Because you might want to release the game one day? Then you have to pay for both the engine and royalties.
Also, you may want to produce a game that can run on a tablet or normal notebook, in which case the Unreal engine requirements disqualifies it.
Content is the most difficult thing about games now. Seriously. The engine is not where most of the resources go.
It's a hell of a lot more difficult creating a decent in game universe than creating an engine. Think about it - games now require _loads_ of textures someone has to paint. Loads of voiceovers someone has to do. Loads of text someone has to write. And debug, optimise, etc. The engine is not the tough bit. A lot of it is dull, dull work.
That being said, there are success stories, but they are few and far between. Fall from Heaven (civ4), Magna Mundi (EU3) - (though look at how that has turned out now), quite a few for X3, and obviously the old poster boy, counterstrike. These mods relied upon a large initial userbase.
Seriously, content is king now, and it's hard to do without loads of work.