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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.'"
Todays compotor scientists program with pure thought connected by JSON/XMLhttpREQUEST to a HTML5 document tree located in four-dimensional time on the APP STORE. This "code" shows that Id software is living in the PAST and won't be arouned for long, it is a DINOSORE and I am going to eat its stock markets for BRUNCH with BEAUTIFUL HOOKERS and jesuse!!!!!
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"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."
You have just spouted utter nonsense, and have made a more valuable comment than most other people here.
UDK is free for noncommercial and educational use. You may download a copy here. Licensing is required for commercial use, however. From their site ;)
Read this: http://www.develop-online.net/news/37234/UDK-devs-making-75k-only-give-1-to-Epic In short, they take 25% if you sell the game, but only if your game makes more than 50.000. They also take into account the 30% that applestore of android take using their distribution platform. But if it's non-commercial, there is no $99 if I'm not mistaken. Btw, that $99, could the average indy develop an engine like this for it? I would say, nah.
"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."
unreal engine isn't so bad on tablets... http://epicgames.com/infinityblade/
it's a fine engine. what you render with it is what makes all the difference if it runs well or not.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I still see a lot of value in Q3 based projects. They really look good enough(for me), and I hear good things about the netcode.
Literally yesterday, I was looking at a bridge in Lord of the Rings Online (which is quite pretty otherwise), and thought to myself : Why isn't it curved?
It seems the fashion with engines now is to drop curved edges - I'm not sure why. They look so much better, and have been around for ages. Quake 3 did these brilliantly, and when it came out, I thought that would be the end of crappy lumpy bridges, etc. No such luck, they're still with us, over a decade later.
Anyone with knowledge of this issue, and why they're still about?
I believe it spelled "aneurysm". They were discovered by Aneurysm Bevin, evil inventor of British death panels.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I wrote this very comment *because* I read that article.
Apparently, he got around this by compiling the bytecode to x86 code on the fly:
Moreover their design is much more elaborated: They combine the security/portability of Quake1 Virtual Machine with the high performances of Quake2's native DLLs. This is achieved by compiling the bytecode to x86 instruction on the fly.
And here's the evolution of this:
Trivia : The virtual machine was initially supposed to be a plain bytecode interpreter but performances were disappointing so the development team wrote a runtime x86 compiler. According to the .plan from Aug 16, 1999 this was done in one day.
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.
Q3 engine's curved surfaces are actually quadratic bezier spline patches (9 control points per patch). The patches had to be designed with special tools in an editor and were tessellated at runtime to an appropriate detail level based on the computer's graphics settings. The engine did not support any kind of collision detection with these surfaces so they had to be enveloped in invisible brushes to appease the BSP system for collision and culling.
While they were interesting at the time the reasons nobody really does this anymore are probably: