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Quake 1 GPL'ed
WarSpite was the first of many to write with the news that id has open-sourced the Quake 1 Source Code. This includes WinQuake, GLQuake, QuakeWorld, and GLQuakeWorld. Yes, it's been released under the GPL [?] . id's ftp site got the goods.
ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/sou rce/q1source.zip ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgam es/idstuff/source/q1source.zip ftp.3 dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsuppor ted/q1source.zip ftp2 .3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsupp orted/q1source.zip
or the file itself: /idgames/idstuff/source/q1source.zip
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Producing a mac version of glquake or glquakeworld should be pretty easy with the existing code now that Apple has real OpenGL support.
Producing a version of the software renderer with decent performance would be VERY HARD. A huge amount of effort went into the assembly optimization for the PPC, and it still didn't quite measure up to the x86 code.
John Carmack
Heh. You don't know how much trouble it is to convince biz oriented people that this isn't just plain stupid.
While thinking in terms of money and profit are probably good ways of understanding the way most things work in the world, don't let yourself become so jaded or cynical to think that it is the ONLY way things work.
I do think The World Would Be A Better Place if all software companies released older code so users still interested could work with it or learn from it. (I'm not holding my breath, though)
John Carmack
You better make gibs, you better get frags
You better shoot grunts, zombies and scrags
Santa Carmack G-P... L'd Quake
He's written some code, debugged it all twice
Then made it all free, isn't that nice
Santa Carmack G-P... L'd Quake
He knows when you've been fragging
He knows when you've got quad
He knows when you've just rocket jumped
'Cause Carmack is Quake God
So don't you be lame, don't you not play
Join a net game, I'll frag you today
Santa Carmack G-P... L'd Quake
Nope. We are the copyright holder of all works, and we can release any part of it under any license we choose.
Completely aside from that, I think it is still unclear exactly where the GPL wants the separation of code and content.
Few would argue that every document read by a GPL word processor would be covered by the GPL, and most would place maps entered by quake into that catagory, but things can quickly get murky.
Quake game mods are written in QC, but turned into data to be processed by the main code. I think the spirit of the GPL would want that code to be released, but it is only a small step from there to saying that every program loaded by a GPL operating system must be GPL, which is clearly not the case.
John Carmack
I don't think so, due to what I call the Database Problem (I'm sure there's a more formal name for it).
Basically, for the Metaverse to work, you need a massive, distributed, dynamically load-balanced database. You need near-zero latency between servers to handle synchronization. You need to be able to have servers dynamically hand off clients to one another without the user being able to perceive it happening. You need to be able to support the one guy wandering off by him/herself in the "frontiers" of the metaverse. You need to be able to support the virtual stadium containing 100K independent spectators (plus the 30 or so guys playing Rocket Arena down on the field), and handle collisions and other object/object interactions between all of them ("Oh, no, Bob! A wild grenade just landed in the home field bleachers!" "That means a five point penalty, Dan...").
IMHO, this problem is insoluble with current technology. Those who point to Ultima Online et al don't realize that they're side-stepping the problem by keeping all the users and data on a given server. Users and objects cannot migrate between servers. To do even this much, you need heap big server iron, which UO has. But to do something the scale of the Metaverse, you can't get one server that's big enough; you must go to a dynamic distributed system. No one has solved this problem yet.
I suspect advancing CPU and network technologies will eventually make this practical, but I believe we're still several years off...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions