Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

fwice writes "QuakeCon has just kicked off and at the end of the keynote speech, John Carmack made an announcement saying that the Quake 3 sourcecode will be released shortly. "

This is great

[ibentmywookie]

This is why I love idsoftware. Now we'll see some cool stuff done with the quake III engine, like with Doom Legacy, quakeforge, etc etc.

Yay :)

Re:This is great

[Irashtar]

Indeed, they deserve a 21 railgun salute, but who would waste that much shooting at the roof of the map?

Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[SynapseLapse]

That would be sweet: http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Give me Quake III on DEC Alpha or give me death!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Alpha Troll hath sp0ken!

Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3!

[Pxtl]

Fsck that. Tenebrae is a friggin' techdemo. I want to see something actually useful... like all the huge Quake3 TCs released as standalone opensource games and bundled with Linux distros.

For shit's sake, Quake 3 was the first Id game to actually support mods as first-class citizens with their own keybinding menus and stuff. The Q3 TCs are an order of magnitude more complete than the Q2 ones because of it (Action Q2 is nice, but having to use the console for everything is inexcusable in a modern game).

Plus, Q3 allowed for replacement of all major media in game, without even modding. This means that there are already numerous replacement collections of player models and weapon models available on Polycount (not having monster models makes it easier) and maps on various mapping sites. As a result, all you'd have to replace to make a FreeQ3 TC would be the textures and sounds - everything else has been done already (whereas Q1 didn't have prevalent player-model and weapon-model replacements at the time of opensourcing).

This is by far some of the best news the opensource gaming world has ever seen. I can't wait to see this capitalised on.

Re:This is great

[gothfox]

Yes, really nice of them to do this time and time again. It's worth mentioning though that not only id opensources their previous generation games.

To name a few, Star Control 2 was opensourced and is being developed on Sourceforge. Beneath the Steel Sky sourcecode was also opened. It would be great to see this trend continue and expand.

Re:This is great

[cheesybagel]

They also gave the ScummVM team the source code to integrate into ScummVM proper.

Re:This is great

[Novus]

Beneath a Steel Sky was reimplemented by the ScummVM team based on source code provided to the ScummVM team by Revolution Software Ltd. The original BaSS source code was not open sourced, but the ScummVM reimplementation is open source. Quoting from ScummVM AUTHORS file:

Special thanks to:
[...]
Tony Warriner and everyone at Revolution Software Ltd. for sharing
with us the source of some of their brilliant games,

Re:This is great

[dmaxwell]

0.40 of UQM is fantastic. It supports various scaling options now. The biadv scaler is absolutely beautiful; the game looks good at 800x600 and above resolutions. It also gives you the option of 3DO graphical menus or the PC menus. The in-game graphics of course are the 3DO versions which are superior to the old PC version. It is even better to play now than it was then.

The Precursors [medievalfuture.com] are recreating the MOD music the game originally shipped with and have replaced about 75% of the in-game ditties and l

Re:This is great

[Jagasian]

Are they still using lossy compression for the voices and other audio? Also, have they made it so that you can use the pre-rendered CG video from the 3DO version? It has been a while since I have tried the UQM. I'd love to see the game has everything that the PC and 3DO version had. I first played the 3DO version, and it is still a favorite of mine, but there were things missing from the 3DO version. I'd hate to see the UQM not include the few goodies present in either of the previous versions.

Re:This is great

[AKAImBatman]

id software could still make profits licensing the Quake III engine to game developers

They do. Still make a profit, that is. When they release an engine, they release it as GPL. Anyone can make a game out of it, but then they must release their game under the GPL. As a result, many companies will choose to purchase a commercial license instead of dealing with the issues imposed by the GPL.

The only real reason for the lead time on Open Sourcing their software is that ID doesn't want to help competitors by outright teaching them the technology they developed. Once the technology is old hat, then keeping the source closed becomes less important.

Re:This is great

[stupidfoo]

The whole game doesn't have to be GPL. You could charge for the game since it would most likely include custom models, sounds, images, etc. that would be entirely outisde of the open source engine. They still would have to make available the original code and the modified engine code, but the rest of content is there's to do with as they wish.

Thanks id

[ribblem]

I saw the source for Quake 3 long ago since I work for an IHV. I think the biggest benefit it will have over its predecessors is that it is much cleaner and easier to understand/modify (at least from my brief examination it seemed this way to me). It should be very straight forward to add in VBOs which numerous licensees have done. It will be a little more work to cleanly add fragment programs, but still not bad. Again licensees have already done this proving it's doable. Adding in stencil shadows really shouldn't be too much work. I'm sure adding FBO wouldn't be much work either, but depending on the effects you want to use this for they could take some effort. While I'm not as well versed in physics I imagine someone should be able to expand the physics engine of Q3 to the now popular rigid based per triangle collisions.
At this point for tons less work than writing a game engine from scratch you'd have a very nice modern engine for whatever you want as long as you release the source with it.
Thank you id Software.

Keen?

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

Yeah, this is great and all... but how about they release the Commander Keen source code already?

Dopefish lives.

[ikkonoishi]

They can't release it.

Dopefish ate it.

Re:quake4 coming soon ?

[k_187]

probably, but they usually do this when their new engine has been out for a while, and doom 3 shipped a year ago.

Re:This is great

[NewStarRising]

"giving modders tools to create "Hot Coffee" type games."

Modders have always had tools to put their own content on computers.
The problem with the "hot coffee" content was that the game publisher supplied it. The tools were never the problem.

Re:This is great

[The Evil Couch]

wholly untrue. I know that slimeball lawyer is making those claims, but he's full of shit. there's nothing but smooth skin underneath those pixelated squares

Will it be modified?

[mattdev121]

I wonder if this source code will be modifier and edited some way to keep some company secrets hidden or if the comments will be purged.
Should be interesting...

Re:Will it be modified?

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like they're taking out the punkbuster code. The evenbalance people seem kinda secretive about their code, I suppose for security through obscurity. I saw the Q3A code while working on Medal of Honor, and there's nothing really secret or special about it. ID's cool about GPL'ing their old code, so I doubt they'll modify anything except the punkbuster stuff.

I've been looking forward to this for a while. I had tons of fun writing normal mods for Q3.

Re:Will it be modified?

[uchian]

No point really, it's five year old technology. While it's great for people coming into the gaming industry, there won't be anything in the quake 3 code that the competitors haven't already discovered for themselves, and also with the advance of the technology of gpu's, a lot of the neat tricks in quake 3 will probably be either unnecessary on the latest graphics cards, or will be completely supplanted by some other technology.

However, given source releases of other games (remember descent), they may clean out some expletives from various comments :-)

Re:Will it be modified?

[leathered]

It may be five year old technology but it was way ahead of it's time when it was launched. My first impression of Quake III was how crap it looked on my fairly up to date hardware back then. It was only a couple of years later when I bought a GeForce 3 did I finally see what a wonderful engine Carmack and co had come up with.

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

The q3 netcode is still better than just about anything out there. See for instance the unbelievably crappy netcode in most current FPS. q3 still smokes them all.

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

I consider netcode to be the method of which the server and client communicate game states, and how that data is used. Unlagged makes several changes to the way that the client deals with that data, such as implementing much better client-side player movement prediction, as well as server-side latency correction.

I think you should understand what exactly moding entails. It is not an addition, it is a modification, of whatever sections of the engine source the company has chosen to make available. In the cas

Re:Will it be modified?

[bani]

Ok, um. HL1 and HL2 have "excellent" netcode? Now I know for certain you're not a modder. :-)

I think you should understand what exactly moding entails. It is not an addition, it is a modification, of whatever sections of the engine source the company has chosen to make available.

Er, no. Companies never make _engine source_ available. Otherwise you'd be able to easily circumvent copy protection, cheat detection, etc.

What companies make available is _mod source_, eg modules which the engine loads and runs the mod code. Different engines handle this in different ways. For instance UT uses a VM similar to java. quake3 offers VM as well as machine-native DLLs.

In essence the engine is the linux kernel and mods are linux executables.

HL1 and HL2 are based off of _quake1_ engine code. HL2 still has a lot of icky quake SDK cruft in it, if you bother to look. It simply is not better than quake3. The only reason why it might "appear" to be good is that it is a very simple engine running very simple mods -- the amount of traffic traveling over the link is very small.

But give it a complex game to run, with tons of complex entities and complex gamestates, and it will not do as well as q3 engine games.

quake3 works _excellent_ in high packetloss and high latency situations. i've tested it to eg 80% packetloss and 500ms latency and it was still playable.

and er... unlagged doesnt change player movement prediction. it does make a change to serverside extrapolation if clients drop command packets, but that's a different thing entirely.

Disclaimer: I wrote etpro [anime.net] and ettv [anime.net].

Re:Will it be modified?

[Guspaz]

Ok, um. HL1 and HL2 have "excellent" netcode? Now I know for certain you're not a modder. :-)

True enough, at least now. At one time I wrote a Q3 mod called GibHappy. It was very simple, however. But in reality it matters how the netcode performs for endusers, not how pretty or ugly the code itself is.

Er, no. Companies never make _engine source_ available. Otherwise you'd be able to easily circumvent copy protection, cheat detection, etc.

It depends how you define "engine". If you strictly mean the 3D engine

Re:Will it be modified?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of their other source releases (every game dating back to Wolfenstein 3D) were tampered with in any way before releasing them.

Actually... The Doom source release consisted of only the Linux version, not the code for the DOS version, because id used a third-party DOS sound driver. So they simply stripped the DOS version out. Didn't much matter anyway, considering that neither the DOS nor Linux versions were particularly useful when the Doom source was released.

And thinking about it, all of their source releases were rather devoid of comments. There were actually comments included in the code, but not a lot of them, and it's not uncommon to see a couple of pages of rather dense code with only a couple of one line comments splattered around. I think that's mostly their coding style - there were very few comments in the first place, rather than having been stripped out. And what would be the point in stripping the comments? To make the code harder to read? Then why would they release it at all?

As for "company secrets", you are aware that id tend to be very open about what they're doing, and quite freely share new ideas and methods with everyone else (maybe not the instant they come up with them, but they don't seem big on the whole "company secrets" bit), right? And considering the age of Quake 3, there's probably nothing at all in there that would count as a secret, because virtually everyone who wants to know how something like Q3 works already does.

Re:Will it be modified?

[QuaZar666]

I think I remember that they did have to modify Quake 1, due to various licensing issues. I would expect that this would be the same thing with Quake 3. Might not be that difficult since 90+ of the code was made by ID.

Modifications

[ThePyro]

Kindof. He mentioned that the PunkBuster stuff will be removed from the code, so that people can't compile their own versions for the purpose of cheating.

Let the race to port this begin...

[WoTG]

Will Quake 3 run on a PDA, cell phone, DVD player, or a camcorder? I have a distinct feeling that we're going to find out really soon.

Oh yes, and start imagining the Beowulf clusters...

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as they port it to text mode I'll be happy.

ttyquake [slashdot.org]

some screens for the lazy
screen shot [mr.net]

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[m50d]

Unreal Tournament can already do that [icculus.org], as can anything that uses SDL (e.g. frozen bubble or I think wargus)

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[Krunch]

Modern ttys support colors too: http://sam.zoy.org/libcaca/ [zoy.org]

Re:Let the race to port this begin...

[pchan-]

Finally, I get to use my natural smoothing and antialiasing feature. A game that looks better with my glasses off than with me wearing them.

Cool

[mistermark]

Cool! this also means projects like DEVMAP [selwerd.nl] and QQQ [selwerd.nl] can be released to a bigger audience

Excellent!

[destx]

Does anyone know of projects that have been waiting for the source? I'd be interested to see what people are planning to do with it.

torrent of carmacks keynote

[i88i]

as always, filerush [filerush.com] has got the goods: clickies [filerush.com]

A reasonable model

[Coryoth]

This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source. Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done. Game engines, where being cutting edge counts for a lot, is one of those areas. At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold. Once you've stopped making cash out of your software then open source it and provide the community something to play with. You can end up with results like Tenebrae [tenebrae2.com] which is a fairly impressive open source engine considering it is built originally from Quake I source.

I wish there were some other commercial developers that could manage to follow the same sort of pattern. Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced? Are there some other applications that are currently locked up, not being sold nor developed, that could be opened up? I assume part of the problem is bookkeeping: you can keep software on your books as an asset even if you probably couldn't make a dime trying to sell it anymore - and "goodwill from the community" doesn't fit into accounting.

Jedidiah.

Re:A reasonable model

[latroM]

Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done.

Non-free model you mean? Commercialism and free software are compatible.

Re:A reasonable model

[Lisandro]

Actually, it's a good compromise. iD releases its older engines sources as GPL while still selling commercial licences [idsoftware.com] for them to be used in closed source software. And apparently, they do sell them, for everything back to the original Quake engine.

    It's a great gesture, and iD gets (as it should) a lot of respect from the OSS community from it; i just wanted to point out that they still do make cash out of their "older" engines. No conflict of interests there.

Re:A reasonable model

[Hast]

While you may still be able to buy licences for the old games id has gone on record for waiting until all licenced games are out of "sales period" (basically a few years) before they release their source.

This is naturally in order to not piss off their customers.

Your reasoning (was Re:A reasonable model)

[Laebshade]

Your reasoning/idea sounds awfully like the idea behind copyrighted material entering public domain.

Now...

[iignotus]

We can finally have Quake 3 on linux!

Oh, wait...

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

or at least ported for mac osx86 intel

and really see how fast it is ..

Re:Now...

[blechx]

Not as much of a joke as you migth think.
For example, ids ported q3 uses OSS, wich is kind of deprecated now and doesnt even work with all soundcard drivers (i have to hack it through esddsp to get mmap-stuff to work), with the program released as free software anyone is allowed to make it work with ALSA, JACK, or whatever they see fit.

Re:Now...

[bcmm]

Seriosly, though, maybe someone will fix ALSA support a little bit, maybe use SDL for the sound like many Doom and Quake derived engines do and allow a good choice of sound drivers. Maybe even a proper aRts driver, so you can listen to music and get the Q3 sound effects (don't talk to me about artsdsp; hearing the sound 2 seconds late is worse than nothing).

Re:Now...

[joeljkp]

It's a plugin for ALSA that lets you play multiple sounds through the same channel at the same time. The format for the config file is a pain, but the following worked for me:

Put all this into a .asoundrc in your home dir:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmix"
}

Note that this is for a single sound card with a single audio channel, etc.

To test, try starting up two mplayers or something.

Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Agret]

The article name is misleading as the Quake 3 source has been slated for release for a very long time now. It was pushed back because someone licensed the engine right at the end of its life cycle.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[richy freeway]

No, you're dumb. Yes, they could have had the source for free but without the licensing deal they couldn't have made any money out of it.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

They (ie. Company X) could (at least in theory) make money out of selling a Quake 3 derivative under the GPL - it's just that their source code would also have to be under the GPL. That wouldn't mean anything for their content - maps, graphics, sound effects, music, etc. They wouldn't be obliged to make that available under GPL.

The only practical result from a company selling a game based on GPLed source code is that they couldn't easily do any copy-protection tricks on their game content.

To be fair, it'd be kind of tricky to make any real money from such a project - especially with the large number of fairly decent free mods available for Quake3 engine games. But it's theoretically possible... :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[richy freeway]

Fair point well made. Not really the norm though is it? :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

To put it mildly - no, no it's not. :)

It'd be extremely interesting if a small group of artists/modders could pull it off though - put together a professional-quality game with entirely their own content but using a (slightly) modified Quake3 engine. Maintain the engine as an opensource (GPL) project on their website, sell the content for $5 or so.

Ah well, it's a nice idea. :)

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Richard_at_work]

No, the company in question could have wanted to modify the engine and retain their own code, for example maybe they wanted to include a custom physics engine, or update the graphics engine in it. Under a license agreement with id they can do this, but by using the GPLed engine they cant do this. How many games do you know that use the Quake3 engine without even minor tweaking of the engine? Its not a simple case of 'Engine' 'Content' and making money from the content.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Spellbinder]

i think you could split it up
what use is the physic engine without the storyline and the content??
if you consider that anyone had to release a game made with the physic engine also gpl
i think it would more be a problem to clearly seperate the engine from the content
maybe you had to release the game content also as gpl
the problem is that other companys could steal parts of your code and reuse it as in their closed source stuff without you knowing

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Pete]

You seem to be assuming that any such company would have to keep the game source code closed. I absolutely agree that most "normal" companies would indeed want to do that, the idea of making their game code available under the GPL would probably make their heads explode :). And you're exactly correct that if they wanted to use the Q3A engine but keep their code closed, they could pay id a (probably quite high) license fee for non-GPL access to the Q3A code.

All I was suggesting was that it'd be technically

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[Cyclops]

No, you're dumb. Yes they could have made money out of it even if it was GPL'ed. Selling the boxed copies of GPL'ed software + all those nifty proprietary game packs (the levels, the scenery, etc...) is what's really great.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[ejito]

You can't release commercial multiplayer games (what the q3a engine was built for) on GPL'ed engines, unless you want dozens of hacks ready for cheaters when the game hits the shelves. With the release of code, instead of just hooking dll's, they can code straight onto the engine to make every basic hack. This is why modders don't GPL their code, even though they give away their product for free.

Legacy cheating isn't as much of a problem, which is why the Quake1 GPL wasn't much of an impact; but legacy che

Uh...

[Dthoma]

...you realise that only a poorly-coded game can be used to cheat in multiplayer, right? Any sane coder will keep the game state entirely in the server, so it's impossible to cheat by "hacking" the source at the client's end.

Re:Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

[m50d]

If it was GPL (as some of ID's engine releases are) then they certainly could. Sure, anyone who bought their game would have the right to sell copies to their friends, but let's face it, that happens quite a bit anyway. Or they could just keep their models, textures etc. and not license them for redistribution. Redistribute the engine all you like, people can play total conversions with it, but if you want the actual game you still have to buy the CD.

This is the reason

[Aggrajag]

This is the reason I actually buy every title from iD Software, even if I don't like the actual game (Quake 3, Doom 3).

Re:This is the reason

[verbatim_verbose]

That's very nice of you, but if you don't like the game, wouldn't it be a better gesture to donate the money to an open source project? id has plenty of money... a game purchase is a drop in the bucket to them compared to people working on Free software.

This would probably be a more practical gesture if you want to support open source. (Which, I can't tell if you do or not - but still, just a thought.)

Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[deVoid99]

If you can't wait for the Quake3 source, I've already replicated most of the Quake3 engine's features, and released source & binaries.

DXQuake3 : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/ [pipex.com]
DXQuake3 features : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/dxquake3_feature s.htm [pipex.com]

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, but it does conflict a bit with some of the appeal of Q3: Being based on OpenGL so as to be easily cross-platform.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[Jugalator]

It'll run great [slashdot.org] in Windows Vista though! :-p

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[MaestroSartori]

Nice feature list, and I'm sure it all works fine.

However...

Quake 3 also runs on Linux & Mac. Not to denigrate your project whatsoever, but it *is* DirectX and thus (depending on how you've organised stuff) might not be straightforward to port.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[turgid]

Next you can write a cross-platform Direct X library that uses OpenGL as a back end. That would be very useful indeed.

Re:Can't wait? Do it yourself.

[2nd Post!]

Why is OpenGL legacy; just because you say so?

DirectX isn't the end; especially since the two biggest game platforms out there don't support it: Gameboy Advance and Playstation2. Programming in DirectX limits him to PC games.

Nosferatu Total Conversion

[88NoSoup4U88]

This vampire themed Total Conversion [nosferatuthegame.com] looks very promising. They were waiting for the source to be released, so they can release this game for free.
They made some nice changes to the engine : a particle engine, Ingame video playback, Cube maps, Specular maps, Lightblooms and some more modifications.

Have a look at this screenshot [nosferatuthegame.com] or even better, the videos [nosferatuthegame.com]

Let me clear this up:

[Anonymous Coward]

Heya, Ghostface here (leader of the Nosferatu Team)

No we are not really waiting for the Quake3 src in order to release Nosferatu for free. The game is based upon a heavily modified version of the Qfusion Engine which in turn is based on the Quake2 sourcecode.

Engine : Quake 2 -> Qfusion - > Nosferatu Engine

No Quake3 in there ;)
We just use some data formats from quake3 :)

Re:Let me clear this up:

[88NoSoup4U88]

Oi, sorry for misinforming there :/

Damn, and all this time I thought you guys were going to use the Q3 engine : Am I crazy, or have you guys changed plans ? I would have sworn I'd seen that you people would be using that engine.

Anyways, kudos to you all, and it looks very promising.

A shameless site plug

[Ndr_Amigo]

One site to keep an eye on for your Quake3 source needs is QuakeSrc [quakesrc.org], particularly the forums.

Most of the current Quake engine moders hang out here.

Obligatory Futurama quote....

[EvilCabbage]

"Good news everyone!"

In other news.

[jotux]

3D realms just announced they are about to start writing the source code for Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:In other news.

[cortana]

How much have 3d Realms sunk into the DNF cesspit so far, and is this number greater or less than the amount of money that they could possibly hope to make when they release the final game?

native alsa sound support!

[Internet_Communist]

I hope this means someone will add native alsa sound support. Who needs oss kernel emulation w/mmap?

maybe quake 3 will finally work with dmix.

Re:native alsa sound support!

[bcmm]

I know this is not tech support forum, but this is obviously going to take time to fix, so for now:
Has anyone got a good way to work around the problems with ALSA? The only success I've had has been with artsdsp, but with that the sound lags 2 secs behind gameplay, which is too distracting. Anyone know a way to make arts react a bit faster?

Re:native alsa sound support!

[bersl2]

You mean besides not relying on onboard sound or even some discrete sound cards, which do DSP and mixing in software, a la winmodems?

I suppose you could run JACK as a real-time process. This way, sound doesn't get preempted.

And if you actually want to read the comments...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you actually want to read Carmack's comments it's helpful to have a link to them rather than the Planet Quake homepage:

http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=10 68 [gamecloud.com]

More companies should follow.

[RoadWarriorX]

I think this is one of the great examples of the balance of free software in a business market. The software companies always state that the number one reason why their never release the source code of their product is that they do not want to loose their intellecutual property...ever.

Id has enough sense to realize that there is a point in a piece of software's lifecycle where their innovation has made "enough money". So, they can release their Quake X engine under GPL to benefit the community, while at

The moral of the story is:

[Fuzuli]

You can be a nice guy, even if you have millions of dollars. Although there are some posts which discusses the significance of this release, years after the game went out, i feel like i should remind you guys: this is not a donation to poor software houses so that they can come up with a new hit.
This is about letting some other (even if they are in the software industry or not) guys learn something from what you have done.
Carmack has been one of the legends of the genre, and even if his usual habit (create the best visual environment possible, and go on) has started to loose it's success (half life vs doom 3) there is no doubt that he is very very good programmer. For a lot of other programmers, it's a good oppurtunity to see what kind of tricks he's been doing.
The release is late, but this makes it fair for the companies who paid to licence the engine. If you can't make money from a source code in 4 years after you've bought it, than you have much more serious problems than this release. It's kinda sad to see all those complaints, since Carmack has no obligation to release code, and he gets complaints instead of thanks when he does it.
I'll possibly never compile the thing since i don't have time for that as an "enterprise developer" (oh god, why did i fail so badly?), but it'll feel good to have source code of quake 3 somewhere around my hard drive.
Whatever, good work Mr. Carmack, thanks..

Re:The moral of the story is:

[phrasebook]

You can be a nice guy, even if you have millions of dollars.

Or maybe: you can be a nice guy, when you have millions of dollars (and you've gotten over the Ferrari thing).

AltTab!

[Snaller]

I home someone will fix that damn idiocy that the user can't Alt-Tab - That is so lame.

Great news for artists and researchers.

[delire]

We host and or link to [selectparks.net] about 120 game-based artworks many of which are built on/for Quake3.

Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP. This has resulted in game-based artworks that rely on proprietary third-party engines having less-than equal opportunity where other mediums are concerned.

This is welcomed greatly in the art world. True to form as always, thanks John.

This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick off

[Thilo2]

Especially in germany - where there is an age restriction on the Quake3 game and you cannot easily buy it. For instance, the Quake3 mod Padmod which can be found here http://www.worldofpadman.com/ [worldofpadman.com] has astonishing artwork while at the same time being without blood and from the concept suited for children (it's still fun for adults though). Unfortunately, the MOD does not have many gamers right now - one reason for this is certainly the ban on quake3 itself. With a seperate build one can now circumvent this ban which will hopefully bring new users to mod projects like these.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:But it used to be closed source.

[justins]

Congrats to them for their efforts and thanks on behalf of those who enjoy playing it, but let's see a viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys. And I mean one developed from the ground up as open source.

The problem is that the "open source" nonsense is just fucking irrelevant one way or the other. Make a killer new game engine, something competitive with Doom 3, and release it under the GPL. What have you got? Not much.

The difficulty in getting a killer new game out is in the co

if...

[KillShill]

copyright laws were anywhere near sensible, we'd be getting the source code for all programs on a regular basis. not that i'm trying to diminish iD's contribution but let's keep things in perspective. or as they used to say "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on".

engines nowadays are far more advanced than q3's, so it isn't very viable for most commercial ventures. still it's quite a nice little engine that runs beautifully on current and older hardware.

good job iD.

Re:Licensing

[Coryoth]

The licensing scheme will, of course, be of an utmost importance to the community of developers and the "article" doesn't say anything about it. Let's hope it will be a truly free license, preferably GPL, so that the source can actually be modified and re-distributed.

Well the Doom, Quake, and Quake II source were all released as GPL, so I'm unsure why you would expect Carmack to suddenly change his mind and go with something different for the Quake III source.

Jedidiah.

Re:Licensing

[NeoChaosX]

Of course it's going to be GPL. Carmack release the Quake 1 and 2 source code under the GPL, so why wouldn't he do the same for Q3?

Re:Licensing

[Antony.S]

He said in the keynote that it would be GPL (and then he went on for the best part of 5 minutes talking about how much he loves the GPL etc).

Re:punkbuster not included

[The Evil Couch]

anti-cheating/hacking program that was born from the cesspit that Counterstrike became IIRC, and is now the industry standard for preventing cheating and hacking in online first person shooters.

Re:punkbuster not included

[bcmm]

Anti-cheat. Haha.

It's crap at that, but it's very good at stopping people using duplicate CD keys. Which is a shame, because I see nothing morally wrong with two people on a LAN using the same copy to play on a server.

I hope this release helps kill off punkbuster usage on Quake 3 servers.

Punkbuster is shit

[cortana]

It was so good at its job that Valve ditched it in favour of their own anti-cheating system (which is also shit, but that's another point).

Re:Punkbuster is shit

[cortana]

I never played a game where it kicked legitimate cheaters. The worst was with a mod called True Combat: it would kick *everyone* from the server, a few minutes after they joined, for alleged cheating!

I wouldn't have cared, except that it was impossible to turn off once turned on. Even removing the commands that enabled it from the server's config files and restarting the server didn't do it. I know this sounds crazy, and if I came accross someone raving about how it posessed his PC I too would discount that

Re:punkbuster not included

[nunchux]

Punkbuster... Yeah. I guess it works some times. But I've also been booted for being a Mac user (and thus a version behind), booted for using a CD key that was compromised (on a game I paid for, at that... good luck working that situation out), booted because some griefer accused me of cheating because I got off a lucky sniper shot or something. And when you're marked a cheater in one server, you can be marked a cheater in ALL servers-- making the multiplayer mode of a game I paid full price for worthle

Re:What worth after 6 years?

[_Shorty-dammit]

uh, id's been releasing the source code to their engines for a long, long time, and they're just continuing to do so. Why on earth do you think this is some abnormal event for those guys? It was already slated to be released a long time ago but was pushed back because of a new licensee, as someone posted a little ways up to remind everyone. No matter how dated the engine may be in your mind (really, it's mostly texturing that makes it look dated) there's still going to be a lot of interesting code to lea

Re:one question for everyone

[_Shorty-dammit]

"directx" isn't just graphics, it's sound, input, etc. Doom3 uses opengl for graphics, period. It doesn't get converted to anything else, there'd be no point in that at all. It might use directx for other things besides graphics perhaps, mouse input, keyboard input, sound, etc.

XBOX Doom 3

[Phil John]

was quite heavily re-written (hence the delayed launch date) by a company who was already au-fait with xbox development. I suspect they ripped out carmacks opengl code and put in a direct-x replacement, converting shaders manually etc. They also didn't have to deal with creating different render paths for different hardware (geforce 3 vs geforce fx vs radeon etc.) and only stuck to the nvidia card in the xbox, therefore reducing the amount of work required immensely.

Re:Payback for banning

[_Shorty-dammit]

or you could grow up and get on with your life, heh. Why would you even give a rat's ass anymore? You'll find that *not* acting like a fool will get you not-so-surprisingly few bans...

Re:Quake engine?

[leathered]

Ah yes, the HL2 engine, which judging by the leaked alpha version still contains Quake 1 code.