Quake 2 Source Code Released Under The GPL

Masem (and many others) writes: "The source code for Quake 2 is now available until the GPL license. The .plan file for John Carmack has the details." The Id Software site is of course slammed with demand for the code. Hopefully other mirrors will be available.

Lint

[Oily Tuna]

Someone needs a copy of Lint

gamex86.dll - 0 error(s), 332 warning(s)

Flamebait maybe - but if a build of my project generated 332 warnings I'd be fired.

first impressions...

[markj02]

Looks like nice, clean, readable C code. It's not all that large--175kloc. Memory management via functions wrapping malloc, using some kind of zone strategy. It's interesting that there don't seem to be that many complex data structures--that's probably why this code can still be written reasonably nicely in C with manual storage management.

This code looks very different from what CS courses teach you or expensive OOP consultants recommend. It's kind of reminiscent of the traditional UNIX code: very concrete and just tries to get the job done.

3.16 -vs- 3.20

[mojo-raisin]

Looking at quake2/changes.txt it looks like the version of Quake2 that was GPL'd was 3.16. But id has released binaries of version 3.20.

Anyone know if there are major differences between these versions?

Dreamcast game engine?

[NanoGator]

Any chance somebody will set up a Q2 community for improving/modifying the code? I'd really like to monitor what happens here. I can see some really cool potential here.

My personal interest in this project is that some independent game makers make some free, yet good quality games for Dreamcast. Wouldn't that be cool? The DC is $50, and can play burned CD's, which makes it an ideal candidate for this type of thing.

In any case, if the GPL licensing of Q2 sparks some quality spin-offs, this could be a welcome evolution of cross-platform games.

No Mac version included?

[appleprophet]

The zip includes the platform specific files for irix, linux, solaris, unix, windows, and even rhapsody!@ Yet there's not a glimmer of MacOS code, either for X or classic.

I'm guessing this is because ID software didn't port it to Mac, rather Logicware did the classic port and OmniGroup did the OS X port. However, this doesn't explain why the code for so many other OS' is included... Did ID Software actually port Q2 to rhapsody, for example?

Oh well, it would be really nice if Logicware or (more probably) the OmniGroup could donate their mac specific code. Do either of the above two companies actually own their Mac specific source code? Is this why ID Software is hesitant to include it in this package?

Oh well, I have no idea, I'm just thinking out loud.

Re:No thanks, John.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, as an academic exercise, it goes against nearly all the "rules" of having others learn about your code. It was once a lovely 3D engine, now it's akin to releasing the hardware schematics for the TI-99/4A.

There are a *lot* of things the Q2 engine does extremely well and much that people can learn from it. I'm willing to bet that significant chunks of the Q3 engine aren't that disimilar to Q2 engine. Things like BSP tree and collision algorithms will have been improved a bit, but not that much.

Those who would argue that they make significant money off licensing the engine are fooling themselves. They are a multimillion dollar company, and every new Quake or Doom game nets them more millions. They're percentages for licensing revenue must be paltry.

Quake 3 was a big victim of piracy and didn't ship nearly as many copies as you might think. Also, the I believe the licensing fee is something in the region of a million dollars per game. I'm sure they make more money off licensing the engine than on direct sales.

How widely applicable is this release model?

[gonerill]

First, like every other sensible person here I think it's terrific that Carmack and ID have this strategy for releasing older code under the GPL. I've noticed that a lot of comments have argued that this is a strategy that many or all software firms should adopt with the GPL --- develop commercially and profit in the short run, release source to community when development cycle has moved two products down the road.

I wonder, though, whether ID find it much easier to pursue this strategy because they're in the game market? Games (and *especially* FPS/Multiplayer games) are a market segment where most buyers want the newest engine, best graphics, etc. Could a company that made Wordprocessors or Spreadsheets pursue this model as easily and still make profit like ID? I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it seems to me that many users would have a much higher tolerance for using a free, three-year-old version of their wordprocessor than using a pricely new version (assuming the company didn't do nasty things like change the .doc format, etc). This isn't true of games. So while I like this "Develop-Sell-Wait-GPL" approach, I'd bet that the "Wait" time of a company like ID is amongst the shortest of any software market segment.

Re:Website

[xiana]

Heh, a redesign of the idsoftware.com webpage is in progress, and we should have a brand-spanking new page up in the not so distant future (...hopefully...)

-Xian

Thanks

[John Carmack]

Thanks for the kind comments, it helps me brace a bit for some of the really vile hate mail that is already starting to come in from the people worried about cheating.

Bill Heineman is preparing the mac source code for Q2 for a release.

We will see about getting the 3.21 changes we missed into an updated release.

I am also happy to say that another old game's code will be released under the GPL soon. We can always hope that it becomes a trend...

John Carmack