Id Software and Activision Wolfenstein Source

An enthusiastic Anonymous Coward writes: "Id Software and Activision released the sources of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Single-player and multiplayer included. Unbelievable! Another great surprise from Id Software!" Update: 04/14 15:19 GMT by T : Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.

Here come the hacked, never-miss multiplayers

[Brento]

Don't be surprised in a month when suddenly people start missing a lot less often in multiplayer mode.

Low Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Another low-water mark in terms of Slashdot content quality.

"Developers: Id Software and Activision Wolfenstein Source" - English is not my native language, but surely, this is a fairly crappy headline. "Developers: Wolfenstein Source Code Released" or something similar would have been way, way better.

Second, the posting itself is shit, written by an "enthusiastic anonymous coward" who is apparently about 13 years old. Who the hell is reviewing these news items before they hit the front page? Whoever posted this one (hi tim) should have done some creative re-writing, or better yet, picked another submission about the same thing (surely there must have been a couple about something this well-known).

In its current state, I am very glad I'm not paying a cent for /. access. Stuff like this posting really brings down the average content quality big time.

Re:Here come the hacked, never-miss multiplayers

[coupland]

Bah, mod all this shit down. It isn't the full source, this is just the game source. They always release the game source...

Re:This is just the *game logic*, not the engine

[Brown]

The .pak only contains the game code in byte-compiled form.

It is not easily modifiable on it's own, although there are utilities to convert it back into something like it's original source. ID released the actual QuakeC sourcecode a little later, along with a byte-compiler etc for it.

Re:Here come the hacked, never-miss multiplayers

[pe1rxq]

Clear enough for correct people - and if think different, maybe the whole GPL/Open Source concept is flawed...

No, it shows the 'Open Source' concept is flawed, its a buzzword....
The GPL and Free Software concept would have prevented such an prohibition and would make the source code actually usefull.

Jeroen

true, however...

[spd_rcr]

it's good to see ID keeping with their tradition of slowly opening up their source code. how many other gaming companies out there do this ? many still freak out when you try to play w/ their 20 year old roms. quake 1 is still a great game, fast, and can be run on nearly any machine still operating, of course i don't think they're giving away the NiN tracks, the RIAA would have a fit !
ID is definately one of the best software companies and definatey at the top of game companies. They're a business, they make money, & they give back to the community.
so they keep the code for 3+ years, at least they won't go broke and stop having code to give us.
it'd be nice to see other companies doing this !
way to go ID Software, thanks for continued good deeds.

Re:DUH!

[atrus]

Team Fortress was a Halflife based mod.

Re:Here come the hacked, never-miss multiplayers

[Anonymous Coward]

That works until the 1337 d00dz create a few new identities that play fair, gain trust and then declare that all their buddies in #h4x0rs are trustworthy. Eventually their link to other webs may be broken but an hour or two of IRCing will create another dozen...

I don't mean to troll, but it seems that closed source engines make it a lot harder for people to cheat...

Re:DUH!

[Nurgster]

Guess again.

Team Fortress Classis was a Half-Life mod, the original TF was a Quake 1 mod.

Re:Here come the hacked, never-miss multiplayers

[ryanvm]

Players take a vow to play cheat free. They get their friends to confirm that they play cheat free. Friends confirm other friends. The web develops. This relationship is published to a well known repository and linked to other webs of trust submitted by other groups based on common participants.

At least one pitfall to this system is that it hinges on social interaction between participants.

It basically mandates that logging onto a random server and playing for an hour or so every couple nights isn't "good enough". Now you have to engage in moronic chit-chat with the dozen
retards on the server in order to can gain their trust. No thanks.

I play CounterStrike because the game is fun. The last thing I want to do is be forced to integrate myself into some "clan" of immature jackasses just so people can be sure I'm not cheating.

Most redundant posting ever

[screwballicus]

It's a shame to see good people making good comments get bad karma for posting useful information, but it's also a shame to see a message board filled with 30 people all saying the exact same thing. How many checked to see whether someone else had posted regarding the code being just game source and not engine source before repeating that fact? Not many, seemingly. 30 people can't have all posted that comment simultaneously. It looks like slashdot is all soapbox and no audience, especially seeing as virtually everyone seems to be well aware of the existing policy on releasing source, anyway.

Game code is in the interesting part

[Junks Jerzey]

Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.

Speaking as a professional game player, the game-level code is the interesting part. Graphics engines get pretty boring after you've worked on a couple of them. Go back to a graphics book from 15 years ago, back before PC gaming took off, and that's pretty much how graphics engines still work. Game-level code, though, now that's interesting. There are many more open problems in that area, or at least problems that can be solved in hundreds of ways, as opposed to three or four.