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First Person Shooters (Games)

Carmack Discusses Delay of Q3A Source 252

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
Time Doctor writes "John Carmack moved to a blog format, and updates everyone with his thoughts on graphics and why licensing delays the (still) inevitable Quake 3: Arena source, when it was expected before the end of 2004."
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Carmack Discusses Delay of Q3A Source More

Carmack Discusses Delay of Q3A Source

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  • He knows the market at least. (Score:4, Funny)

    by NashCarey ( 765512 ) * on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:29AM (#11238014) Homepage Journal
    He wrote in his blog, "I'm not quite sure what the tone is going to be - there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks."

    Uh, Yeah....

  • Well at least he has a good point. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:30AM (#11238015)
    Just be thankful that they DO release the source for these games. It keeps them alive. I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.

    By releasing the code for these games it increases their worth and their life for quite some time.
    • Doom II is still my favorite deathmatch game. I'm glad iD is committed to opening the source to their older engines so that they can still be played. I wish more game companies would do this.
      • Just curious, why is doom2 your fave deathmatch ?

        -Dave
        • It's not my favorite, but I can see why he thinks so - balance.

          Every move has a countermove (even more so in Heretic, which is my nominee for perfect deathmatch, because of the items). 2 highly-skilled doom2 players can continuously battle for 10 minutes or more before a frag is scored on a small map like Dead Simple, throwing every weapon in the game at each other along the way.

        • Re:Well at least he has a good point. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Apathetic1 ( 631198 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @10:48AM (#11238226) Journal
          A few reasons...

          It runs on everything. There aren't very many games I can play with my housemates because my Windows machine is the only one in the house.

          The level design is great. Maps like Entryway or Dead Simple are the perfect size for two to four players because there's room to run but not so much that you never see anybody else.

          I love the weapons, the plasma gun in particular.

          Don't get me wrong, I still fire up Quake 3, Tribes, C&C Renegade, etc. occasionally but I always find myself coming back to Doom.
      • Not sure if you, or anyone else here is aware of this, but there is a client/server port for Doom/Doom 2 called ZDaemon. (www.zdaemon.org)

        Which in itself is a great example of how the community updated and rewrote the network code.

    • Re:Well at least he has a good point. (Score:5, Informative)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:43AM (#11238064) Homepage Journal
      Bolo [lgm.com], from about 1987. Of course, the Bolo-playing population is vanishingly small, but it does live on today. I'm sure somebody else will come along with more examples shortly, but people playing eight-year-old network games isn't that remarkable.
      • I can remember back when I was maybe ten years old and me and my brother would hook up a couple of PowerMacs to the network and play Bolo together. It was really fun, because back then games that were written specifically for the Mac seemed to have a special quality in them that a game tied to another platform did not; some mysterious feel about them that could only be experienced on a Macintosh.

        In Bolo, the graphics were very fine and had good color, the refresh was excellent, and you never had any flicke

      • Umm. Nethack. How old is that? While it might not be a network game, it still has a very strong following and a vibrant development community.

        SiO2
      • I used to play Bolo on my mac back in the mid 90s. Singleplayer though, I had no net connection.

    • Re:Well at least he has a good point. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:45AM (#11238072) Homepage Journal
      The thing with Quake is that there are no other games from 1996 which even compare to today's games. Quake (deathmatch) can still just about hold its own even against today's titles like UT2004. The graphics are scrappy but all the elements are there, and Quake 1 is still as fun as hell.
      • The original Quake looked hideous in comparison to modern games. The OpenGL version was a considerable improvement, as was QuakeWorld (which, sadly is not supported by all mods). Projects like QuakeForge have continued to improve on this. I still consider Quake 1 to have been the most fun of the Quake series, and the fact that I can play it on about any (relatively modern) platform I've used due to the source code being available is a huge bonus.

      • Re: freesource allows improvement (Score:4, Informative)

        by Xross_Ied ( 224893 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @04:04PM (#11239731) Homepage
        http://www.fuhquake.net

        FuhQuake is a really great opengl quakeworld client.

        Much better than quakeforge because fuhquake has support for 32bit textures AND includes 32bit textures for many, many maps as well as many other small refinements that compare to today's games. I don't know if it compares to doom3 but it does compare to quake3arena (2 years old?).

      • The thing with Quake is that there are no other games from 1996 which even compare to today's games. Quake (deathmatch) can still just about hold its own even against today's titles like UT2004.

        While it's true that no other game in 1996 is memorable off-hand, Quake's deathmatch can be consdiered obsolete:

        1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.
        2. If you suicide with the thu

    • bzflag.org (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anarchofascist ( 4820 )
      I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.


      BZFlag [bzflag.org], admittedly not from 1996, more like 1986.

    • I don't know anyone else still playing network games from 1996 except for Quake.

      Your point, in general, is taken, but there are those of us that still enjoy a game of Netrek [netrek.org] now and then :-P

      Shit, now I feel old...


      Mechanik
    • People still play Warcraft II [warcraft.org]. I don't think that open-source has had a significant impact on the longevity of Id's earlier games. The fact that they were solid games that many see as still worth playing is far more important. The original half-life, released a year after quake II, has orders of magnitude greater online presence, despite being closed source.

  • Sounds Fair to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:30AM (#11238018) Homepage Journal
    I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later too. Carmack has to keep his clients happy first, the free/gpl scene can wait. The fact that he/id is one of very few that release anything related to old software means we should hold him in very high regard.
    • Maybe, but for many commercial game developers, the GPL isn't an option anyway. Sure, you can keep the game art proprietary and the engine GPL, but I don't think (for instance) EA would do that. They want to keep their modifications of the engine to themselves.

      OTOH, a developer may be pissed off if she buys an engine licence just to have id release the source before she has released the game.
    • I'd be pissed if I paid a wad of money, only to have Carmack post in his blog that if I hadn't given him the money, then he would have released it for free.

      Not the smartest thing Carmack has ever posted.

      • Re:Sounds Fair to me (Score:3, Insightful)

        by k_187 ( 61692 )
        Yes, but they dual license it dont' they? So if you want to use it in a commercial game, then ID still charges you. Not as much as they do when they haven't released it GPL, but they still charge.
      • Its not like the 2004 release date goal was held secret in some clandestine fortress of the FSF. I'd hope the buyers discovered this relatively easy to find fact, and continued anyways. In all likelyhood, this is the first step in releasing the source. By quietly discussing this with the community, the liscencee is in a much worse position to fight a GPL release. Its entirely possible that a month from now they contact Carmack and ask him to release the source under the GPL, and ask him to drop their name o
    • I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later

      But everyone knows it was going to be released soon after Doom3, I'm sure Carmack has said it here on Slashdot multiple times. If the other company didn't like that I'm sure they could have paid ID a whole lot more and written into the contract exactly when the code could be released.

  • Admin has a funny sense of humor (Score:5, Funny)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:30AM (#11238021) Homepage Journal
    I think its so slashdotted you can't see the humorous message anymore, something like.

    Too much traffic
    probably slashdot.org
    email somedude@idsoftware.com

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:32AM (#11238030)
    http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/94b382fc4adc8812a 904c676b34b459e/index.html [mirrordot.com]

    - S

  • Was I the only one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:32AM (#11238031) Homepage Journal
    ...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?
    • ...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?

      Probably not. Statistically speaking there has to be at least one other dyslexic on /.
    • ...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?

      That's got to be the stupidest engine name ever. Or maybe the were hoping that by making it ungoogleable they would be able to keep it safe from pirates and hackers...

  • Some TA Stuff is out (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 00Monkey ( 264977 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:33AM (#11238033) Homepage
    I'm not sure exactly what it is but there is some source for something in Team Arena out:

    ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/source/

  • ENTIRE TEXT (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:33AM (#11238035)
    Welcome, Q3 source, Graphics

    December 31st, 2004 | John Carmack's Blog

    December 31, 2004

    Welcome

    I get a pretty steady trickle of emails from people hoping for .plan file updates. There were two main factors involved in my not doing updates for a long time ? a good chunk of my time and interest was sucked into Armadillo Aerospace, and the fact that the work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring.

    The Armadillo work has been very rewarding from a learning-lots-of-new-stuff perspective, and I?m still committed to the vehicle development, even post X-Prize, but the work at Id is back to a high level of interest now that we are working on a new game with new technology. I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I?m going to give it a more general try here. .plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I?ll be sensible and use the web.

    I?m not quite sure what the tone is going to be ? there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks.

    I have had some hesitation about doing this because there are a hundred times as many people interested in listening to me talk about games / graphics / computers as there are people interested in rocket fabrication, and my mailbox is already rather time consuming to get through.

    If you really, really want to email me, add a ?[JC]? in the subject header so the mail gets filtered to a mailbox that isn?t clogged with spam. I can?t respond to most of the email I get, but I do read everything that doesn?t immediately scan as spam. Unfortunately, the probability of getting an answer from me doesn?t have a lot of correlation with the quality of the question, because what I am doing at the instant I read it is more dominant, and there is even a negative correlation for ?deep? questions that I don?t want to make an off-the-cuff response to.

    Quake 3 Source

    I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn?t the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I?m pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.

    Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won?t be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won?t wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

    Random Graphics Thoughts

    Years ago, when I first heard about the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs, I couldn?t think of anything off hand that I wanted them for. As I start working on a new generation of rendering code, uses for them come up a lot more often than I expected.

    I can?t actually use them in our production code because it is an Nvidia-only feature at the moment, but it is convenient to do experimental code with the nv_fragment_program extension before figuring out various ways to build funny texture mip maps so that the built in texture filtering hardware calculates a value somewhat like the derivative I wanted.

    If you are basically just looking for plane information, as you would for modifying things with t

  • Google cache (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    of Carmack's page here [google.com]

  • What's that you say... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jaidon ( 843279 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:39AM (#11238048)
    ...id Software is going to be LATE releasing something? No way!

  • this does suck (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jonwil ( 467024 )
    This sucks that Q3 code is being delayed.
    Unless there is some provision somewhere in one of the licence aggreements with the companies still using Q3 code, they should just release it like they promised damnit.
    The companies who have licenced it can still use it for whatever it is they are using it for without any problems.

    Releasing the Q3 source code would provide people wanting to produce 3d games (well those that would fot onto the quake 3 engine and its way of doing things anyway i.e. FPS's mainly) a go

    • Re:this does suck (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:48AM (#11238080)
      Firstly its their code, and the reason Carmack gives is a very valid one - keep your paying customers happy before your non paying customers. He does agree that a royalty free license is not the same as a GPL license, but regardless of the difference, theres going to be some hard feelings if he just released the code right after someone forked over a large amount of money to use it.

      As for your second point, I cant actually think of one single opensource project that has taken the Doom, Quake, Quake2 source code and done something memorable with it. There were a couple of ports to different platforms, but no real memorable independant projects with new gaming material.
      • I dont know much about Quake or Quake 2 but look at DOOM.
        Look at zdoom for example, that takes the DOOM engine and adds many many features to it.
        A fair number of maps and mods out there take advantage of the new features added to ports like zdoom.
        check sites like www.doomworld.com to see what people are doing with DOOM and its engine.

        • Re:this does suck (Score:5, Informative)

          by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @10:15AM (#11238145) Journal
          Quake has gone even further.
          Modern quake engines use full 24bit replacement textures, can load maps from Hexen, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, or HalfLife (and all textures there of), have all the graphical improvements you can think of (stencil shadows, specular lighting, etc). Some quake clients can even load Quake3 QVM code(Thats the mod data, meaning you could load a quake3 map with the bsp loader, the weapon models with the .md3 loader,and the mod itself)

          And thats just the stuff I remember. Check out http://quakeworld.nu for more info.

      • Re:this does suck (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rhennigan ( 833589 )
        I cant actually think of one single opensource project that has taken the Doom, Quake, Quake2 source code and done something memorable with it.

        While this may be true, the educational value of being able to look at the code itself is enormous, even if you never make anything from it. Think of coders who make games that can use Q3 Arena code to improve their project.

      • Re:this does suck (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Sunday January 02, 2005 @10:41AM (#11238210) Homepage Journal
        Not so!

        The quake world base was expanded quite well I think.

        If you look at some of the clients that are still around today. FuhQuake, QuakeForge and of course ezQuake. (though they all appear to be dying/dead now).

        Now, eQuake has done an excellent job repacking Fuhquake and providing some excellent work building that out with addons. The biggest improvement was dynamically retextured objects at run time.

        So with the quake retexture project the grahpics aren't half bad.

        Though all those simply build out on an existing platform and enhance the QW client/server line.

        Tenebrae, which I believe is now defunct, had some excellent work in this area. Tenebrae2 looks visually appealing and was based on their work with the Tenebrae engine (quake 1 source). Bump mapping was introduced as well.

        Of course look for yourselves... [sourceforge.net]

        Though unreleased, Tenebrae2 looks really good, but I really don't believe developement has gone very far lately. (www.tenebrae2.com)

        I think T2 has been one of the better evolutions I've seen from the original Quake source.

        Now go grab eQuake [quakeworld.nu] and then pick up XQF [linuxgames.com]
    • Unless there is some provision somewhere in one of the licence aggreements with the companies still using Q3 code, they should just release it like they promised damnit.

      I direct you to the wisdom of Mr Torvalds:

      "He who writes the code gets to choose his license, and nobody else gets to complain."

      There's some other stuff in the original quote that you won't like either, but I've spared you that :)

  • Okay... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

    • But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

      That was probably the large licensing deal that recently went through.. DNF switching engines AGAIN, this time to an old one instead of a new one.

      :P



      So the answer is yes.
    • But will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever?

      The source for Doom 3 will probably be released before DNF

  • Insight into programming in the gaming industry (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:48AM (#11238078) Homepage
    "The work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring."

  • Writing commander keen (Score:5, Funny)

    by clockwise_music ( 594832 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @09:49AM (#11238086) Homepage Journal
    Bit of a difference from his Earlier days! [3drealms.com].

    My favourite quote from this article:

    >John C. having some trouble getting the little Scrub in Keen2 to carry the player on its back and, as always, The Carmack figures the shit out and gets it done

  • Hats Off To id (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @10:06AM (#11238126) Homepage Journal
    Even with the delay, I would say hats off to Carmack and id for continuing to release code like this. As others have already mentioned, it really does help keep the fps genre in particular alive and progressing because it seeds the next generation of development talent. This is good not just for fps games, but anything where a good 3D engine is needed. It's easy to think that there may not be any need to further develop 3D engines, but with new hardware and software coming out all of the time, along with new ideas on how to do things, there's always more that can be done.

    Contrast this openess to a company like EA which as far as I know has never released any source code. As many here already know, EA just sewed up an exclusive deal with the NFL [proliphus.com] for NFL branded football games which essentially puts competing games from ESPN or 989 off the field since they can't use NFL players or stadiums. There has never been any source code for sports games like this released to the public, which means no mods or clones. And it also means that learning how to write these types of games has an enormous learning curve. Well I'm rambling now, but I think the point has been made. Oh, and of course EA is not the only company tight with source code, most are!

  • Tough beans. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The trees ( 561676 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @12:16PM (#11238636)
    To the new licensee, I say tough beans. While there wasn't really an official announcement, it was fairly well known that Carmack was planning on releasing the source soon. Either they decided that it was worth it to pay and have it right away (instead of waiting for it to be opened), or they somehow missed this information when they researched their purchase. In the first scenario they have no reason to complain when it's open-sourced, since they were expecting it. In the second scenario they can complain, but only that they made a poorly informed purchase.

  • Kudos for Camack (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ramar ( 575960 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @01:14PM (#11238933)
    As I read through the comments so far, there hasn't been a single negative reply (within my threshhold) in regards to the delay, and I also applaud Id's efforts. Funny though, 'cause when I read this, I thought it sounded strikingly similar to the licensing delays Sun has in releasing the Solaris source code, which more people than not criticize as feet dragging or worse.

    Sure, they're not exactly parallels, but both Id and Sun have positive history in the open source world (thats not intended as a troll...) Why is that Id gets slack while Sun gets stiffed for attempting the same thing?
    • Because SUN bought a SCO license, hence funded SCO in their anti-linux crusade. Also I have heard SUN employees bash Linux for its "uncertain IP" and "risk of litigation", while promoting SUN products such as their Linux distribution...

  • Carmack is great (Score:5, Informative)

    by shotgunefx ( 239460 ) on Sunday January 02, 2005 @02:04PM (#11239174) Journal
    In the beginnning of the 90s, I was a teen trying to get started in video games.

    I found a BBS (I think MCI Worldcomm) in CA where John Carmack and Michael Abrash frequented. He was discussing Doom as it was being developed. Actually posted code from it as he was developing it and going into specifics of the engine. It was amazing to get that kind of perspective when your just starting out.

    After a couple of months though it was removed. I take it that some people at Id didn't like him sharing the development of this ground breaking game while it was still being developed.

    One of the things they looked at for Doom originally was Voxel models. I still have copies of this stuff someplace (including a primitive Voxel editor he released). I should dig it up and post it for posterity sake.
    • It belongs to Id under US laws, so I'd recommend you don't share it with us. It probably won't hurt anybody, but I don't think /. needs the headache.
  • For some reason I don't think I'll be porting [slashdot.org] this one to Pocket PC anytime soon (can't find the slashdot story for the Q2 port).

    OTOH, Pocket PCs are already on the market with hardware acceleration, so who knows? :)

    Dan East

  • I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I'm going to give it a more general try here. .plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I'll be sensible and use the web.

    We know that he's new to blogging because the RSS/RDF/XML/Atom/whatever files are missing...

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