A Look At Free Quake3 Engine Based Games

Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, nearly two years ago. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."

id Software Rocks

[time$lice]

I've always admired id for releasing their engines after the game has lived its life. I feel that they're giving back to the community (at least in some small way). The Q3 engine was the bomb back in the day. Now if some of the competition would follow suit. :)

Re:

[nacturation]

I've always admired id for releasing their engines after the game has lived its life. I feel that they're giving back to the community (at least in some small way).

Giving back implies they've taken something from the community which, as far as I know, isn't the case unless you're talking about algorithms, etc. that they've taken and expanded upon.
 

Re:

[time$lice]

I guess I should have worded it: "I feel that they're *thanking* the community for the generous support by later releasing their game engines."

That's closer to what I was trying to portray.

Interesting timing!

[psxman]

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2007/04/quake3-total -conversions.html [blogspot.com]

Come on, dude. Give credit to the source of your post.

Re:

[Thilo2]

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have never read your article. In fact, I am aquainted well with two projects mentioned there.

Re:

[psxman]

It's not my blog, just one I read. And if you are telling the truth, that's still some strange timing.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Padman just came out a couple days ago. So it's no surprise that people might be talking about it just now :)

Re:

[Hard_Rock_2]

Not really. The Inq also posted a similar article. Not to mention that two of the games that are mentioned were just released on April 1st.

Re:Interesting timing!

[Time Doctor]

Thilo works on ioquake3 (which is my project), and World of Padman, and a STV: Elite Force game. Both of which are using ioquake3.

Re:

[crhylove]

High Five! Ioquake3 is the bomb. The new Urban Terror is particularly great on Ubuntu, as well, but every once in a while the keyboard stops responding and I have to ctrl+alt+backspace (could be beryl?!?). Gameplay is damned near the best FPS on any system ever though, when it's working right! Thanks again!

rhY

Two others...

[the linux geek]

Nexuiz and Warsow are both superior graphically to about anything listed on there, and both include advanced engine features such as dynamic lighting. Nexuiz is based on a (heavily modified) Quake 1 engine, with QuakeC support still intact for ease of modding, and Warsow is based on similar modifications for Quake 2.

nexuiz.com
warsow.net

Re:

[raynorpat]

XreaL and Revolution

Re:Western Quake

[ShadowsHawk]

Not sure if it's still out there or not, but I played one at a LAN party awhile back called Western Quake. Fully functional AI bots helped fill in and the weapons were pretty good.

Re:

[Constantine XVI]

You do realize the article was about quake3 based games, instead of heavily modified Quake1/2 engines?

Re:

[the linux geek]

Yeah. I was pointing out other things that might be of interest to the /. community. Cut the snark.

Nexuiz is incredible.

[CelticWhisper]

Seconded for fucking truth. Nexuiz is the most fun I have had with an open source game in the history of ever. I had a LAN last October wherein we played Nexuiz for most of the night (amidst filesharing, Xbox games, and food and conversation) and it was an absolute blast. The couple of LANs before that, while great in their own right, weren't as cohesive when it came to everyone getting into one game.

I experimented with Cube, but found that it wasn't as seamless for LAN play as Nexuiz, and some of the levels (at least in SP and where bots are concerned) were sadistically difficult. As I described it in a forum post, "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye."

The great thing about Nexuiz is that it combines:

• Variety (there are plenty of levels, weapons, and tactics to keep it interesting for arguably longer than even a UT session, and the grapple can make certain levels positively insane)
• New/cutting-edge/recent/advanced/$SYNONYM_FOR_GO OD graphics tech (HDR, dynamic lighting, bloom, etc. for boxen that can handle it), and
• Scalability (runs perfectly well on boxen that CAN'T handle the aforementioned glitz) to be playable by just about anyone on just about anything.

One of the problems we had in some of my LANs was that some people's computers, primarily the girls' laptops*, were underpowered for games like CoD, MOHAA, and the like. UT '99 ran fine, but you can only play an 8-year-old game for so long (stop throwing things at me, Starcraft fans, I know it's still awesome and I'm talking FPSes here. ...Stop throwing things at me, Deus Ex fans. ...Fine, you win) before you hunger for something new. Yet, when we played Nex, we had (among others):

• My G5 Quad 2.5GHzx4, 2.5GB, GeForce 6600/256MB
• My brother's AMD64 2.0GHz, 1GB, GeForce 6800/128MB
• My AMD64 1.8GHz, 512MB, Mobility Radeon 9600/64MB
• My Power Mac G4 867MHz, 1.5GB, Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Ed./128MB
• My friend's Pentium M (slow)GHz, (meager)MB, (integrated)/(notenough)
• A Macbook and a Compaq notebook, specs unknown to me
• And my ancient test box: Pentium 2 400, 640MB, Radeon 9200/256MB in a PCI slot

With the exception of my test box, which lagged pretty severely, Nex ran without a hitch on everyone's system. One person had mouse troubles, but she had the same problem with UT at a previous LAN, and was using a wireless mouse, so I'm chalking that one up to hardware.

On top of that, it's cross-platform Win/Mac/Lin, so nobody's excluded. First person to say "I run BeOS you insensitive clod!" gets slapped with a large trout.

Aaaaanyway, give Nexuiz a shot. It's great. And the blood effects are, put simply, a little frightening for an OSS project where people presumably work on what they like.

* - Yes, I have girls at my LAN parties. Stop looking at me like that. You're creeping me out.

Re:

[TerranFury]

First, thanks to you and Cthefuture for pointing these out.

The only OSS shooters I was aware of were Cube [cubeengine.com] and its sequel Sauerbraten [sauerbraten.org]. Those two are interesting in that they achieve quite a lot with, technically, very little -- the spatial heirarchies they use are quite primitive, and they don't do any occlusion culling, for starters. Cube, the simpler of the two, is actually pretty cool in that it will run, and run well, on damn near anything with a graphics card. Yet it somehow feels like little more

Re:

[Workaphobia]

Hello fellow Nexer.

I've been a Nexuiz fan since the day after it came out; just after I discovered it on a linux gaming site I saw the post on slashdot announcing its release. I've been playing since then and it's still a very enjoyable game. Version 2.0 brought a number of performance enhancements, but unfortunately there seems to be some intermittent driver bug that's aggravated by Nexuiz and Nexuiz alone, on my university's standard issue Thinkpad T43p. It doesn't help adoption when every one you are phy

Re:

[esteel]

Well the next upcoming release should be a huge improvement for Nexuiz.. The renderer got a nice boost (in general +30-50%), the network code was enhanced to cope with high packetloss and high ping (ping 280, PL 20% was like ok), along with some other changes like a working wallhack prevention (well it was already there but was a high cpu burden on some map before and now its just fine) and ofcourse the usual big fixes, new content and stuff.. However you seem to be right about the problems with US players

Re:

[Cthefuture]

Thanks for pointing those out. It has been a long time since I played around with this stuff. It's neat to see people are still working with it. Years ago I did mod development for all these engines (I have done projects for Q1, Q2, Q3, and UT).

The main problem is most of these projects don't "get it" when it comes to game feel. I just tried both Nexuiz and Warsow and they both feel exactly like Quake1 and Quake2. Some of the graphics are updated and they have added a few effects but it looks exactly l

Re:

[daniel borgmann]

I think you are quite wrong about Warsow, they most definitely "get it" and movement in Warsow is absolutely stunning once you get the hang of it. In fact, that's the whole point of the game. It totally leaves CPMA in the dust and there isn't even a comparison to Quake 3. "Rigid and forced" is how I would describe the Quake 3 movement once compared to Warsow.

I think you should give Urban Terror a try if you haven't already, aside from Warsow this game has the smoothest and most enjoyable movement of all the

Re:

[Cthefuture]

OK maybe I didn't play Warsow for long enough. To me Warsow feels like they tried to put the Quake1 movement in Quake2 (maybe they were aiming for Q3 style movement but failed). It still has a strong Q2 feel except a bit more "muddy" than normal (movement still feels rigid; muddy and rigid, I can't explain it). I don't like it but maybe I could get used to it. To be honest I think something like Warsow done in the Quake3 engine would be killer because I like the concept of Warsow.

As for Urban Terror, it

Re:

[daniel borgmann]

I can promise you that Warsow doesn't feel muddy _at all_ once you get used to it and it probably would play just the same if it would have been written for Q3. They did not aim for Q3 style movement, if anything CPMA was an inspiration. Maybe we are talking about different kinds of feel, but for me Warsow movement feels nothing like Q2 and still more fluid and controllable than Q3. I'm not the only one who probably has spent more time just jumping through the maps than actually playing Warsow. :P Of course

Re:

[Cthefuture]

If I recall correctly CPMA was an attempt to make something that felt like Quake1. Quake1 feels muddy and rigid to me also. It's like the screen redraws lag behind my mouse movements and the run/strafe movement feels like I'm on train tracks rather than being smooth.

Movement physics are a huge part of the engine and how it was coded. Since obviously they have full access to the engine source they could change that. However, there are many subtle issues with "feel" that are hard to quantify and hard to c

Re:

[daniel borgmann]

The Quake 1 part would be the bunnyhopping, which is in CPMA and Warsow. When I still didn't know how to do it properly (cornering in mid air), Quake 1 like physics felt very rigid and cheap to me as well. But once I did, I realised how limiting the Quake 3 physics are instead. For a mainstream game this would be a bad thing, because the game should feel nicely right away, but it can't really be held against Warsow which is basically a game by freaks for freaks. ;)

I agree about the feeling of a game being h

Re:

[XO]

I think neither of these projects "get it". The weapons are horrible, especially so in Warsow. Actually worse than in the original Unreal game, and man those weapons -suck-. The movement is -bizarre-, in both of them, I had to crank sensitivity over 120 before they were close to a 75 setting in Quake 1/2/3. I don't know how anyone on earth could ever play with the default 3 or even the slider max at 20 ...

Aside from some insane graphical improvements for their respective engines, these games -blow-.

Urban Terror

[BlackEmperor]

Urban Terror has been around for ages. Wasn't it originally a half-life mod? I remember playing it maybe 4 or 5 years ago, or even longer, back when it first came out. It was quite a cool game back then, I remember playing quite a few lan games at work.

Maybe I'll give it a spin now, but the screenshots I saw on the website look quite antiquated (graphics wise).

Re:

[Time Doctor]

Urban Terror has always been a quake 3 mod. Though there were some mods for HL that had a similar heritage (the post action quake 2 fallout)

Re:

[Some_Llama]

There was another CS type mod (as this is the closest comparison) on Unreal Tournament's engine.. it was called Tactical Ops, maybe this is what you were thinking of?

Re:

[donglekey]

But it's still fun.

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

I wonder if they eventually will release Doom 3 source code and Quake 4 source code.

That depends on whether they come out with another revolutionary engine (I haven't heard of anything for a while) and how fast developers license the new engine. I think Quake 3 was delayed for a while since there were two games based on that engine still in the pipeline at the time.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

But still no Commander Keen.

Quake 3 Fotress???

[Dj Stingray]

http://www.q3f.com/ [q3f.com]

I spent HOURS and HOURS playing this game. It beats the TFC version hands down.

I wish people would get back into it.

Re:

[mrchaotica]

The trouble is that Q3F is still distributed as a mod to Quake 3, and it isn't necessarily obvious how to get it to work with the GPL version.

Re:

[Thilo2]

You cannot "simply" ship a game stand-alone. Most of the modifications, and even if they are total conversions, still rely on a considerable amount of data shipped with the original game. Before a game can go stand-alone, you have to re-create all that data.

Re:

[poopdeville]

That's what 'cp' is for.

Re:

[mrchaotica]

And the games mentioned in the summary have done that. Q3F should to so too (or at least use Tremulous's CC-licensed data).

Re:

[Elevator_Inspector]

"You cannot "simply" ship a game stand-alone. Most of the modifications, and even if they are total conversions, still rely on a considerable amount of data shipped with the original game." I goofed around with IOQ3 a few months ago. All I really wanted to do was build my own levels with original textures and be able to load them, no need to actually play a "game". What I found out on the IOQ3 forums was as long as whatever you are doing is based on a completely original pak0.pk3 you would be ok. At the ti

Re:

[Barkmullz]

It beats the TFC version hands down

Agreed! I also spent an enormous amount of time playing Weapons Factory Arena [gamespy.com] for Q3. I sometimes miss those days; it was great fun.

FTEQuake

[ShakaUVM]

FTEQuake (http://www.fteqw.com/) supports Quake 1, 2 and 3 maps, and can connect to servers of all the different flavors of quake.

It's fun playing Quake 1 with shaders and advanced lighting. =)

Of course, I have to recommend CustomTF. =) (www.customtf.com)

Re:

[XO]

This sounds really interesting, although their web site is a little lacking on non-techie details. (not that I don't enjoy the techie details, but there's little information on exactly what it does, and how to get it to do cool stuff) So, I downloaded it, and whenever I run it, my computer instantly reboots.

OpenArena

[keitosama]

Why wasn't OpenArena [openarena.ws] mentioned? It's a Quake 3 style game, basically the same thing as the original, but with all new models, textures, sounds, everything replaced and released under the GNU GPL to make it possible to distribute a completely Free deathmatch arena game.

Re:

[HanClinto]

Seconded -- we have a blast with both Nexiuz and OpenArena at our LAN parties (favoring the latter)

Re:

[danglingparticiple]

Thirded! I actually had a mini LAN party at work today and I stumbled across this game while doing a search for free first person shooters on wikipedia. It was a total blast to play, very easy to set up and beginners to intermediates had no troubles getting it working within a matter of minutes.

More OSS graphics engines

[Ceriel Nosforit]

I know of Ogre, which is very, very pretty;
http://www.ogre3d.org/ [ogre3d.org]

And Crystal Space, which is very pretty, and also includes a game engine;
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ [crystalspace3d.org]

If someone however knows of an OSS physics engine for games which does a bit of aerodynamics, please let me know. :)

Re:

[physicsnick]

There's also the zlib/libpng-licensed Irrlicht [sourceforge.net], which is my graphics engine of choice.

Then there's Lightfeather [mmdevel.de], which I'm less keen on.

As far as OSS physics engines go, I only know of ODE [ode.org], but as far as I know it's rigid body only, so I doubt you could get it to do any aerodynamics. There are plenty of examples/tutorials of people integrating it with all of these graphics engines.

Re:

[raynorpat]

Bullet is another OSS physics library, and the creator himself was on the Havok team.

I told my kid about Padman last night

[MrCopilot]

I told my kid about Padman last night,
He was playing it when I went to bed.

He was still playing when I left for work this morning.

If thats not a positive review I dunno what is.

Re:

[SmittyTheBold]

Does he not sleep? Ever? Not to be a parent or anything...but you might want to do something about that. It just gets worse. ;)

Re:

[MrCopilot]

Does he not sleep? Ever? Not to be a parent or anything...but you might want to do something about that. It just gets worse. ;)

Your concerns are understandable but...

During Spring Break I let the 17 & 18 yr old keep their own hours as long as they are home by 11pm they can spend all night fraggin in the garage.

Day of Defeat-ish alternative?

[KlaymenDK]

I'm sure nobody will ever read this post, but anyway ... I used to be a HUGE fan of Day of Defeat (ever since b1.1 or so), but do not like Steam (to put it mildly).

These Quake-ish, Counterstrike-ish, and NaturalSelection-ish games are very well made, and the greatest respect and gratitude go out to the creators ... but they just don't catch my interest like DoD did.

Does anyone know if there exists a multi-platform (and possibly even free) "team shooter" (for want of proper term), like Day of Defeat? I mean,

Re:

[daniel borgmann]

Do you know Navy Seals: Covert Operations? Maybe that would have been your thing, unfortunately it's dead for quite a while so I wouldn't expect a stand alone release. :/

Other than that I can't think of anything that would match your description. Maybe True Combat: Elite to some extend, but that doesn't require all that much teamplay. And I guess Enemy Territory itself is too unrealistic for you.

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

Thanks for you suggestions! I had not heard of any of them. Perhaps I'll download and try some of them.

Theres DDay

[Hard_Rock_2]

I used to play it in class a while back becuase it ran really nice. They have a standalone pack and used to have a community, I don't know how popular it is these days, it looks like they stopped working on it a few years ago.. Linky: http://dday.planetquake.gamespy.com/site/ [gamespy.com]

Re:

[SteelCougar307]

DoD is pretty awesome :D The closest thing I've found to it is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory [planetwolfenstein.com]. I can't personally vouch for Linux compatibility, but it seems like it would work fine.

Oops

[Hard_Rock_2]

I ran across this looking for something completely unrelated, apparently DDay still has a community and lots of updates: http://ddc.planetquake.gamespy.com/site/ [gamespy.com] http://mods.moddb.com/8832/dday-normandy-/ [moddb.com] So the last link I gave was the wrong one, sorry!

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

Very interesting! I'll definitely have a good long look at it. Thanks!

Re:

[Taulin]

If you are in need of a gaming fix, and found FreeBSD to limit them, have you ever thought of putting together a cheap box to run an old version of Windows that supports all the game you want to play? I am sure you have reason to run FreeBSD as your primary OS, but I always read how people spend so much time trying to get their favorite games running on other OSs. It might be as simple as they don't have legal copies of Windows, etc... however, just a question. Not trying to stir trouble or anything.

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

No trouble stirred, I'm not easily offended. :)

True, I run BSD because quite frankly I'm fed up with putting my choices in the hands of that kind of corporation (yadda yadda yadda, rant skipped). Also true, that choice does limit my gaming choices, but the bottom line is that I don't want to have another box to maintain just for games.

I only play ancient games anyway (BZflag and DoD are the newest of the bunch, otherwise it's Ports of Call and things from that era). And it's really just DoD that I would rea

Trepidation

[DrPreston]

I have also like id for releasing their source code. It really helps students with learning about game programming and design, and also provides a stable starting point for new open source games. I'm on the Dev team for another Q# based game - Trepidation It's coming along slow but looks promising. check out the public dev build on our site www.planettrepidation.com