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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Carmack on next Q3 test; parts open-sourced 91

Posted by Hemos from the frag-your-friends dept.
SithLordBill writes "Looks like there will be another Quake3 test due in mid-September. This one will include single player bots as well as the Virtual Machine (written to interpret game mods). Anyway, Carmack will be releasing the VM and its modules (as well as the modified compiliers, LCC and q3asm) will be open-source as to give mod developers a head start. Check out his most recent .plan update -- there's a bunch of cool stuff there. "
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John Carmack on next Q3 test; parts open-sourced More

John Carmack on next Q3 test; parts open-sourced

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  • Absolutely. Thats why I said "fairly open", not "fairly open source". It was ambiguous in this context, mea culpa.

    I asked John Carmack about GPL'ing the doom source, and he said he'd talk to his business partners at id. Apparently, they're not ready for the idea.

    Id makes significant money from source licenses. You have to explain to them how to replace that revenue if you want them to open their sources in general.

    A year before the source release, id was still quoting ~$250k for a Doom license. I think it was a nice gesture by id to release them. They have real educational value, which was id's stated purpose in their release.

    Jim


  • Yes, all the patches were free. But that didn't change the fact that it took a year to be finished.

    (To be fair, it was pretty functional out of the box - but alot of silly mistakes (leaving a backdoor rcon password in, getting thier master servers pinged every 30 ms, as opposed to every 30 s, etc) could have been avoided with a few iterations of the test, and some multiplayer capabilities in it (q2test was one player only, 3 levels)).
  • dude. shut the hell up until you have something intelligent to say rather than posting 20 some responses to an article.
  • Wow...that's....painful.
  • It's not the same game, but it's not entirely new either. Think of it as a refinement. id have the formula just-right, I'm sure not going to bitch if they continue to refine it to take advantage of new technology. If it aint broke... -- szcx
  • As for no competition, I've enjoyed HalfLife a heck of a lot more than any quake. Just as I finish the single player game and get bored of plain deathmatch online games, they come out with TFC. After a few months of that, I discovered the CounterStrike mod. The fun just never ends.

    With TF2 coming out this fall, you can bet what I'll be buying. I tried the Q3 test when it first came out, and I was just underwhelmed. It was just too much of the same old brown graphics, race for the rocket launcher, etc. Of course, if HalfLife had a Linux client it would be the perfect game, but oh well...
  • >dude. shut the hell up until you have something
    >intelligent to say rather than posting 20 some
    >responses to an article.

    Yeah, seriously. If I have to read this guy's !$%#!%$ stupid sig one more time I'm going to throw up.
  • Not at all. Open means open. It doesn't mean anything else. A door can be open but the area behind it restricted. That doesn't mean the door isn't open, it just means you can't go there.

    The doom/hexen/etc source is open in that you can see it. You can't call it your own and sell it, but if you really have to whine when someone won't let you profit from their product, tough shit.

    And if you're any good, you can simply see how they did it and write your own game if it's that important.
  • Sure, but can the CPUs handle it? That's the part of the system that's being used the most.
  • Carmack did make a $10000 donation to the mesa project which was used to pay a programmer to work
    on the project.

    For details see the news section of www.mesa3d.org


    Also on the measa site it says:
    "Please do not refer to the library as MesaGL (for legal reasons). It's just Mesa or The Mesa 3-D graphics library. "
  • The old Quake 2 bugginess myth rears it's ugly head again. Most games are buggy because of their tight development schedules. Quake 2 was less buggy than most games. Quake 2 was primarily a single player game. It did is admirably well out of the box. There was a slew of patches in the first few weeks of release mainly because of people crashing multi-player internet servers.
    This had never happened on a large scale before.
    The deathmatch maps and ctf were only added in later releases. (3.13 if I remember correctly).
    Furthermore most of the changes were related to optimization and tweaking the game behaviour. There were very few critical bugs.

  • You can...

    Nightmare is just skill level 4 with monster respawning & fast monsters... so if you turn these on manually, then cheats will still work.. the appropriate command-line switches are as follows:

    -skill 4 -respawn -fast

  • for $100 (2x the price) you could buy 128mb of memory.. jeez..
  • I was trying to prevent any misinterpretation of the original slashdot posting. I read his .plan file and he plans on making the source for the VM available - but not the gaming engine itself. Some people may have been confused by the difference.

    And yes, I'm aware of John's contributions. :)
    I should know - I have a matrox card -and- play q3test often.


    --

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Java is doubtlessly superior to C in terms of maintainability, readability, compile time checking, so the software engineering aspects make it much more suitable for large projects. Execution speed is the problem. As QuakeXYZ and similar games will always use the bleeding edge of computer graphics hardware, I can only imagine them running nicely when the Java3D library is perfectly supporting modern graphics hardware (read: the part of it important for games like texturing etc.) and CPUs fast enough to run JVM's feeding the 3d library in an adequate manner with geometry data. Unfortunately, it takes a couple of specialized developers to check this out, without a guarantee of getting any other result than 'not possible yet'.

  • ... (Score:2)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    First off - Quake is simply incredible. It lets you repeatedly kill your boss in the office without being arrested. :)

    Second, he is only making the source available for the VM - which helps the mod community. But to make this clear: Quake3 is not open source. For a real open source game, check out Golgotha [golgothaforever.com]. I hate it when people call any source release an "open source" release. . .

    --

  • Why do you think Quake sucks? Becuase it's not GNU?

  • Re:... (Score:3)

    by calc ( 1463 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:09AM (#1723847)
    John Carmack is helping out with the open source community quite a lot. He is currently helping write the matrox g200/g400 glx drivers. Also, remember what the first real linux game was? Doom! So please do not complain when companies can not completely open the source to their main source of revenue.

    Thanks John for your support!

    -calc

  • ...or a sideways view lying on the ground...

    What?! There are other views?

    :-)

    dylan_-


    --

  • Why does the coward say 'nuff said? It's pretty clear that when you say ``Quake sucks'' people are going to respond.

    What a depressing dumbness...
  • especially when you respawn in the same general area in time to see your liver still bouncing around.

    Looks like it's time to invest in a nice 3D/glide card.

    Chuck

  • He almost used Java and the Kaffe VM instead of C according to an old interview [unrealities.com]. His most interesting comment was about Java being a superior language to C, and what sounds like his willingness to write q4 in Java (if it is possible by then with a java->x86 compiler like gcj [cygnus.com])

  • I think what we really want to know is what licensing the source release will be under. Knowing ID software's profits off of their game engines, I doubt it will comply with the OSS model, but it will still be beneficial to both the community and ID software.

    If we, as the Quake-3 players-to-be help debug this source, we will make it a better game to play on our own. As long as Carmack is willing to continue the evolution of the OSS-ish model of Quake-3 over time (and he's been good for releasing updates to other closed-source games in the past), we will all end up with a great game.

    It is still my suspicion that ID would not be willing to allow others to freely use their VM in other programs without paying the usual licensing, but they may decide to share it in other areas in the future. It would be nice, for instance, if ID helped in the development of MesaGL ... (or do they? :).

    ... we can be hopeful, can't we?

  • Hmm... (Score:1)

    by Shiska ( 131 )

    How about just releasing the game :) ...I thought that this time around, things would be the same way as they were with q2 ... as I recall, it wasn't long after the release of q2test that the final product shipped.

    Sorry. I just want the game. Badly :)
    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
  • Not id per se, but J.Carmack personally.
    To see it yourself, go to the g200-dev mailing list [openprojects.net]. He is a very keen participant of this list. Incredible, I wonder how he gets the time, but anyway, he seems to be really cool.
  • Sounds already more interesting than golf, tennis, ping-pong, chess, checkers, backgammon, football, soccer, basketball and any of the "Build some shit and send it rushing to the enemy base" RTS games...

    If you don't like Quake, don't fucking play Quake. What's so difficult about that concept that you cannot get your head around it?

    Geez, some people...


  • The difference is, most games out there are never patched and never finished, or patched once and forgotten. I can think of no other company which would still work on patches one year after the official release (other than, of course, persistant universe games, like EverQuest).
  • Yep, I'm sure John Carmack is stealing credit card numbers from all those Quake servers... LOL.

  • The license is open in that you can develop the game for non-commercial purposes. There have been great game developments done for DOOM, Hexen, Heretic.

    AFAIK, one of the complications is that id don't hold the copyright/distribution rights for all of their games and so can't fully release all of the old artwork/music/maps, etc.

    dave

  • Who would shoot their teammates just to blow away their armor.

  • ?

    I really wish I had the energy to parse this, but it's late in the day.

    What are you saying?
  • Have you tried ascii quake 1? So much fun :)
    I don't have the URL offhand, but it is really nifty.
  • The Quake Experience: Run around pick up guns, see opponent, chase opponent, jump off 100 foot cliff while trying to shoot opponent, follow opp. around corner, realize he has outsmarted you, die in fountain of blood, try again.

    CTF (Capture the Flag) is more fun IMHO than the regular game, more strategy and all that, but the regular game (even Q3Atest)is so fun because of the intelligence of your opponents. No AI can match the simple craftiness that your average 12 year-old can come up with, much less an experienced player. Matched against similar pings, it comes down to skill. A fast trigger finger is nice, but if you don't know how to strafe wildly while hitting a wildly strafing opponent, your trigger finger don't mean sh*t.

    I play because after nearly 20 years of playing games it is by far the most intense, immersive, fastest, and gratifying experience I have found coming from a machine. That being said I was up until 2:00 last night (no I'm not in school, real world) trying to keep Morgan Industries from overrunning my fungus farms. Thats from "Alpha Centauri" for the gaming challenged. Definitely a "thinking mans" game. There are also a couple of nice CGI swipes at M$ in the game, and quotes from nearly every major thinker in western history. Very highly recommended if you like breathing and use a computer.

  • Stop thinking like Sun. It's only interpreted if you compile it to java bytecodes and run it with a java VM. With a compiler like gcc/gcj, you just compile it like you would C. The only real problem with compiled Java that I see is getting the GC to behave.

  • Absolutely. The DOOM, HERETIC, and HEXEN sources have all been released under a fairly open license. Only commercial reuse is really forbidden.

    Many enhanced engines have resulted, including many for Linux. If you like retrogaming at all, you might like to check out the page at

    http://www.doomworld.com/ports/linux_unix.shtml

    Please be gentle, I don't think this is a large server.

    Jim
  • Now all this beta testing is needed thats sure But one release IMHO should have been enough not 3 or more just because the game isn't ready


    Yeah, one beta release was just great for Quake 2. Got all those bugs right out of there. That's why it had to be patched from 3.05 to 3.20 over the course of the next year. Because it was enough beta testing.


    When a company officially finishes [planetquake.com] a game just under a year after they release it, and then tries to do more beta testing for thier next game, that's called 'learning from ones mistakes'. Quake 2 was a mess out of the box. Hopefully, all this playing and drooling over Q3Test will make it actually in good shape out of the box.

  • Ummm... that's completely ridiculous. John Carmack's business strategy is almost completely opposite of M$. M$ releases vaporware(nothing at all), claiming for a very very very long time that it will be the best. Carmack keeps to himself and writes code, the whole time telling people exactly what he's working on, and he releases tests for people to play with etc..

    Carmack's strategy seems to be, "let's keep people updated on what's going on and release tests and shareware version so people can see what the game is like" etc...

    M$ strategy is basically, "let's convince people that this product that we haven't even started working on is going to be the best ever. let's buy another company that already has this product, or basically make an exact copy of it, and call it innovation".

    Get a clue!

  • This was fixed a long time ago [planetquake.com].
  • system shock sucks. crappy interface. go around hunting semi-human creatures armed with wrenches in a lab like atmosphere. bullshit.
  • Quake 3 == Wolfenstein 3D 6

    It's the same basic gameplay as Wolfenstein 3D, the Doom series, and the previous games in the Quake series. Graphics have obviously been improved. New weapons are added each time, and the physics models have improved. There's also some more range of movement, with stuff like crouching and jumping.

    Overall, however, it's still the same game.
  • Actually, lack of pointers should help performance. A major hinderance to optimizing C and/or C++ is that the compiler can't tell if you're aliasing pointers. High level functional languages have the potential with more research and a lot of effort to greatly outperform C. It was only recently that C++ could even compete with FORTRAN for numerical simulation speed. Higher level langauges (fortran is a bad example) give the compiler much more information about what you actually intended, so it can optimize more aggresively. There is lots of interesting research going on in this area.
  • Wouldn't it be so awesome if the "bots" that will be available in q3 single-player could be programmed, just like you can program a robot in Robot Battle [robotbattle.com]? It might be fun to have online tournaments where only people's bots that they created could participate. I'm sure this could be done, and it would be a LOT of fun!!! Heck, you could even send a bot you created against a real person and watch them crumble against your awesome programming talent! Yeah!
    "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
  • Loki doesn't make games. They port them.

    CTP was by Activision, Myth II is from Bungie, etc, etc.

    That's like saying Zoid wrote Quake for Linux - he didn't write it he, he ported it to the various Unices it runs on (not to diminish Zoid's work, of course, as he is certainly a very fine programmer who handles teamplay & CTF code and all in all is very cool and who I know is reading this right now :-).

    (Which reminds me -- Zoid -- for Team Play in Q3, can we get something to address the problem of TeamKillers? It's a really, really annoying problem in q3test right now).
  • for Team Play in Q3, can we get something to address the problem of TeamKillers? It's a really, really annoying problem in q3test right now

    No shit. What's up with that anyway? I mean to people actually get a sense of satisfaction of switching to the other team and then killing themself or others on the same team repeatedly just so they can lower that teams' score and thus allow their former team to win?

    I guess if people can find a way to cheat, they will do so.
  • Just because you don't like it yourself doesn't mean that it 'sucks' per se.
    Personally, I rather enjoy just shooting some annoying little pixels after a long hard day. Helps blow off some steam :)

    (that seems to be a problem with a lot of folks I see - if you, personally, specifically don't like it, then it "sucks" and nobody should ever use it. Riiiiiiiight.)


    "I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."

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