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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake 3 Source Code to be Released 394

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-better-than-any-textbook dept.
fwice writes "QuakeCon has just kicked off and at the end of the keynote speech, John Carmack made an announcement saying that the Quake 3 sourcecode will be released shortly. "
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Quake 3 Source Code to be Released More

Quake 3 Source Code to be Released

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  • This is great (Score:5, Informative)

    by ibentmywookie ( 819547 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:41AM (#13310321)
    This is why I love idsoftware. Now we'll see some cool stuff done with the quake III engine, like with Doom Legacy, quakeforge, etc etc.

    Yay :)

    • Re:This is great (Score:5, Funny)

      by Irashtar ( 836973 ) <Irashtar@@@gmail...com> on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:33AM (#13310444)
      Indeed, they deserve a 21 railgun salute, but who would waste that much shooting at the roof of the map?
    • That would be sweet: http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

      • Give me Quake III on DEC Alpha or give me death! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The Alpha Troll hath sp0ken!

      • Re:Hopefully we'll see Tenebrae3! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @12:26PM (#13311624) Homepage
        Fsck that. Tenebrae is a friggin' techdemo. I want to see something actually useful... like all the huge Quake3 TCs released as standalone opensource games and bundled with Linux distros.

        For shit's sake, Quake 3 was the first Id game to actually support mods as first-class citizens with their own keybinding menus and stuff. The Q3 TCs are an order of magnitude more complete than the Q2 ones because of it (Action Q2 is nice, but having to use the console for everything is inexcusable in a modern game).

        Plus, Q3 allowed for replacement of all major media in game, without even modding. This means that there are already numerous replacement collections of player models and weapon models available on Polycount (not having monster models makes it easier) and maps on various mapping sites. As a result, all you'd have to replace to make a FreeQ3 TC would be the textures and sounds - everything else has been done already (whereas Q1 didn't have prevalent player-model and weapon-model replacements at the time of opensourcing).

        This is by far some of the best news the opensource gaming world has ever seen. I can't wait to see this capitalised on.

    • Re:This is great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gothfox ( 659941 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @06:21AM (#13310525) Homepage

      Yes, really nice of them to do this time and time again. It's worth mentioning though that not only id opensources their previous generation games.

      To name a few, Star Control 2 was opensourced and is being developed on Sourceforge. Beneath the Steel Sky sourcecode was also opened. It would be great to see this trend continue and expand.

    • Thanks id (Score:5, Informative)

      by ribblem ( 886342 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @06:49AM (#13310573) Homepage
      I saw the source for Quake 3 long ago since I work for an IHV. I think the biggest benefit it will have over its predecessors is that it is much cleaner and easier to understand/modify (at least from my brief examination it seemed this way to me). It should be very straight forward to add in VBOs which numerous licensees have done. It will be a little more work to cleanly add fragment programs, but still not bad. Again licensees have already done this proving it's doable. Adding in stencil shadows really shouldn't be too much work. I'm sure adding FBO wouldn't be much work either, but depending on the effects you want to use this for they could take some effort. While I'm not as well versed in physics I imagine someone should be able to expand the physics engine of Q3 to the now popular rigid based per triangle collisions.
      At this point for tons less work than writing a game engine from scratch you'd have a very nice modern engine for whatever you want as long as you release the source with it.
      Thank you id Software.

    • Keen? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by YowzaTheYuzzum ( 774454 )
      Yeah, this is great and all... but how about they release the Commander Keen source code already?

  • Will it be modified? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mattdev121 ( 727783 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:46AM (#13310332) Homepage
    I wonder if this source code will be modifier and edited some way to keep some company secrets hidden or if the comments will be purged.
    Should be interesting...

    • Re:Will it be modified? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It looks like they're taking out the punkbuster code. The evenbalance people seem kinda secretive about their code, I suppose for security through obscurity. I saw the Q3A code while working on Medal of Honor, and there's nothing really secret or special about it. ID's cool about GPL'ing their old code, so I doubt they'll modify anything except the punkbuster stuff.

      I've been looking forward to this for a while. I had tons of fun writing normal mods for Q3.

    • Re:Will it be modified? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by uchian ( 454825 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @06:43AM (#13310562) Homepage
      No point really, it's five year old technology. While it's great for people coming into the gaming industry, there won't be anything in the quake 3 code that the competitors haven't already discovered for themselves, and also with the advance of the technology of gpu's, a lot of the neat tricks in quake 3 will probably be either unnecessary on the latest graphics cards, or will be completely supplanted by some other technology.

      However, given source releases of other games (remember descent), they may clean out some expletives from various comments :-)

      • Re:Will it be modified? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by leathered ( 780018 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @08:24AM (#13310732)
        It may be five year old technology but it was way ahead of it's time when it was launched. My first impression of Quake III was how crap it looked on my fairly up to date hardware back then. It was only a couple of years later when I bought a GeForce 3 did I finally see what a wonderful engine Carmack and co had come up with.

      • The q3 netcode is still better than just about anything out there. See for instance the unbelievably crappy netcode in most current FPS. q3 still smokes them all.

    • Re:Will it be modified? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13, 2005 @06:45AM (#13310565)
      None of their other source releases (every game dating back to Wolfenstein 3D) were tampered with in any way before releasing them.

      Actually... The Doom source release consisted of only the Linux version, not the code for the DOS version, because id used a third-party DOS sound driver. So they simply stripped the DOS version out. Didn't much matter anyway, considering that neither the DOS nor Linux versions were particularly useful when the Doom source was released.

      And thinking about it, all of their source releases were rather devoid of comments. There were actually comments included in the code, but not a lot of them, and it's not uncommon to see a couple of pages of rather dense code with only a couple of one line comments splattered around. I think that's mostly their coding style - there were very few comments in the first place, rather than having been stripped out. And what would be the point in stripping the comments? To make the code harder to read? Then why would they release it at all?

      As for "company secrets", you are aware that id tend to be very open about what they're doing, and quite freely share new ideas and methods with everyone else (maybe not the instant they come up with them, but they don't seem big on the whole "company secrets" bit), right? And considering the age of Quake 3, there's probably nothing at all in there that would count as a secret, because virtually everyone who wants to know how something like Q3 works already does.
      • I think I remember that they did have to modify Quake 1, due to various licensing issues. I would expect that this would be the same thing with Quake 3. Might not be that difficult since 90+ of the code was made by ID.
    • Kindof. He mentioned that the PunkBuster stuff will be removed from the code, so that people can't compile their own versions for the purpose of cheating.

  • Let the race to port this begin... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:50AM (#13310345) Homepage Journal
    Will Quake 3 run on a PDA, cell phone, DVD player, or a camcorder? I have a distinct feeling that we're going to find out really soon.

    Oh yes, and start imagining the Beowulf clusters...

  • Cool (Score:5, Informative)

    by mistermark ( 646060 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:54AM (#13310354) Homepage
    Cool! this also means projects like DEVMAP [selwerd.nl] and QQQ [selwerd.nl] can be released to a bigger audience

  • Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by destx ( 856327 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:55AM (#13310359) Homepage
    Does anyone know of projects that have been waiting for the source? I'd be interested to see what people are planning to do with it.

  • torrent of carmacks keynote (Score:5, Informative)

    by i88i ( 720935 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:57AM (#13310362)
    as always, filerush [filerush.com] has got the goods: clickies [filerush.com]

  • A reasonable model (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:57AM (#13310363) Homepage Journal
    This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source. Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done. Game engines, where being cutting edge counts for a lot, is one of those areas. At the same time, software tends to go out of date fairly quickly, and if it was developed as a commercial app then it often ends up as abandonware, lost to the world - no longer being sold. Once you've stopped making cash out of your software then open source it and provide the community something to play with. You can end up with results like Tenebrae [tenebrae2.com] which is a fairly impressive open source engine considering it is built originally from Quake I source.

    I wish there were some other commercial developers that could manage to follow the same sort of pattern. Do some of the old X11 nVidia drivers contain sufficiently outdated stuff that they could be safely open sourced? Are there some other applications that are currently locked up, not being sold nor developed, that could be opened up? I assume part of the problem is bookkeeping: you can keep software on your books as an asset even if you probably couldn't make a dime trying to sell it anymore - and "goodwill from the community" doesn't fit into accounting.

    Jedidiah.
    • Let's be honest, there are areas of software development that get some benefit from a commercial model and the cash incentive from selling your software when you're done.

      Non-free model you mean? Commercialism and free software are compatible.

    • Re:A reasonable model (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:21AM (#13310416)
      Actually, it's a good compromise. iD releases its older engines sources as GPL while still selling commercial licences [idsoftware.com] for them to be used in closed source software. And apparently, they do sell them, for everything back to the original Quake engine.

          It's a great gesture, and iD gets (as it should) a lot of respect from the OSS community from it; i just wanted to point out that they still do make cash out of their "older" engines. No conflict of interests there.
      • While you may still be able to buy licences for the old games id has gone on record for waiting until all licenced games are out of "sales period" (basically a few years) before they release their source.

        This is naturally in order to not piss off their customers.
    • Your reasoning/idea sounds awfully like the idea behind copyrighted material entering public domain.

  • Now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by iignotus ( 877104 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @04:57AM (#13310365)
    We can finally have Quake 3 on linux!

    Oh, wait...

    • Re:Now... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      or at least ported for mac osx86 intel

      and really see how fast it is ..

    • Re:Now... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by blechx ( 767202 )
      Not as much of a joke as you migth think.
      For example, ids ported q3 uses OSS, wich is kind of deprecated now and doesnt even work with all soundcard drivers (i have to hack it through esddsp to get mmap-stuff to work), with the program released as free software anyone is allowed to make it work with ALSA, JACK, or whatever they see fit.
    • Seriosly, though, maybe someone will fix ALSA support a little bit, maybe use SDL for the sound like many Doom and Quake derived engines do and allow a good choice of sound drivers. Maybe even a proper aRts driver, so you can listen to music and get the Q3 sound effects (don't talk to me about artsdsp; hearing the sound 2 seconds late is worse than nothing).
  • The article name is misleading as the Quake 3 source has been slated for release for a very long time now. It was pushed back because someone licensed the engine right at the end of its life cycle.

  • This is the reason (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aggrajag ( 716041 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:01AM (#13310372)
    This is the reason I actually buy every title from iD Software, even if I don't like the actual game (Quake 3, Doom 3).
    • That's very nice of you, but if you don't like the game, wouldn't it be a better gesture to donate the money to an open source project? id has plenty of money... a game purchase is a drop in the bucket to them compared to people working on Free software.

      This would probably be a more practical gesture if you want to support open source. (Which, I can't tell if you do or not - but still, just a thought.)

  • Can't wait? Do it yourself. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deVoid99 ( 669548 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:03AM (#13310378) Journal
    If you can't wait for the Quake3 source, I've already replicated most of the Quake3 engine's features, and released source & binaries.

    DXQuake3 : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/ [pipex.com]
    DXQuake3 features : http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/dxquake3_feature s.htm [pipex.com]

  • Nosferatu Total Conversion (Score:5, Informative)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:29AM (#13310435)
    This vampire themed Total Conversion [nosferatuthegame.com] looks very promising. They were waiting for the source to be released, so they can release this game for free.
    They made some nice changes to the engine : a particle engine, Ingame video playback, Cube maps, Specular maps, Lightblooms and some more modifications.

    Have a look at this screenshot [nosferatuthegame.com] or even better, the videos [nosferatuthegame.com]

    • Let me clear this up: (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13, 2005 @07:01AM (#13310600)
      Heya, Ghostface here (leader of the Nosferatu Team)

      No we are not really waiting for the Quake3 src in order to release Nosferatu for free. The game is based upon a heavily modified version of the Qfusion Engine which in turn is based on the Quake2 sourcecode.

      Engine : Quake 2 -> Qfusion - > Nosferatu Engine

      No Quake3 in there ;)
      We just use some data formats from quake3 :)
      • Oi, sorry for misinforming there :/

        Damn, and all this time I thought you guys were going to use the Q3 engine : Am I crazy, or have you guys changed plans ? I would have sworn I'd seen that you people would be using that engine.

        Anyways, kudos to you all, and it looks very promising.

  • A shameless site plug (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ndr_Amigo ( 533266 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:42AM (#13310455)

    One site to keep an eye on for your Quake3 source needs is QuakeSrc [quakesrc.org], particularly the forums.

    Most of the current Quake engine moders hang out here.

  • "Good news everyone!"

  • In other news. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jotux ( 660112 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @05:58AM (#13310481)
    3D realms just announced they are about to start writing the source code for Duke Nukem Forever.
    • How much have 3d Realms sunk into the DNF cesspit so far, and is this number greater or less than the amount of money that they could possibly hope to make when they release the final game?

  • native alsa sound support! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Internet_Communist ( 592634 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @07:14AM (#13310620) Homepage
    I hope this means someone will add native alsa sound support. Who needs oss kernel emulation w/mmap?

    maybe quake 3 will finally work with dmix.
    • I know this is not tech support forum, but this is obviously going to take time to fix, so for now:
      Has anyone got a good way to work around the problems with ALSA? The only success I've had has been with artsdsp, but with that the sound lags 2 secs behind gameplay, which is too distracting. Anyone know a way to make arts react a bit faster?
      • You mean besides not relying on onboard sound or even some discrete sound cards, which do DSP and mixing in software, a la winmodems?

        I suppose you could run JACK as a real-time process. This way, sound doesn't get preempted.

  • And if you actually want to read the comments... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13, 2005 @07:16AM (#13310626)
    And if you actually want to read Carmack's comments it's helpful to have a link to them rather than the Planet Quake homepage:

    http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=10 68 [gamecloud.com]
  • I think this is one of the great examples of the balance of free software in a business market. The software companies always state that the number one reason why their never release the source code of their product is that they do not want to loose their intellecutual property...ever.

    Id has enough sense to realize that there is a point in a piece of software's lifecycle where their innovation has made "enough money". So, they can release their Quake X engine under GPL to benefit the community, while at

  • The moral of the story is: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fuzuli ( 135489 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @08:07AM (#13310702)
    You can be a nice guy, even if you have millions of dollars. Although there are some posts which discusses the significance of this release, years after the game went out, i feel like i should remind you guys: this is not a donation to poor software houses so that they can come up with a new hit.
    This is about letting some other (even if they are in the software industry or not) guys learn something from what you have done.
    Carmack has been one of the legends of the genre, and even if his usual habit (create the best visual environment possible, and go on) has started to loose it's success (half life vs doom 3) there is no doubt that he is very very good programmer. For a lot of other programmers, it's a good oppurtunity to see what kind of tricks he's been doing.
    The release is late, but this makes it fair for the companies who paid to licence the engine. If you can't make money from a source code in 4 years after you've bought it, than you have much more serious problems than this release. It's kinda sad to see all those complaints, since Carmack has no obligation to release code, and he gets complaints instead of thanks when he does it.
    I'll possibly never compile the thing since i don't have time for that as an "enterprise developer" (oh god, why did i fail so badly?), but it'll feel good to have source code of quake 3 somewhere around my hard drive.
    Whatever, good work Mr. Carmack, thanks..
  • I home someone will fix that damn idiocy that the user can't Alt-Tab - That is so lame.

  • Great news for artists and researchers. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by delire ( 809063 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @08:28AM (#13310740)

    We host and or link to [selectparks.net] about 120 game-based artworks many of which are built on/for Quake3.

    Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP. This has resulted in game-based artworks that rely on proprietary third-party engines having less-than equal opportunity where other mediums are concerned.

    This is welcomed greatly in the art world. True to form as always, thanks John.

  • This will help MOD projects based on Q3A kick off (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Thilo2 ( 214163 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @09:23AM (#13310868)
    Especially in germany - where there is an age restriction on the Quake3 game and you cannot easily buy it. For instance, the Quake3 mod Padmod which can be found here http://www.worldofpadman.com/ [worldofpadman.com] has astonishing artwork while at the same time being without blood and from the concept suited for children (it's still fun for adults though). Unfortunately, the MOD does not have many gamers right now - one reason for this is certainly the ban on quake3 itself. With a seperate build one can now circumvent this ban which will hopefully bring new users to mod projects like these.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • if... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KillShill ( 877105 ) on Saturday August 13, 2005 @03:40PM (#13312479)
    copyright laws were anywhere near sensible, we'd be getting the source code for all programs on a regular basis. not that i'm trying to diminish iD's contribution but let's keep things in perspective. or as they used to say "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on".

    engines nowadays are far more advanced than q3's, so it isn't very viable for most commercial ventures. still it's quite a nice little engine that runs beautifully on current and older hardware.

    good job iD.

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