Q3A now under the GPL

[Xtra]

Subject says it all.

http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/

[bitplane]

yey
Q3 characters

[Murphy]

While Carmack did announce at the QuakeCon that the Q3A engine source should be available within the next few days, savvy surfers will notice that it is not, in fact, posted yet.

[Guest]

127g is the old code

[Murphy]

127g is the old code

Moreover, it's not the engine. It's the "game" code, which has been available for a long time. The code that's to be released is the actual engine.

[T101]

Of course that does not mean that the game content is now free.
[/b]

[Guest]

Ok I was a few days early. Its out now anyway.

[afecelis]

link please

I think you're still confused with the 1.27 code for modders. What we want is the game code; many ppl want to check the network code, I'm sure.

[afecelis]

oh! found it! it was the best news of quakecon 2005!

http://qexpo.quakedev.com/

[Murphy]

What we want is the game code

Ack. No, what we want is the engine code.

The three parts of Quake engine games are:


Resources
Levels, sounds, textures, images, etc. These are always id's and are never free.

Game Code
Game logic code. Movement, monsters, items, rules, etc. In Quake 1, this was QuakeC code. In Quake 2, this was C that was compiled to native code (for example, a DLL in Windows). In Quake 3, this is C code that is usually compiled to Quake Virtual Machine bytecode. id makes this code available so that modders can modify it.

Engine
The actual engine. Network code, graphics, input, file management, etc. This code stays under wraps for years, but eventually id releases the source under GPL.


So, id haven't updated their tech downloads page yet, but the source can be found here:
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source ... source.zip

You may have to try a few times to get through to the server. It's quite busy all the time, but I'd imagine it's very full right now.

[Guest]

I wonder if we could rip out all Carmack's rendering code and implement an Irrlicht-based renderer for Quake 3

Hey - it'd be a challenge! (not only because Quake is coded in C)

[Fred]

Put any Quake3 code into Irrlicht and you'd have to release Irrlicht under the same license.

[Murphy]

I wonder if we could rip out all Carmack's rendering code and implement an Irrlicht-based renderer for Quake 3

Hey - it'd be a challenge! (not only because Quake is coded in C)

Yeah, I was actually starting to work on that for Quake 2 but ran out of time.

You'd still have to keep a lot of the Quake code in there, though. For example, you couldn't get away from using the BSPs easily as they're also used for movement. Unless you wanted to change the way movement worked too, but that's a big change.


As for having to release Irrlicht under the same license... I don't think that's necessarily the case. You'd have to release your "glue" between Irrlicht and Quake under the same license, but Irrlicht is a library.

[buhatkj]

I wonder if we could rip out all Carmack's rendering code and implement an Irrlicht-based renderer for Quake 3 Razz

Hey - it'd be a challenge! (not only because Quake is coded in C)

from my reading of this, i think you might have it backward Murphy. I think he was suggesting we put some irrlicht code into quake3, not vice versa. So irrlicht is zlib, and quake3 is GPL, the end result (Q3 engine with new irrlicht renderer) would be GPL, but irrlicht itself remains zlib. This is actually an intriguing idea, maybe then we could use some of irrlicht's advanced rendering features like parallax mapping, and dynamic lights, and shaders.

although, the only bit of quake3's engine that I would really want would be the netcode....I like .X models better than MD3 (.X has REAL skeletal animation), and irrlicht already loads BSP maps. Irrlicht already does so much, it has all these loaders and a scenegraph and everything, I would rather add sound, networking, etc. to irrlicht than relegate it to merely cranking out frames, it's capable of much more with a bit of work.

for instance, check out my thread here for my sound node: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=8368

-Ted

[afecelis]

well I just compiled the source and got my own nice optimized quake3 exe!!!

But everything is pure C whereas everything in Irrlicht is C++.

It would be a bit complicated to port Irr stuff back to quake3; and it would be a sin to mix quake3 code into Irrlicht.

I think Irr is doing fine on its own. It'll find its own path; and as of quake3, I can't wait to see the modded engine versions that will start popping out!