Quake III code due for release

By Ellie Gibson Published 15 August, 2005

Some time this week, apparently.

id Software's John Carmack has announced that the source code for Quake III is due for a release under the GPL some time this week, according to US website IGN.

Speaking at the QuakeCon event in Texas on Friday, Carmack said he's looking to encourage "creativity in the development environment", but stressed, "It's not about the magic source code that's there... It's about the execution."

He went on to discuss the evolution of mobile phone gaming, stating that the latest handsets have the power to run games which are almost up to the standard of handheld consoles. However, Carmack said, there may only be a "one to two-year window" before handhelds take another leap forward and leave mobiles in the dust. He also suggested that the PSP could be capable of running games based on the Q3 engine, rather excitingly.

As we reported previously, Carmack is currently hard at work on a Doom RPG for mobile phones - described as a turn-based tile combat game that's "sort of Bard's Tale meets Doom." More news when we get it.

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About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (9) Latest comment 7 years ago

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  • sephy #1 7 years ago

    /watches hombrew developers froth at the mouth

  • smelliot #2 7 years ago

    This could be very interesting.

  • Furbs #3 7 years ago

    Hmm, never really been a Quake fan (UT fills my run and gun needs) but Q3 on the Xbox is an interesting possibility :)

  • wizbob #4 7 years ago

    I can't even remember what was so hot about the QuakeIII engine; it has support for bezier surfaces or something? I don't remember seeing them used all that much.

  • Furbs #5 7 years ago

    You'd get curved arches for doorways, the underside of bridges etc. But I do remember being massively underwhelmed by it, which is why I never got in to the series. Quake 2 was a bit meh for me too, but only cos I didnt get in to PC gaming till 6 months after it came out, by which point HL was on the way.

  • deaner #6 7 years ago

    Modding has been made illegal by Hilary Clinton and is punishable by whipping of the legs under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

  • Wobble #7 7 years ago

    Furbs:
    You mean curved like the edges of a hot cup of coffee?

    /uh-oh...

  • Shadar #8 7 years ago

    A lot more hot stuff about it. There's this funky terrain displacement mapping going on in the Team Arena-version of the engine, the game featured animated, multi-layered textures, the aforementioned beziers, the game featured (or at least supported) 1024x1024px textures, which was pretty bad-ass at the time. Then there was the nifty particle effects, the hi-res VIS lightmaps, the stencil buffered shadows ... it was basically a whole lot more of a dirty muthafucka than most anything released at the time. Add to the fact that it was really scaleable, and you had a nice little gold-standard engine.

    I think, with tinkering from the homebrew devs, this could improve. Add some dynamic lighting and support for bump-mapping and pixel shading, and all of a sudden, we have a free engine that's nearly up to current standards. What's not to be a little excited about?

  • wizbob #9 7 years ago

    Not bad, a bit of googling also reveals alpha support for textures (32bit), 3-degree level-of-detail support (presumably for outdoor spaces) and a shader system. I didn't really notice those in Quake III but they were pretty impressive/disgusting in Doom III.

    If the code could be enhanced to include bump-mapping, ragdoll and normal shading I reckon Carmack wouldn't have bothered starting from scratch though.