Quake III, Now With GPL Goodness

Most of us have either played Quake or at least have known someone who was addicted to this great PC game. Well, it seems that it has just been tossed into the wilds of the GPL for everyone to have a stab at it. Cool, eh?

The Quake III Arena “engine” has been released as GPL free software code, continuing id Software’s tradition of releasing their older software to the public for free (as in libre) use. Why is this interesting? Because what they’re doing isn’t giving away an old game that nobody would buy, they’re giving away a toolkit for virtual environments that is much more sophisticated than casual observers might expect.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, Quake III Arena is the third iteration of the “Quake” series of first-person shooter computer games. The “Arena” aspect means multiplayer capacity is built-in; with very little difficulty, a dozen or so friends can connect over a network and play against each other. By releasing the source code under the GNU General Public License, Id Software isn’t making the game itself free to download — the various textures and maps and sounds remain proprietary. All that has been released is the “engine:” the core software that controls things like the physics model, the interaction between objects, player motion, networking, communication between players, and so forth.

What this means is that developers can use the Quake III Arena engine along with their own graphics and maps to create their own virtual worlds. [Read the rest]