Shacknews are reporting that Carmack has announced plans to GPL the Quake 3 source code in his QuakeCon keynote speech, apparently "within a week".

Update: As promised the source has been released; interested code hackers can grab it locally.

Nice one!

The good thing is, unlike previous source releases, the engine isn't completely out of date. It can be modernised with pixel shaders, improved network code, etc but still be interesting enough for people to play today (unlike Tenebrae and other Quake 1 or 2 engine mods). I can't wait to see some community work from this release. Personally I wouldn't mind diving into the graphics code.

It's also good that he's chosen the GPL. There's nothing worse than an ego-tripping I.T. undergrad lone ninja-coder (as I've mentioned before) who thinks his source-code is so good and special that he has to keep it under wraps for fear of someone stealing it, despite him releasing the binaries for free without profits and secrecy not mattering anyway. Wankers. What are we talking about again?

last edited by parabol at 11:00:18 13/Aug/05

Hopefully we'll see a few more decent free (not to mention OS) FPS releases as a result of this.

Heh, my first thought when I saw the topic was "Phwoar, they're porting Quake 3 to the Source engine?"

heh good point :) fixed subject to reduce confusion

yeah thats what I thought Khel.

Bah, GPL. What a load :/ BSD licence all the way :(

But this is awesome news. I can't wait to see a Shader Model 3.0 version of Q3, or a version with netcode as good as Tribes 2 and optimizations that will make Team Arena playable (not that anyone will though :(

Khel, this would effectively allow for that though. Dunno why you'd want to. The Quake 3 netcode is still some of the best around for the small maps the game uses. As for the speed and fluidity of the graphics and input engine... nothing has since come close.

It's out:
http://www.3dgamers.com/news/more/1096482562/

let's hope there some kick arse freeware games made with the source code :)

As usual, I can't get it to compile first go :)

*waits for someone else to find a solution*

Eagerly awaiting the huge number of hacked clients coming out much like when the quake source was originally released.

heh shad, but who plays quake 3 still? :P

Eagerly awaiting the huge number of hacked clients coming out much like when the quake source was originally released.

Quake III has Punkbuster support though, shouldn't Punkbuster block hacked clients?

I doubt the source code has any bunkpuster code at all.