Giant Bomb‘s weekly thursday night throwdown featured Quake 3: Arena running with ioquake3 this week.

including the Quake series:

Looking for a graphical update to Quake 3?

Check out this new texture pack from Paul Marshall (aka Kpax).

It replaces the original textures in Quake 3 with high-resolution versions, and it is licensed under the creative commons!

Download now: xcsv_hires.zip (179MB)

Unzip this file to your baseq3 directory, note that pure servers will need to have the file as well.

A wonderful thing happened today at QuakeCon. John Carmack announced the release of GPL source code for the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein engines!

Work has already begun on iowolfet and iortcw!

This post will be updated as infrastructure is prepared.

Stop by the irc channels #ioquake3 #iortcw and #iowolfet on irc.freenode.net for more collaboration.

Bugzilla is configured at bugzilla.icculus.org to allow entries for both iowolfet and iortcw.

You can now clone the Mercurial source repositories (Thanks to icculus.org!):

http://hg.ioquake.org/

If you’re new to Mercurial please check out this excellent guide.

Thank you id software!

Via Thunderbird’s excellent kwaak3 ioquake3 spin-off, I just tried out ioquake3 on a borrowed Verizon Droid (Motorola Milestone). I’ve also tried kwaak3 on a donated T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream):

it is truly amazing that ioquake3 can run well on these platforms, not just for first-person-shooters or doom clones, but for new kinds of games to have a stable engine for many, many platforms.

THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE!

San Francisco, CA – After over four and a half years of serving the Quake 3 community, the developers have behind ioquake3 have decided to make some changes. Citing the need to keep with the future and keep up with the community’s demands, the ioquake3 team has teamed up with Relnav of the Relnav’s Quake 2 project. With this, several changes will be made:

• ioquake3 will be renamed to Relnav’s Quake 3
• The principal development platform will be Windows 7 and Direct3D 11
• Legacy suport for Mac OS X and Linux will be provided by the WINE emulation software project.
• The multiplayer subsystem has been rewritten and a new, written-from-scratch, anti-cheat system has been created.

The first release of Relnav’s Quake 3 will be made available in the next few days. Due to the anti-cheat system, source-code releases have been suspended for the forseeable future.

We’ve already provided a few mod teams with a prerelease version of Relnav’s Quake 3, and we’re excited to see what people can do with it.
One particularly promising mod team has created a mod in the Goldeneye: 007 style but using the CSI: Miami universe! It is really quite amazing.

The Relnav’s Quake 3 team thanks you for your continued support and looks forward to the next five years!

One of the more interesting platforms for ioquake3 is the Nokia n900. The n900 is a smartphone running the Maemo version of Linux and a few months ago a project started to bring ioquake3 to it.

Oliver McFadden maintains this version and demonstrated it in this video captured at Maemo Summit 2009 after the break. Here’s a link to the packages for the n900.

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Once again Wikipedia has decided that ioquake3 isn’t notable. Just like the last time, the argument against the ioquake3 wikipedia entry is without merit:

Since the release of ioquake3 1.36 we’ve had a lot of attention from various sites and I thought it would be nice for people who only read ioquake3 to check out the reaction we’ve gotten in comments on some other places:

• ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold (Slashdot)
• New ioquake3 (bluesnews)
• ioquake3 Goes Gold WIth Ogg Decoding, x86_64 (phoronix)
  
• ioQuake3 v1.36 veröffentlicht (der quaker)
• ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold (reddit)
• ioquake3 1.36 (happypenguin)
• ioquake3 1.36 (LinuxGames)

Slashdot was by far the leader in both legitimate comments, visits back to ioquake3.org, and trolling. Of course in preparing a Slashdot post at around 1AM I made a huge blunder in attempting to make a joke about Quake Live, which is a great game and I encourage everyone to check out now that the queues have been eliminated.

ioquake3 was even featured around the 16:30 mark on the MODSonair video podcast:

MODSonair Episode 177 on Vimeo.

By far the best reaction was the decision of the Smoking Guns team to start experimenting with ioquake3 as you can see over at their site.

Yee haw!

A few people were confused about what Mumble is, for them I would suggest that they check out the comparison article over at TimeDoctor Dot Org.

The biggest issue ioquake3 faces with public reception is the problem of having content built-in for people to play that does not require the Quake 3 data.

Be assured that we’re working on this though we could really use your help in coming up with content under the creative commons license and game code under the GPL. Please get in touch with us or contact me directly (zachary [at] ioquake.org) if you’re interested.

ioquake3 1.36 is here!

Go get it as a package for your system, or a source zip file/tarball. Check out your options for help if you run into a problem. If you find any bugs, please search bugzilla, and then report them!

Here is what you can do with ioquake3:

• Play Quake 3: Arena and the expansion, Quake 3: Team Arena
• Make your own game!
• Play standalone games like Urban Terror and Tremulous.
• Play older Quake 3 mods without the Quake 3 security issues but with new features.

Have a look at the list of improvements that have gone into this release:

• Ports to new platforms
• Off-server data downloads (http redirection) via HTTP and FTP with cURL
• OpenAL sound rendering allowing for surround (5.1 and 7.1) speaker layouts and generally improved sound
  quality. Especially on the Windows Vista Operating System.
• Ogg Vorbis audio decoding.
• In-engine VOIP support, with optional Mumble player-location (positional audio) support.
• IPV6 Networking. We’re ready to frag on the net of the future!
• SDL backend for the OpenGL context, window management, and input. This also improves portability.
• Anaglyph stereo rendering (for viewing with 3D glasses)
• Full x86-64 architecture support
• Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support
• New SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64
• Compilation with MinGW and cross-compilation for Windows from Linux
• Improved console command auto-completion
• Persistent console command history
• Improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools
• Colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems
• GUID System
• Multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders)
• PNG format support for textures
• Numerous security fixes

If you’re interested in following more updates with ioquake3, follow our twitter feed , and please do digg/reddit/slashdot this post! Please!

Join us on our forums, mailing lists, irc, etc at the discussion page!

Write just about anything about ioquake3 on the wiki!

Talk with us on our mumble server at mumble.ioquake3.org

Thanks again to everyone who has made this a spectacular release. What do you want to see in the future of ioquake3? 4-Player Split-Screen? Let us know in the comments.

Effectively immediately ioquake3 will be dropping the established rendering path of OpenGL and moving directly into the future of gaming, rendering through a text editor. We realize this decision may come as shocking to some, but with increased competition from browser-based games like id software’s Quake Live, we must compete on a whole new level.

So, I have started by creating an SVN branch for the new rendering conduit and all support for OpenGL rendering will be dropped along with LibSDL support. We’re especially happy about dropping LibSDL support since we realize that everyone who has used our LibSDL version of Icculus Quake has hated the mouse responsiveness and the way it inserts DRM into the rendering channel. Eliminating that kind of drama will really set the project free.

Therefor, I present to you, the gaming public, and screaming Icculus Quake 3 fanboys, VI-OQUAKE3:

(screen shot after the break)

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server.ioquake3.org (graciously donated by our friends at EscapedTurkey!) is now running my favorite Quake 3 mod, RQ3. You can find a mirror of the files for the mod here.

The ioquake3 team would like to congratulate that Noble Frenchman and his league of extraordinary gentlemen behind Quake Live, The Browser-Based Quake 3 distribution on their release of Quake Live into Open Beta!

Go check it out and when you get bored with Quake Live’s gameplay (pfft, as if!) come back and make your own game, with ioquake3!

The wikipedia admin going by the hacker alias Rjd0060 has apparently been concerned with the vast quantities of e-paper that the ioquake3 entry was wasting when that same e-paper could be used for fictional star wars characters which don’t even appear in movies or fictional cartoon characters from the 80s.  So, he has decided to delete it:

The argument against the deletion, as I see it, has been posted to the admin’s talk page, and reproduced here so you don’t waste any e-highway e-traffic by visiting wikipedia:

Once again the ioquake3 wikipedia entry has been deleted for being without notability when, in fact, this is wholly inaccurate. ioquake3 is the de-facto standard in quake 3 engine technology with many games and other projects being based on it. Some of those games include urban terror World of Padman andtremulous. I created ioquake3 in 2005 and it has continued since then with the help of many contributors. To say that it is irrelevant does the project and those that use it a severe disservice and I think contributes to the overall discouragement of smaller open source and free software projects, as if they and the contributions made to them are without merit. id software created the original code base and released it onto the internet. To say that projects based on the original source release are not notable is like saying that it wouldn’t be notable if Ray Bradbury released a book under a creative commons license solely to the net and someone took that and made an entirely new and interesting work of fiction based on it.

Of course, having created ioquake3 you can take my words with a grain of salt. Please don’t let that stop you from researching the notability of the project yourself. Perhaps starting with these links:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/566/1040566/two-free-games-based-on-the-quake-3-engine-tip-up

http://www.linux.com/feature/136752

–TimeDoctor (talk) 02:53, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Note that this is the second time ioquake3 has been deleted from wikipedia, the first time in 2007 was apparently because the entry was an “Advertisement”. Quotes are there to enforce the ridiculousness of the idea that an entry for an open source project could be spam.

Please join me in showing support for the ioquake3 project and leave a polite and considerate comment here or on Rjd0060‘s talk page.

Thank you for your continued support of ioquake3,

Zachary “Zimbo” Slater,

El Presidente of ioquake3, Time Doctor Dot Org, and related industries.

Update:

Already support is pouring in from fans and contributors to ioquake3. This post will continue to be updated with some samples of that support.

For example, this post to the admin’s talk page from our friends at id software:

ioquake3 is indeed the best updated version of id Software Inc.’s GPL release of the Quake III Arena engine source code. Over the years the project stayed true to it’s objectives to make the original code base easier to work with, available on a wider variety of platforms, and to provide a solid base for several projects that wanted to build upon the technology.

I was the maintainer of Quake III Arena for several years until the company released it as GPL, and I am pretty happy there are people like Zachary who stepped up to the plate afterwards.

It seems very odd to me that content would be removed based on an individual’s personal appreciation of relevance. If the article provides useful information and references, it should at least be valued for the efforts of the contributing individuals.

Timothee Besset,
Software Engineer
id Software, inc.

Here is another great measure of support from our friends at the RQ3 Team:

How can ioq3 not be relevent when some of the maintainers have, as part of the project, provided fixes that have made it into id’s official Q3 codebase? From the Quake 3 1.32c readme:

1.32c (5-8-06)
- Ludwig Nussel and Thilo Shulz discovered a vulnerability letting a malicious client download files from a server if auto download is enabled ( sv_allowDownload 1 ).
- A second issue fixed in this release (R_RemapShaders buffer overflow) would let a malicious server exploit a buffer overflow to execute a shellcode on connecting clients.

I would like to point out that both Ludwig Nussel and Thilo Shulz are active participants in the ioq3 project. If id, the producer of the original game that ioq3 is based on, recognizes ioq3′s work as being relevent, what more is needed? Isn’t that both verification and validation of ioq3′s contribution to software? I mean, heck, you can cite actual publications (not blogs or other sissy webpages) as references to show that ioq3 is recognized time and again as one of the premier OSS games released.

ioq3 is especially notable for its wide range of platform support and write-once-run-anywhere Quake Virtual Machine ability which lets ioq3 run on Windows (x86 and x64), Linux (x86 and x64), Linux PPC (32 and 64 bit), FreeBSD, Solaris (SPARC and x86), Irix (MIPS), Mac OS X (x86 and PPC), and was recently the initial basis for a port of Quake 3 to the iPhone, an ARM-based device. Just google for “quake 3 iphone” to see all the press and buzz THAT generated. If that’s not notable, I don’t know what is! There are many modern commercial game engines that don’t support what ioq3 supports such as in-engine VoIP and IPv6. Heck, the VoIP stuff is from someone recognized both in the professional game programming arena and also by Wikipedia itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon

-Monk

Thanks to the best of the rest who also supported ioquake3 on the wikipedia admin’s talk page:

Shame you thought this article had to be deleted; this could have been a discussion on improving the article to wikipedia’s standard. But you might have too much work to do in the foreseeable future as probably so many articles, about softwares/video games, are failing to meet those same requirements and therefore need to be “cut off” (weird principle for a participative online encyclopaedia).

Regards,

Tam

Sad… Just plain sad.

-Richard ‘JBravo’ Allen.

Thanks to the support of these and many other people, the ioquake3 wikipedia page has been restored!*

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Check out these great threads in the tech support forum written up by none other than that Reaction Quake 3 superstar, Monk! The Tech Support forum is also great for any development or user questions.