D3 Open Source coming soon...

[AluminumHaste]

I don't know if this has been posted as it's not that new, end of 2008 maybe, but here's a quote of Carmack's

 

Carmack: What we can’t do is we can’t take time away from [other projects]… it does take effort to get these things together. If we are still heads down trying to get Rage out the door, I’m not going to task somebody with putting together the Doom 3 source distribution. But when Rage ships, you can expect the Doom 3 source code to be coming out.

 

So when Rage ships, D3 source will come hot on it's heels!

[New Horizon]

I don't know if this has been posted as it's not that new, end of 2008 maybe, but here's a quote of Carmack's

 

 

 

So when Rage ships, D3 source will come hot on it's heels!

 

Might not have been posted here, but he has mentioned this in the past.

[Noisycricket]

According to the Rage wiki page, its not coming out this year.

 

On March 9, 2009 The company's CEO Todd Hollenshead told Gametrailers TV, 'No, it won't be out this year,' when asked about a possible release date.[10]

Edited April 10, 2009 by Noisycricket

[Albert]

_

Edited March 31, 2020 by Albert

[Diego]

E3 2010: The latest on id Software's Rage

 

2011 is the year, folks..

[Komag]

hope so

[Sotha]

Nice to know this. I was wondering about this recently.

 

But what does D3 open source mean in practice? Okay, TDM can probably made available for all since the engine is free.

 

But the doom3 assets will not be. This means that if I create a fan mission which contains D3 assets, it cannot work with the open source edition of TDM? Should we mappers avoid using D3 assets? Pretty impossible since many decals and particles are on the D3 side.

 

Please elucidate.

[New Horizon]

Primarily it means we will have full access to the graphics render engine, and anything else that wasn't included in the SDK. It provides us with the opportunity to perhaps optimize / fix anything we had to hack in due to SDK limitations.

 

As for a stand alone version of TDM, yes the issues you indicated would be a problem....but not impossible to overcome. It would definitely require a dedicated group of individuals to replace the D3 assets with similar assets. It's not an impossible task, but I doubt it could be finished in a week.

 

Nice to know this. I was wondering about this recently.

 

But what does D3 open source mean in practice? Okay, TDM can probably made available for all since the engine is free.

 

But the doom3 assets will not be. This means that if I create a fan mission which contains D3 assets, it cannot work with the open source edition of TDM? Should we mappers avoid using D3 assets? Pretty impossible since many decals and particles are on the D3 side.

 

Please elucidate.

[Midnight]

It's been mentioned before that TDM uses a lot of D3 assets, meaning that these could not be used in a stand-alone release of TDM once D3 goes open source. In fact, it means that unless these assets are replaced there won't be a TDM stand-alone, but replacing these assets would be a considerable task. This isn't a big deal in my opinion since D3 can be found for £13.99 on Steam (or £60 on Amazon!!, £1.19 used), but it would be great if it means TDM can be available to a larger audience.

 

The biggest benefit is that the source code will mean that TDM can be further improved, so the rendering can be made to support soft shadows for example. I'd be interested in hearing if the TDM team has any specific areas they are wanting to update when source is available, what's possible and what would be considered priority for improving TDM.

[rich_is_bored]

Perhaps a wiki page should be created so that work can be done now, while we wait for the source, to replace stock assets? Waiting till the source is released beforehand isn't required. You can override stock assets now.

[rebb]

Does TDM really use that many Doom3 assets ?

Apart from light-textures ( which are fairly easy to make ) and some fonts i didn't notice many.

 

Are there more obvious ones ?

[Serpentine]

It's not suuuuuuch a big issue, a day's worth of testing to produce logs of what materials are missing and a script to pull out and organize a nice big list and we'd be in action. Most of the work can be mitigated with the use of stop-gap textures which while not perfect will be 'good enough'. Most replacement will take place after that, while the textures will not be pixel perfect I don't think it's the worst work to do and maybe a month later with myself working on it (and anyone that's interested in less detailed work/decals etc) we could have a full stock of them.

 

Remapping the textures is done quite easily with a script too, if that is even needed

 

Working on it now is most likely not the beeeest idea (but maybe a test is... mmm), assurances are only words until the source is in a public repo.

[Mortem Desino]

The executable, sounds (a lot of impact sounds), decals (especially blood and spiderwebs), tons of light textures (like you mentioned), some FX (like earthquake shakes, blood drips). There are more, but those are the ones that come to mind being called from doom 3/base.

[Springheel]

Does TDM really use that many Doom3 assets ?

 

Yes, there are tons, far more than most people are aware of. There are hundreds of sounds, textures, particle effects, light textures, animations, low poly prop meshes, high poly character models, ragdolls, and animations.

 

Finding all the assets is no easy task either, as many of them have been copied into the TDM folder structure and renamed. For example, the beggar character uses arm models and textures taken from D3 characters. The noblewoman has leg meshes and textures taken from a D3 character. Several of our heads are D3 heads with minor tweaks. The zombies are entirely D3 characters with alternate textures.

 

There is currently no one on the team capable of replacing those assets (and I suspect future members would want to create their own things rather than copying things that already exist--and that's exactly what I'd rather see them do as well).

 

I've posted this before, but not only would every asset need to be replaced, but it would need to be replaced in a way that does not break existing maps using D3 assets. Given that there is absolutely no payback for this effort until *every* asset is replaced, I would be very surprised to see this happen. While lots of people seem to think it's a good idea, the number of people willing to volunteer to start doing it has been suspiciously low.

[Diego]

This might also renew the interest in the d3 modding community, I was taking a look at the other mods right now, at moddb, and there isn't much besides TDM. A lot of unfinished stuff (eventhough I was searching specifically for 'released' ones.. go figure) and a lot of minor changes to d3 itself.

[Melan]

Diego: Ruiner is still being worked on apparently.

[jdude]

TBH, I see no reason TDM should strive to be independent of Doom3. Should we put all this effort into doing so, so people who are too cheap to spend 5 bucks can DL the game for free? There's so much other greater stuff we could do with the source code with that energy. And support ID for making the D3 engine, they deserve your 5 bucks. (consider yourselves lucky I spent approximately $120 on doom3 and it's expansion cuz I got them asap )

 

btw: There's also the Phobos project and the Hexen project being worked on. The trailer for Ruiner was kick ass imo. The ending with the interpretation of the doom2 boss scene is phenomenal! I can't wait for all three mods

[Tels]

The executable, sounds (a lot of impact sounds), decals (especially blood and spiderwebs), tons of light textures (like you mentioned), some FX (like earthquake shakes, blood drips). There are more, but those are the ones that come to mind being called from doom 3/base.

 

OTOH, even before we released, I pushed for moving all D3 specific entities in their own file, so they are not released. And very we recently got rid of the AI scripts from D3 we included, and I also ripped out a ton of old D3 C++ classes from the code - so we get towards that goal step by step.

 

Technically, we could make an "empty" doom3 base PK4s, and then see what breaks when you try to load TDM.

[Tels]

TBH, I see no reason TDM should strive to be independent of Doom3. Should we put all this effort into doing so, so people who are too cheap to spend 5 bucks can DL the game for free?

 

I think the point is for people who *cannot* buy D3 anymore. Just imagine it gets delisted at Steam for whatever reasons (or Valve closes shop entirely). You already have problems buying Doom3 in Germany, because it is rated 18+ (meaning you need either a credit card for Steam (which is so 18+automatially, too) or find some online dealer (which also makes it automatically 18+). This will only get worse over time.

 

Anyway, we surely have way too many work and way too little people.

[rich_is_bored]

Given this "buy the game to reap the rewards" approach, might it be reasonable to release a standalone but handicapped version of the game?

 

In other words, strip the game of all Doom 3 content and replace the things that break with nonsense like black boxes and checkerboard textures while those with Doom 3 would be unaffected.

 

It's not ideal but it seems to be the best compromise between committing to a huge amount of work and doing nothing. As a side benefit I guarantee you people will start contributing towards the cause.

[Tels]

Given this "buy the game to reap the rewards" approach, might it be reasonable to release a standalone but handicapped version of the game?

 

In other words, strip the game of all Doom 3 content and replace the things that break with nonsense like black boxes and checkerboard textures while those with Doom 3 would be unaffected.

 

It's not ideal but it seems to be the best compromise between committing to a huge amount of work and doing nothing. As a side benefit I guarantee you people will start contributing towards the cause.

 

Problem is, you'd still need D3 to run the actual game, unless someone also re-implements the physics/rendering/sound/loading engine etc . But you mean that this "TDM stripped" would simply to gather efforts from people?

 

Edit: Such a version ca be made quickly with just empty PK4 files in the D3 base directory, me thinks.

[nbohr1more]

Stick and Carrot approach eh?

 

I like the idea but I presume as Springheel had mentioned that the "standalone" folks will be unlikely to offer up much help...

 

But... simply having the option available will mean that anything that does get contributed will reduce the final amount of work needed if Doom 3 becomes completely unplayable on modern OS's (Windows 9?) (If enough momentum builds I suspect that ttlg converts will keep hacking and patching Doom 3 to keep the engine alive in a similar fashion to the work done for Thief 1/2...)...

 

I really hope that some suit at ZeniMax doesn't put the kibosh on all this Open-Source fun ( ) but if the effort to replace Doom 3 assets goes well it would reduce the work needed to move to another engine (Open-Source Quake 3?)? (Yeah probably too much plumbing to kluge into Q3 so TDM would likely be in a similar boat to Thief 1/2 until something akin to TDM was tried on a newer engine... monumental amount of work non-withstanding ...)

 

Lets forget I even mentioned this pessimistic POV, I am really looking forward to Open-Source Id Tech 4! :)

[demagogue]

I suggested making a D3-stripped version of TDM before too, TDM-lite, with just the least replacement necessary to get a FM running.

 

My thinking was a few FMs might be specially crafted for it, open to the world, then that could draw a lot of water to the full TDM. And such FMs would be backwards compatible with vanilla TDM, I think. It would just be its own branch, not trying to overtake TDM, but something that could really boost its profile in the way Thieves Den or Tears of St. Lucia did, or some people will just be happy with those limited FMs. (That raises another possibility; could a single FM be made its own executable? That'd even make it even more accessible.)

 

BTW, after watching those videos, I'm already interested in modding for Rage now.

Best news from that interview was that it's shipping with the editor. Only thing is that we're back to limited gameplay all over again...

 

Edit: And of course I'm also looking forward to id4 going open source so I can finally figure out how to get the volume-slider working for the zoned ambient sounds. And for a better, shinier TDM too, of course.

[Tels]

I don't think you can make *anyting* TDM related without Doom3. We need the _engine_.

 

It is like asking "Heh, we have this nicely modded (painted-green, ripped out the seats, added more bling) Ferrari here, why not make a mod-without-the-actual Ferrari?". Sure it would work, if you can live without the frame, the engine, the wheels and the electical system...

[nbohr1more]

Yep... Those were worst case scenario ideas that mostly amount to something akin to the Open Dark Engine project but for Doom 3.

 

But , yeah, that is much more far fetched for Id tech 4 than with the Dark Engine ...