Wolfenstein goes GPL

id Software has just released the source code of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory under the GPL. Download it from the id software FTP server:

• Return to Castle Wolfenstein (single player)
  
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein (multiplayer)
  
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Great. :)

Unfortunately, RtCW MP is more or less dead now, and ET was never the same. I doubt, that this release bear any big stuff, aside from maybe Linux ports.

Did they ever get around to release Doom3's source?

Wikipedia says that id Tech 4's GNU GPL is planned for 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_tech_4)

It's nice to hear that engines are still being GPLd now that id is part of Bethesda.

I'm less interested in the source release for those particular games.

What is far more interesting however is their exiting from the engine middleware market. Which frankly Epic do not own yet, not while big players like Crytek are still in the game. This smacks of Bethesda saying "look guys, no more money for expensive research projects; just buy middleware".

DaniJ said:

What is far more interesting however is their exiting from the engine middleware market. Which frankly Epic do not own yet, not while big players like Crytek are still in the game.

Crytek are more or less Linux to Epics Microsoft at this point.

The may be but Crytek certainly aren't lacking the technical expertise to do something about the situation. Just look at how awesome the latest incarnation of the engine is.

Capabilities are more or less moot if Crytek can't get people to use it, though being multiplatform this time will help matters.

Well yes, obviously. However my point is you can't really say Epic "own" the middleware engine market. The Linux/Microsoft comparison is only partially applicable here. Those two (Linux/Microsoft) have been battling it out far longer than Epic's relatively recent dominance of the middleware engine market. And this dominance is largely due to lack of competition in the console domain.

Perhaps I just like routing for the underdog.

DaniJ said:

Those two (Linux/Microsoft) have been battling it out far longer than Epic's relatively recent dominance of the middleware engine market. And this dominance is largely due to lack of competition in the console domain.

That's true. However, unless CryEngine 3 takes off soon, devs are just going to go UE because it's what they're used to.

If Epic and Crytek are Microsoft and Linux, does that make Emergent Apple?

Well imo if we want to draw this comparison I'd say Emergent are more like FreeBSD. This space doesn't really have a player fulfilling the "Apple role".

The "Apple" in this case would be RenderWare, or probably Vicarious Visions Alchemy. (Does anybody still make games in those anymore?)

Great news!

I'd love to see a RTCW port with engine improvements, similar to what Tenebrae did to Quake for example. RTCW must be the last single player FPS I truly loved playing (since Doom 2 :).

I've actually wondered to myself what it would take to hack upon ioquake3 to support RTCW, now I'm glad we don't have to take the effort to find out :p

printz said:

Wikipedia says that id Tech 4's GNU GPL is planned for 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_tech_4)

Good news, I don't want to have to keep Doom 3 installed just to play The Dark Mod.

Good news, although I'm slightly disappointed because I was expecting something different when I saw the thread title...

fraggle said:

although I'm slightly disappointed because I was expecting something different when I saw the thread title...

Yeah me too.

Heh, yeah, same here.

Damn, ditto.

For the record, I never got any response to those Wolf3D source licensing e-mails.

jute said:

For the record, I never got any response to those Wolf3D source licensing e-mails.

Supposedly Carmack has a twitter account where he appears to be responding to people. Has anyone tried contacting him that way?

I could've sworn someone contacted Carmack about Wolf3D before and got his okay. Twitter is probably a good route to go if that isn't the case; I'd do it myself but I don't have an account there.