RTCW and ET GPL'ed

[befno]

Lots of 3 word acronyms there.  Anyone read this? Carmack released the source code of both RTCW and ET under the GPL!! Open Enemy Territory anyone?

[fromhell]

I don't know. Guns in RTCW:

- Knife
- A pistol
- Another pistol
- A submachinegun
- Another submachine gun
- Yet another submachine gun
- A chaingun
- A flamethrower
- A rocket launcher
- A rifle
- A sniper rifle
- A grenade

No shotguns, not a lot of variety of firepower. Not too interesting, just a generic assortment of bullet flingers. The game does seem a bit overrated, riding on franchise legacy alone.


There is also a technical limitation - THERE IS NO MDS EXPORTER FOR BLENDER AT THE MOMENT, and MDS is the game's skeletal format used for all the characters and some weapons. MD3 for characters technically is not an option.

RTCW's weapon animations bugged me so much for being so stiff and so do their diagonal facing muzzleflashes. The weapons suck, the only good thing about them were the textures. ET watered them down some more, the sound of the tommy gun is worse

[HelloKitty!]

The sources were released under a modified (extra terms) GPL 3.0 license. It can't be easily combined with GPL projects, or at least that's the tenor on internet fora.

[befno]

I thought they were released under the gpl 3.0.  Which are those extra terms?

[Udi]

Which are those extra terms?

Some portions of the code have different licenses like Zlib, JPEG6, CURL etc. which you have to handle accordingly. These are referred as 'additional terms' in the source readmes, but they're not really 'extra', since the Quake3 source had these too. So maybe HelloKitty was thinking about something else. Oh, and the game data remains under the same license as before!

[NetMassimo]

The good thing is that the games now can be given a proper port to different platforms with some improvements.

As for the gameplay fromhell pointed out that the weapon range is a bit limited, on the other hand it's a WWII game with the kinds of weapons using in that period. I played RTCW a lot for a couple of years enjoying it very much until I discovered Open Arena.

Recently I tried the old RTCW Linux installer on my new Ubuntu system but I get a number of errors when I try to run it and I don't have the time to look into them to see if there's a solution so at this point I think I'll wait to see if a new free Linux package is released.

[HelloKitty!]

Extra terms:

http://icculus.org/~icculus/dotplan/ET-COPYING.txt

[HelloKitty!]

Extra terms:

http://icculus.org/~icculus/dotplan/ET-COPYING.txt

It's nothing scary, but it might pose a problem for linking to GPL programs, or at least people seem to be worrying about it.

[befno]

I dont see any incompatibilities with other GPL releases. 

[fromhell]

LEGAL NOTICES; NO TRADEMARK LICENSE; ORIGIN.  You must reproduce faithfully all trademark, copyright and other proprietary and legal notices on any copies of the Program or any other required author attributions.  This license does not grant you rights to use any copyright holder or any other party’s name, logo, or trademarks.

iortcw/iowolfet breaches that already for obvious reasons. Look at their curse names!... and they wonder why I avoid mentioning ioquake3 in describing OpenArena.

[WaspKiller]

LEGAL NOTICES; NO TRADEMARK LICENSE; ORIGIN.  You must reproduce faithfully all trademark, copyright and other proprietary and legal notices on any copies of the Program or any other required author attributions.  This license does not grant you rights to use any copyright holder or any other party’s name, logo, or trademarks.

iortcw/iowolfet breaches that already for obvious reasons. Look at their curse names!... and they wonder why I avoid mentioning ioquake3 in describing OpenArena.

I can understand how the names iortcw and iowolfe may violate the extra terms of these GPL releases but those extra terms were not part of the Q3 Engine GPL release back in 2005.  So, I don't think they apply to ioq3 and to games that build on it.

[7]

LEGAL NOTICES; NO TRADEMARK LICENSE; ORIGIN.  You must reproduce faithfully all trademark, copyright and other proprietary and legal notices on any copies of the Program or any other required author attributions.  This license does not grant you rights to use any copyright holder or any other party’s name, logo, or trademarks.

iortcw/iowolfet breaches that already for obvious reasons. Look at their curse names!... and they wonder why I avoid mentioning ioquake3 in describing OpenArena.

I really don't think these are extra terms to the GPL, because trademark law is something completely different from copyright law (they are both forms intellectual property though). You can't use the trademark 'QUAKE' to suggest OpenArena is part of the quake brand because a copyright license like the GPL is not a trademark license. The only thing they've done differently this time is explicitly stating this fact.

The names 'iortcw' and 'iowolfet' aren't infringing because those aren't registered trademarks ('Wolfenstein' is the registered trademark).

You don't have to avoid the word 'quake' in describing OpenArena as long as you're not using it as a trademark, so it's perfectly legal to describe OpenArena as a quake-like game or a game based on quake.

[WaspKiller]

...You don't have to avoid the word 'quake' in describing OpenArena as long as you're not using it as a trademark, so it's perfectly legal to describe OpenArena as a quake-like game or a game based on quake.

I concur with this assesment.

...I really don't think these are extra terms to the GPL, because trademark law is something completely different from copyright law (they are both forms intellectual property though). You can't use the trademark 'QUAKE' to suggest OpenArena is part of the quake brand because a copyright license like the GPL is not a trademark license. The only thing they've done differently this time is explicitly stating this fact.

The names 'iortcw' and 'iowolfet' aren't infringing because those aren't registered trademarks ('Wolfenstein' is the registered trademark)...

I don't agree.  I'm not a lawyer so I am not sure what Economic Tort or other legal remedy such an infringement may fall under but GAIM was not a registered trademark or copyright of AOL yet that did not stop them from suing and causing GAIM to be renamed to Pidgin.

[7]

I don't agree.  I'm not a lawyer so I am not sure what Economic Tort or other legal remedy such an infringement may fall under but GAIM was not a registered trademark or copyright of AOL yet that did not stop them from suing and causing GAIM to be renamed to Pidgin.

Firstly I'm not a trademark lawyer so I don't have any final answers, just some thoughts. I'm aware of the GAIM/Pidgin story. There are some major differences with the ioquake project, the main one being that the A in GAIM stands for AOL, so that's using a company name directly while you're not affiliated to it (that's like selling 'Pepsi Cola glasses' while your company has got nothing to do with Pepsi).

Another difference is that ioquake by itself isn't a finished game but an engine, so I don't think there can be much confusion about it being part of the quake brand of games (and exactly the same goes for the open sourced ET and RTCW engines too). I guess that if ioquake3 would rename itself to ioidtech3 or something like that, the project would be in real legal trouble.

[jessicaRA]

rtcw was fun.  i think rtcw is going to be even more fun to mod..  is some minor improvements to the balance can think of right away.

[GrosBedo]

Great news.

[befno]

I would like to see them getting new community patches, new online modes, free version releases and such.

[sago007]

All I want is an SDL version so I can run it on my 64 bit Linux system. 64 bit Linux incompatibility is a common problem for games based on id tech3.

[befno]

All I want is an SDL version so I can run it on my 64 bit Linux system. 64 bit Linux incompatibility is a common problem for games based on id tech3.

I think it's already being looked into.  For some reason I predict that Wolf:ET will get more patches and such than either RTCW  MP or SP. Which sucks, since RTCW SP is the first full SP game that id software has released GPL since quake 2. 

[befno]

Anyone know someone who would be interested in making those mds exporters for blender ?

[fromhell]

andrewj, but I think his busy-ness is a conflict.

dunno where the hell f0rqu3 went.


No, MD3 models really don't work for players in RTCWMP and ET. i've tried.

[befno]

That sucks, ill ask him anyways.    I think i've seen f0rqu3 on the #.  If I see him I'll ask him too. 

[fromhell]

I like how there is dummied out bot code in the source

[befno]

I think ET came with bots for offline.  Oh, you forgot when you mentioned the arsenal in RTCW the dynamite and the tesla cannon. Not all the weapons were bullet flingers. 

[SharpestTool]

So this event brought me bck from the dead a bit...

fromhell cough*fromhell*cough,

which weapon animations did you say were stiff? third or first person?

Also, the reason for MD3's not working for player models I believe lies in one of two places.  Its got something to do with the renderer loading md3's and trying to convert them on the fly to mdc's. PLUS the animation and tag parsing is completely different.

Oh well, the mds and mdx/mdm's models are useful features from the RTCW/ET codebase.  No...hell no.  STILL no ragdoll physics (I for one don't want to create sub-entities in the game logic for each "bone" for which the physics code has to run) BUT the animation possibilities are awesome...

The non-particle based scene fogging is a cool trick for mappers (think cvar r_wolffog)

I believe rtcw had a primitive form of bump mapping.

There are a ton of renderer optimizations which still allow it to run on old openGL spec cards.  No 1.5 or 2.0 required FBO's/VBO's.

Another delight for mappers would be ET's "foliage" brushes and its "dynamic textures."

Something realy cool which we could incorporate is the "coronas" around lights.  Nothing on the mapper end I think.

Also, the netcode is pretty slick with how it would pass player commands and events.  

Finally, IMO the best feature enhancement in the engine is the "Pure" server with native binaries.  No more worrying about rewriting library functions for gamecode.  This would allow for all kinds of things.  (this was due to the fact they didn't want to rewrite q3asm for the new vm calls the engine makes...slackers) BUT our gain.

Think about it...servers could output stats in xml, upload them to a web server via HTTP, directly connect to a database, etc.

Also, we can now rip-off the AI and map scripting from RTCW-SP to build a real OA single player.  

Oh yeah, the map scripting in MP, from both RTCW and ET would really blow open what mappers could do.  No more supermarket-style doors only, new map specific events, the possibilities really are endless.

EDIT: didn't realize how bad I wrote this from my mobile phone->not much an improvement from my pc though either I guess.