ioquake3 engine is officially in debian unstable

[Falkland]

After apt-get update , I found ioquake3 engine in the list of the new packages in Debian unstable , but after reading the description I was wondering of why they are planning to use it as the universal engine for quake3 and all the derivative games :

This package installs a modified version of the ioQuake3 game engine,
which can be used to play various games based on that engine, such as
OpenArena, Quake III: Arena, and in future perhaps World of Padman and
Urban Terror.

This package alone isn't of any use; to get a playable game, install
openarena or another suitable set of game data.

The openarena package currently contains its own version of ioQuake3,
but in future it will depend on this package for the engine.

So my question is , why did they decide to use ioquake3 instead of OpenArena engine ?

And still , is it a decision taken only to easy mantain OpenArena and all the other Q3 derivative games , or does it matter with the quality of the code ?

[sago007]

So my question is , why did they decide to use ioquake3 instead of OpenArena engine ?

They do it to easy the work of the Debian security team, that now only need to update one package.

Obviously they have to change some parameters and they have made quite a bit of modification to ioquake to make it support OpenArena, such as adding g_humanplayers/g_passworded to the server advertising string and made the protocol into a parameter.

[smcv]

So my question is , why did they decide to use ioquake3 instead of OpenArena engine ?

Heya,
I packaged ioquake3. It's for easier maintenance/security support of Quake-3-engine games, yes; ioquake3 is the "furthest upstream" version, so it's easier if we do everything else relative to that, and try to push all the bugfixes into upstream ioquake3 so derivatives and distributions can stop worrying about them.

The engine part of "openarena" in Debian is actually already a step in that direction: it's a svn snapshot of ioquake3 (corresponding to the version that the OA engine tarball seemed to be based on), with the OA engine changes from the tarball, some bugfixes from ioquake3, and some Debian-specific changes applied as patches. See http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/openarena/0.8.5-4 if you're interested in how it breaks down.

I've opened bugs on ioquake3 bugzilla for various of the OA engine changes, so they can hopefully get into ioquake3; for the moment we're applying many of them to Debian's ioquake3 as distro patches. I haven't opened bugs for all of the OA changes yet - I left out OA's bloom renderer feature, for
instance - in an attempt to get at least the bugfixes committed sometime this decade :-/