Doom 3 Source Code To Be Released This Year

An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack just confirmed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that the source code to Doom 3 will be released this year. The source drop will follow the release of their Rage game in October. Carmack has also challenged other game developers to release their old source code."

id Tech 5

[bonch]

I wonder if id Tech 5 will ever see a source release now that id is under Zenimax's wing. As for other developers releasing source, that's not always possible due to third-party technology licenses, ownership issues, and the source code flat-out missing (if I remember correctly, Rise of the Triad was missing for years until someone found it for 3D Realms).

Re:What are the derivatives?

[somersault]

Google/Wikipedia to the rescue [wikipedia.org]!

Re:Who Does This help

[adamofgreyskull]

The reason for releasing source code as open source isn't so that you can download it for free, compile it, and have a working copy of Doom 3, it's so that people can look at the code, learn from it, port the game to new architectures or mod the source to add new features/take advantage of new technology. Several original games have been developed using previously released id source code: (Someone should really invent some kind of "Search" "Engine" for this internet thing...)
Nexuiz [alientrap.org]
Urban Terror [urbanterror.info]
Tremulous [tremulous.net]

Sadly, I suspect that you won't appreciate the value of any of that, having phrased your questions the way you did.

Re:Old hardware

[vux984]

look at the line of code...

It zeros out the frame buffer. You know... so you get a completely black screen. And if that's the main render routine... lol... I thought it was quite clever.