at dan . net

Reading about the rise of the upcoming WebGL technology, I discovered Brandon Jones, a good programmer who made a demo for rendering Quake 3 maps with WebGL. He was also kind enough to share his technical thoughts and talks about this project, mentionning the CopperLicht WebGL JavaScript 3D Engine which is also able to render Quake 3 maps.

Following a news on FFF, I discovered XCSV, a Quake 3: Excessive mod derivated game based on ioquake3 and using a full replacement textures set, allowing it to run as a standalone game. I'm not really fond of the Excessive (or Excessive Plus) mod but it's only a matter of taste and it doesn't lower the efforts done by its author, Paul Marshall (aka Kpax), nor the quality of this project.

The textures set is distributed under a Creative Commons license but, unfortunately, using the BY-NC-ND type of contract, which denies any commercial or derivative work. I submitted a comment on the original post on the ioq3 website.

Quite sadly, I saw that the XreaL project, whose goal was to bring an enhanced and visually improved Quake 3 game, has been abandonned :( As Tr3b, its creator, stated: ”the original XreaL game project is dead and I won't waste my resources on dealing with artists again.”.

The less sad part of the news is that, although the XreaL game is now dead, Tr3b is now working on porting the XreaL renderer to the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine, which let a tiny hope of seeing the good work done so far not being dropped.

And for all Wolf:ET enthusiasts, one can remember that Splash Damage already released the sources of the 6 official maps of the game.

SyncError from id Software answered today a bunch of questions on the ESR website regarding QuakeLive.

When asked about the possibility to add some 'single-skill' game mode, SyncError answered: ”Concerning single-skill focused gametypes, I think Defrag or a similar type of 'Speed Run' gametype could be an obvious choice when considering adding a new gametype.”

I don't know if the dev team of QL will really add some Defrag-alike gametype in a near future, but if they do, I hope they won't use the same name and I wonder if they will get in touch with Cgg…

This web server is now online! Yeah, nothing to be really proud, really, nonetheless I now know that enabling the DMZ option on my box doesn't really works as I expected :]

Anyway, the real info to know about, thanks to mathieu this morning ^^, is that the sources of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have been released under the GPL license and are thus freely available from the id Software ftp service. Although the engine itself is the id tech 3 (aka Quake 3) engine, these games have incorporated some changes worth to anybody interrested to the idt3 technology, like some part of the OSP source code.

As for the other free stuff released by id, 2 projects have already been started by the ioquake3 project to maintain and update these games: http://www.iortcw.org/ and http://www.iowolfet.org/.