dripping digital

1996. Dawn of the Internet era. Only one game counted when it came to deathmatch through my 28.8kbps modem. QUAKE. The unambiguous king of first person deathmatch, in my opinion. I played on MPlayer a whole lot. I’ve never been incredible, but I could hold down a frag fest or two. As others moved on to CounterStrike and other updates and twists on multiplayer, I swore at the empty servers of “Spill the Blood.” Others moved on, but I refused. To this day, I haven’t gotten involved in online gaming to the extent I was with Quake. Luckily, it seems there are significant numbers of folks who feel the same way as me. Since I’m here testing out my new open source ATI graphics drivers in Linux 2.6.32 with various things (QuakeLive works perfectly!), I thought it would be a nice opportunity to showcase some developments in the Quake arena.

Oh, and a little post called Open Source Immortality? at QuakeOne may have provided a little inspiration as well. Because, yes, it is true: Quake is and always will be immortal. And for that we can thank the foresight of John Carmack, who chose to release the Quake and QuakeWorld source code to the world in 1999 under the GNU Public License. Free for all time, baby!

So now the world have an entire landscape of modified Quake engines. I personally run DarkPlaces, but that may only be because I’ve been happy enough that I haven’t checked out any other ones yet. Paired with Rygel’s high quality texture pack, it is quite a beauty to behold. But wait! There is more. The Quake Reforged project aims to do for the monsters what Rygel has done for the textures.

The Knight, Reforged

I’ve pestered them to release their already finished hi res skins for Christmas

For more developments, check QuakeOne. It’s amazing that almost fifteen years later, Quake is doing better than ever.

I’ll be blogging more about Quake and also another example of open source immortality (can you guess?? oo the suspense!) in the coming days.

Tags: floss, gpl, nostalgia, quake

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 4:02 pm by John and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.