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Comment by pferde | Hacker News Reader

Can't wait to see the awesome things fans will do with the engine - assuming it even gets through ID's legal dept.

Meanwhile you can go take a look at all the nice things that have been done with the Quake engines. Nexuiz, Alien Arena and many other open source games are based on the Quake engine.

It's fairly certain that id's legals will approve the release as they have done with all their previous game engines. The only problem might be if D3 uses some 3rd party libraries.

I believe one of the major issues will be Doom 3's use of the "zfail" algorithm, which Creative claim a patent on. Generally, Creative license this patent to game developers in exchange for the game supporting OpenAL (a net win for Creative as it means their sound cards can make the game run faster and more people will buy them), but I'm not sure what the terms on a source release would be. Take a look at [1] for more info.

[1]: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doomworld-news/45868-doom-3-code...

Carmack has said somewhere (I can't retrieve the source right now) that an alternative, slower method will be used in the GPL'd codebase, effectively working around Creative's patent claims.

Oh this is just silly. Thankfully the patented algorithm is ridiculously simple, so someone can write an open source patch to use the better stencil algorithm. No doubt whatever derivatives will spring from the D3 source will use the single pass method.

While being at it, it shouldn't be too hard to use geometry shaders for the shadow volume extraction in the D3 engine. Hmm, maybe I should do it :)

I suspect this will be released, I doubt they'd get this far in announcing it to the public unless the remaining stuff was crossing Ts and dotting Is, but it is notable that there's a pretty big difference between this release and previous releases of their engine source.

Previously id was an independently owned company. Now they are owned by ZeniMax, a larger entity.

All the others have, so I trust him here too.

yeah but all the others did when id was an independent entity - it's now owned by ZeniMax Media

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