but why not just make a new game in the spirit of Quake?

Quake exists already. There are many different mods, engine ports, compile tools and editors. The gameplay is known and many people loved or still love it. Why try and copy something people can already play just to be open source? The Quake source is already open anyway, just not the assets, but I suspect most people wanting to do things with Quake only want to touch the code or make new content for it. Why not make a new game that attempts to capture the essence of what you most love about the game?

Is it really that much extra work to just make something new? 

i tried doing that. collision detection killed it. :P 

Necros can you elaborate? You mean you were writing your own collision detection and it was a ballache? 

 

lol, yeah, i never learned much about the types of maths involved with collision detection (planes basically) so it was a lot of googling.

I did eventually get collision detection working for like 80% of cases, but there were certain edge cases that were still messing up.

And then I realized I was just going to make Quake and that I already had that game... :) 

If you ever fancy taking it up again, buy "Real-time Collision Detection" by Ericson. It's a really good comprehensive book on the matter, and it got me up and running pretty quickly.

(Then after about 18 months I mothballed all my work and just bought the Unity engine lol) 

That's always been my experience. Works in most cases, fucks up constantly in edge cases.

I've always thought that Quake's solution with the point moving through the expanded hulls was downright brilliant. What a clever way to avoid most of the hassles. 

haha, I shall add that book to my list Kinn, but I'm starting to get a serious backlog of books I need to read. ^_^

Willem: Yeah, definitely it is a good method of doing it, but I was trying to do an engine that wouldn't really require any compiling and would just run off meshes so I was trying to implement the separating axis theorem method on bounding boxes and tris of a collision mesh. 

what were you making? Did Unity hold up? i've dabbled with it and it seemed decent, though a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. 

Sorry missed your question:

I'm making an online co-op action game - at a glance it might look a bit like Mass Effect in terms of camera position and action, but the gameplay is not primarily about shooting things, and I won't reveal the surprise here :}

Unity is really good. Really I haven't got anything bad to say about it. 

Will be good to see your game when you have something to show. Are you working on it alone or with others?

I hope you are still making Quake levels! 

Cheers - right now it's a 2-man project, I'm doing all the coding and level design, whilst I've got an artist doing all the art.

Dunno when I'll be pimping it. I estimate my savings will run out sometime this summer, so we might need to get Kickstarter funding to carry on developing it; if it comes to that I imagine we'll have to show off something fairly substantial.

Quakery has never left my mind, but I'm afraid it has taken a back seat whilst I have to concentrate on commercial stuff :{ 

I'm looking forward to seeing your game, Kinners! 

Same here! 

Cool. Sounds like a fun project. I hope you guys manage to see it through to completion. Did you quit your day job to work on it, or is it an on the side thing?

I would love to jump ship to do my own thing, but I'm afraid my balls are not large enough to keep me afloat :) 

For that mental image, than 

sounds swell Than. Always interested in new non-shooty mechanics. I excitedly anticipate receiving more factual information on this project going forward. 

Yeah, after seven years I just got sick of the insane overtime/crunch culture of the games industry, so I quit my job. I mean, it's not like I was saving lives or putting men into space or anything, I was making bloody video games and I decided it wasn't worth fucking off my family and social life for something as frivolous as that.

So anyway I teamed up with a long-time artist friend of mine and we buggered about for a year trying ideas out and travelling and stuff. Eventually we settled on a very silly idea that's rather experimental and risky and is built around a mechanic that's basically the polar opposite of what a sane developer would want to implement in a game, but we decided it was so amusing that it just might work...

Or the game could turn out awful, there's stll plenty of scope for that. 

I'll get bored and do my own stuff one day.

Until then I'll keep on doing cookie-cutter shite for various companies I cannot name.

Look forward to seeing your game, keep us up to date :) 

Kinn - So you gave up game development to make games. Good call. :P 

Post #325 

Wow, you missed the point there quite spectacularly. 

Not really, I was snarking more than anything else. 

Hi, hoping this is the right thread..

I�m a Quake mapper interested in commercial (yes commercial!) use of its GPL engine and maybe you can help me;

I�ve read that old Carmack message when ID released the source for free (and many people misinterpreted that !) so.. is it correct to say:

-if I build all my assets(maps, sounds, models, textures,..) on top of this Quake1 source code(modified or not), releasing ONLY this source code for free, I can create a standalone game and charge money for it ?

and why so few attempts(Malice,Shrak,Xmen,..)? 

If you can ensure that the gpl parts truely are a separate work (ie: you're just repackaging them with some startup script to load your game instead) then the gpl is generally fine with you distributing the two together.

There have been so few attempts because they're either total conversions (like xonotic or laser arena) which no longer contain any quake content and are not even thought of as quake (and don't feel like it either), or they're regular ol' mods with limited redistribution requirements.
Also, total conversions are actually quite a lot of work.