as some of you may know the person John Carmack, the uber-brain at id Software, gave the "Yes" to release the RTCW and Enemy Territory Source Code to the public under the GPL licence while the QuakeCon 2010.
What does this mean for us?
At first bugs and exploits will be found in the engine code and at last we will probably see also more hacks on our server.
That's certainly bad for all of us legit players but this news does also imply some positive things.
Due to the release of the source code its possible that we get:
- W:ET Patches which are fixing known bugs and exploits
- Patches which bring us great improvements like better netcode and ogg support
- An entire new designed W:ET with a new and fresh and funky looking renderer like the Xreal Renderer
The negative side could be that everyone then is using another version of ET and the players won't be able to join other servers, so I hope that 1 or 2 projects will emerge and become popular so that we don't run into a ET versions problem.
So how are the news from the front?
Since 1 year is a possible sucessor in the pipelines called "Axis Revenge". This game will use the Xreal Engine but so far are no ingame pictures, videos or a even a demo of the game available.
It's also a question of time when someone else will try to make a new ET, because since the entire code is released everyone could make a new ET.
We will also see an ioWolfET port by the ioQuake maintainer. All overall it will support the features which ioQuake does provide and probably new ones. The existent ones are:
* Ports to new platforms
* Off-server data downloads (http redirection) via HTTP and FTP with cURL
* OpenAL sound rendering allowing for surround (5.1 and 7.1) speaker layouts and generally improved sound
quality. Especially on the Windows Vista Operating System.
* Ogg Vorbis audio decoding.
* In-engine VOIP support, with optional Mumble player-location support.
* IPV6 Networking. We’re ready to frag on the net of the future!
* SDL backend for the OpenGL context, window management, and input. This also improves portability.
* Anaglyph stereo rendering (for viewing with 3D glasses)
* Full x86-64 architecture support
* Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support
* New SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64
* Compilation with MinGW and cross-compilation for Windows from Linux
* Improved console command auto-completion
* Persistent console command history
* Improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools
* Colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems
* GUID System
* Multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders)
* PNG format support for textures
* Numerous security fixes
Back to Xreal...
I wanna show you some "eye-candies" by the Xreal Renderer which will be merged into the ET source code:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh5NQ1iT ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kOMFcp6 ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWkhyIeE ... r_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gBWo-miHQ
http://xreal-project.net/?page_id=3/map ... surrection
If no game studio is able to develope an official ET sucessor, we gonna do it on our own
Appendix:
http://xreal-project.net/
http://www.iowolfet.org/
http://www.axisrevenge.com/