John Carmack has been fairly vocal about releasing the source code for his games, particularly the Quake/Doom series for as long as I can remember, going back to at least Quakecon 2004 during one of his keynotes there. I think at the keynote when they announced Doom 3, he even talked at length about eventually releasing that engine as open source, I think in 7 years (which eventually did happen). He is not the flag carrier for open source games, but he may be one of the most consistent at following through on open sourcing their base engine over the last 20 years. Before leaving Meta as CTO he was speaking about making sure the GO and Quest 1 were usable in offline mode with sideload capability when they become EOL'd. In my view this release of code is not at all surprising in the least.

I went to quakecon 2004, it was an amazing experience. I keep wanting to go back but never do, maybe next year I'll go as a 20-year follow up. I have no excuse because I live very close to the hotel!

Quakecon 2023 is happening right now till Sunday, maybe you can get back some of those memories watching the Quake Pro League matches live stream https://youtube.com/@Quake

ID has traditionally release code for their games when they reach...I forget, 10 years, or end of official support or something. This is just continuing the tradition of giving their games the longest of tale by opening them up. Check it out. https://github.com/id-Software

They used to open source the code after 5 years, but I think they stopped open sourcing their games after Carmack left.

It could just be that they started using other proprietary components in their code though.

Would've loved to read the source code for Doom 2016!

Yeah they use a substantial amount of proprietary middleware now, so even if they wanted to open source the engine it would be difficult to pull off. As of Doom Eternal they're using middleware for at least audio (Wwise), video (Bink), compression (Oodle), physics (Havok), culling (Umbra) and networking (Playfab), plus any references to console SDKs would have to be meticulously scrubbed from a public release, which was less of an issue back when they were a PC-first studio.

Rage should still be releaseable as Carmack wanted to release the source code at some point but he left id before that happened.

I always found amusing that to replace him Zenimax built a whole new studio in Germany to hire the top programmers from Crytek and even then Doom 2016 used a litany of middleware :-P.

Shame they never finished Rage. It was a pretty good game up to the point where the boss came in and said they needed to have it out the door in a week.

It probably went through some heavy development hell, it was id's longest game in development (7 years) and IMO it wasn't really that great as a game - the shooting bits were great and felt very good (the best part of the game), the driving sections felt bad with the levels being too small to drive around and too large to walk and the quests felt tacked on. The various "bonuses" (like those things that hang in the air and you can pick up by making stunts) feel like excuses to pad out the game's length.

It was like the game didn't know if it wanted to be an FPS or some seamless open world ARPG so it tried to do a bit of both and the only reason the FPS side didn't felt bad was because id was masters at making FPSs by that time - but it was certainly dragged down.

It would have been way better if it was a regular FPS with a linear progression of levels like id's previous games.

Doom 3 even had that issue to a smaller degree. They had to rewrite some sort of lighting middleware before open sourcing. That's just one piece of middleware though, and modern stuff is probably much more hairy and complex.

That one wasn't middleware but rather a patent issue, the code in question was written by Carmack but he had unwittingly rediscovered a technique that had already been patented by Creative Labs. Id licensed it from Creative for Doom 3s commercial release but legal wouldn't sign off on including it with the open source version so Carmack swapped it out for a different, slower algorithm.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/patent-issue-forces-new...

This is why software patents shouldn't be a thing at all =(

Ah thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I've read the details.

Original Doom used proprietary DMX audio library https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DMX, didnt stop Carmack and Raven from releasing sources.

Per the article they only open sourced the Linux port, which had already had DMX stripped out and replaced with an open source alternative.

Engines have grown a bit more complex since then anyway, there isn't an open source library that could easily replace Wwise.

It's such a good thing for the company to do - gives back to the community, generates a load of good will and ensures that we don't lose the history of games. Props to ID.

It also helped them out for porting to phones and stuff for official releases if I remember right.

I remember in one if Carmack's last Quakecon keynotes, after the acquisition, he was talking about future source code releases. He didn't say anything definitive, but he did tell a story where he spoke with a Zenimax lawyer, and they told him how important the GPL releases were.

This is not the engine code, this is the game code that was released even prior to Quake 2 being GPLd.

    -----------------------------------------
    John Carmack's .plan for Dec 11, 1997
    -----------------------------------------

    The Quake 2 public code release is up at:

    ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/source/q2source_12_11.zip

    This source code distribution is only for hard-core people that are
    going to spend a lot of time pouring over it. This is NOT a
    how-to-make-levels-for-q2 type dsitribution!

    This should keep a bunch of you busy for a while. :)

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...