[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[Brian Hook]

I just wanted to put in a couple comments here.  I'm pretty much in
full agreement with Frank on this; Q2 as a spring board for just
about any type of on-line game makes a lot of sense.  It won't scale
to hundreds or thousands of users, however it DOES support 64 users
pretty well.  And the big killer for bandwidth was the fast and loud
weapons like the hyperblaster, so in a more sedate environment like
a MUD, you could easily host many more users.

You could EASILY do a low-tech, simple NWN style game with Q2.  In
fact, you could do it WITHOUT the client source.  A long time ago
someone wrote an RTS for Q2 using nothing but the client game source
code (which has always been freely distributed).  It was actually
pretty well done (its name was QWars, but it's not around anymore
unfortunately).

And it's an incredibly powerful framework for doing design work on
bots.  Many cool Q2 bots were made.  Some required manual way points
but some very high quality ones did complex surface analysis and
generated their own path finding data based on the geometry.  One
particular bot learned path finding by emulating the other players
in the world.  This allowed it to do things that many didn't think
were possible, including jumping onto a moving platform.

And it has a software renderer and should run on older systems (it
ran fine on a PPro/200).  If you want 640x480 graphics you might be
in a bit of trouble with the software renderer, but I still think it
should be doable.

The #1 problem with Q2 is that you don't have a huge, open world
without eating up a ton of resources on the client and server.
Different clients can't be on different "levels", but if I were
doing an RPG with Q2 I'd have the "DM" control when to level to the
next "floor" of the dungeon.  Sure, it's dungeon crawl, but it still
works.

Brian

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