[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[Frank Crowell]

From: "Brian Hook" <brianhook at pyrogon.com>

> 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.

I see 64 as the upper end.  I am picking up from various people the
notion that they want an environment where they can take the big
system mechanics and world things but engage on a smaller scale.  It
seems it more important to select areas or zones (for example like
in Unreal or UT), run it on your system and have a few people over
for whatever.

> 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).

Actually the client source has been available in the sense that you
could look at it and modify it, but there was always a distribution
and use restriction.  Q2 is GPL (well ok its not a perfect license)
and so now you don't have to worry about the wishwashy idsoftware
license.

> And it's an incredibly powerful framework for doing design work on
> bots.  Many cool Q2 bots were made

Bots and Quake movies.

> 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.

Actually this may not too hard now that the whole source is
available.  The client can only handle one area at a time in any
kind of virtual world.  But you can serve multiple areas.

I am not saying it would be a weekend project, but it would be a lot
faster than starting from scratch.  Of course I would remove the
"twitchy" part to Quake which I suppose would make a lot of
Quak-ites angry.


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