Interview Steffen Häuser (Quake 2)

[xeron]

Some time ago I asked the Duke3D people if they'd
release the source-code. At that time they
answered "not planned currently".

The build engine is open source. If someone ported that, they'd have a huge head start if and when the Duke 3D specific sources were released, but I don't expect that they will.

For starters, whenever sourcecode is released, you get a bunch of posts from people saying "LOOK! Source code! Someone port this for me because I don't want to learn the skills required to do it myself!" and usually nobody ports it.

Edit: Heh.. just realised who you were... hey if you asked for the sources, yes, you probably WOULD por it  :-D

[CodeSmith]

Actually, from what I can tell the source *is* the Duke3D source, in order to have the entire game all you need is the game data files.

It doesn't look *too* complex (famous last words  :-D ), seems like the really tricky thing will be porting the assembler functions to either C or PPC assembler.  My knowledge of x86 assembler is reasonable, but PPC assembler is closer to zip  :-) ).  Still, if I'm going to burn some time this will be more direct than trying to speed up Bochs...

So, when are your pals at Hyperion going to give me an OS I can buy to try this out on?  ;-)

Edit: Actually, scratch that - after looking more carefully, it looks like it's all just generic engine code - for example in game.c there's mention of "brown monsters" and "evil al", but none of the the usual Duke3D menagerie.  Looks like I was wrong.  Nuts  :-(

[xeron]

Actually, from what I can tell the source *is* the Duke3D source, in order to have the entire game all you need is the game data files.

No its not. It doesn't have a lot of the duke3d specific extensions. From the FAQ:

I was playing [a commercial Build game] and I noticed some sector effects were missing in your Ken-Build demo. Are you going to release that stuff?

No, because that stuff was never a part of my Build test game. Many of those effects were written by the individual game developers in their own code. While I did write some sections of their code (such as network code and Duke bots), I have no right to release it. I can say however that I did write 100% of the source code in my Ken-Build test game. Now that the Build source is released, you can finally understand what I'm responsible for.