Following up from our earlier report here on Neowin we have learned of some interesting updates on this project. Quake II Evolved (or Q2E) has seen some serious set back already as the project has been accused of using illegally leaked GOLK code (the code that is Quake III engine). Berserk has now confirmed this in their own forums and initially appears to want to close the project down and concentrate on finding others that use illegal GOLK code. The community appears to be standing behind the Q2E project which is basically a technology update for Quake 2 bringing it up to todays standards. Will it be worth it or is Quake 2 just too much like old news?
View: Team Blur discussion forum thread
Berserk speaks out: The full story:
Months ago, I was trying to get some Q3 stuff in Q2. Mainly shaders and related things. I was using the l33t engine (now qFusion), Aftershock, and other misc/incomplete engines as a base or reference.
I saw links to this Q3 map renderer posted on a public dev forum. It wasn't that good, shader code was poorly written and not finished at all. But it had some interesting rendering code in it.
I gave it a try and after looking at how Q3 works I noticed it did the same but different. What I mean is that it used the same rendering methods, but it had some differences when calling OpenGL functions. Since I didn't find it to be "the same" (you can tell how Q3 renders every shader by looking at gl.log's or trying diff settings, etc... without the need to be a GL expert) and also had some nasty bugs, I thought it was ok to use that as a reference. Also, in one way or another, almost all Q3 clones do the same: setup arrays, lock arrays, set state, render, unlock arrays, etc... I didn't find this suspicious at all, otherwise you would suspect from every other Q3 clone even if it's legal.
View: Team Blur discussion forum thread
continued from front page: I never saw GOLK, so I couldn't tell if the code was taken from it, but after looking at another engine based on it, it seems to be. While I don't find it to be the same code I put in Q2E, there are several similar things.
GOLK was apparently early dev code, so that should explain some differences. But it still looks familiar enough to come from a trusted, legal source. I'm still looking for that Q3 renderer I used, but since the search feature is broken in the forums, I have to go thread by thread.
Anyway, believe it or not, that's not up to me.
The thing is that I used some code based on an illegal engine, and that also makes Q2E illegal in one way or another.
So I think the right thing to do is to shut it down, and also find other engines based on GOLK, or using code from GOLK-based engines, and report them to id Software.
That's all I guess...
And thanks for the support guys
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.