Doom 3 BFG Edition graphics engine released as free software

John Carmack at the Game Developers Conference 2010
John Carmack at the Game Developers Conference 2010

About a year after the release of the source code of the original version of Doom 3’s graphics engine and only a few weeks after the Doom 3 BFG Edition, which contains Doom, Doom ][, Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil expansion pack together with 7 new levels titled “The Lost Mission” was published, the source code of the BFG Edition was released as well.

Still based on the id Tech 4 graphics engine, Doom 3 BFG Edition is an updated version of the game not only for the addition of new levels but also for its improvements in graphics, sounds, support of 3D screens and many other elements. Along with the announcement of the release of the sources there was the one of a further update of the game that brings even more enhancements and fixes a few bugs.

Bethesda Software, the publishing company specialized in videogames that owns id Software, has released the source code for Doom 3 BFG Edition into a new repository on GitHub. It’s only the graphics engine because over the years the data of the various videogames have always been kept proprietary when their graphics engines have been released as open source.

Now we’ll see what the reception of the community will be. A year after the release of the graphics engine of the Doom 3 original version, the projects to create new free / open source videogames based upon it are still at an early stage. It was known that the adoption of a new graphics engine was a long-term goal but at least personally I have to admit that I thought that by now we’d have some new videogames based on the id Tech 4 graphics engine or some videogames based upon one of the free derived of the id Tech 3 engine ported to the id Tech 4.

At this point, my impression is that the developers of free videogames that already exist at least in the near future prefer to keep on using the graphics engines derived from id Tech 3, which keep on being developed. Considering the fact that new free videogames of the FPS genre aren’t born every day, it’s inevitable that the projects born after the release of the id Tech 4 graphics engine are very few. The release of this updated version brings hope to increase the interest in these projects.

Another positive element is the possibility to create a native Linux client for Doom 3 BFG Edition. There are no plans to create an official one so it’s possible that some group of developers will create one to bring the new Doom 3 version to Linux.

Waiting for any developments, in every sense, we still have to thank John Carmack (photo ©Official GDC), the co-founder of id Software who continues with his policy of releasing the sources of the graphics engines created by his company which allows the creation of an extraordinary ecosystems of free / open source videogames.

[ad name=”GANGameTap300″]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *