Quake III for Android

Holy awesome, Quake 3 for Android! Did I mention that my wife is an internationally ranked Quake champ (seriously, she played on the first UK team)? I think I just lost my spouse for a week. (via /.)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Felix Mitchell

ray: just looked up that magic framerate thing, crazy. I’m sure there’s a good reason why the programmers chose to calculate position like that, but it’s bizarre.

Seconding the assertion that serious FPS gamers don’t play without a mouse.
- Anonymous
  
  The calculations work that way because the game needs to figure out how far you’ve moved from one frame to the next. When you take the speeds the player moves at and divide it into 1/76th of a second chunks, the math used to calculate the movement happens to work out in a way that things get rounded up a little more than normal.
johnphantom

The first Quake owned. I actually played against Thresh on the Harvard Quake server. He beat me badly, by using a technique of denial – he ran all the spawn points for equipment and kept me from acquiring any.

I played Quake 2 a lot, and hated Quake 3.
MrJM

“I think I just lost my spouse for a week.”

But she’ll be back… and more dangerous than ever.
Anonymous

OK then Cory,

Let’s hear directly from Alice about the constraints of interface. I’m a female gamer myself, but if I tried to play modern PC FPSs, I always ended up staring at the floor and the ceiling alternately.

Now I can run circles around people (literally!) with the wiimote and nunchuk combo. I blame Elebits!
beemoh

Unreal Tournament was better.

*runs away quickly*
Anonymous

ray: Actually, he is releasing just the engine. The instructions for installation require the Quake3 CD or the Demo as well as the latest point release.
Jere Majava

Quake 3 has been available for Nokia N900 for months. Maemo – I mean Meego – kicks Android ass as a completely open source mobile OS anyways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHSZfhY25Jc
pauln

And in other, related news, Quake III has mysteriously been removed from the iPhone App Store.
jmtd

@Jere Majava: only if open source is a relative term. (“a little big pregnant”). See http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages for a list of the non-open source bits of maemo, and why.
ray_

If your wife is that good, then she wouldn’t seriously play quake without a full-size keyboard, a mouse with a large mousing surface and headphones. Still, color me impressed – I have to hold down a day job and it seriously stunts my Quake skills.

My main reason for commenting: Q3 isn’t really about graphical “prowess” except in the programming prowess required to make the most of fairly minimal hardware capabilities. For example, the “lightmap” technique allows the game to simulate more sophisticated lighting using precomputed radiosity data and only basic multi-texturing support from hardware.

Translation: running Q3 on a phone is *not* the same as demonstrating some sort of ‘powerful’ graphics acceleration from that phone.

So for Quake-on-Android specifically, I see it as more of a “beacause we could” technology demo than anything else. It says that the SOCs phones are built around have finally caught up to where the desktop GPU feature sets were ten years ago. The low framerate even after some platform-specific optimization says that the GPU’s throughput is only caught up to ~twelve years ago. (note: ask your wife about the “magic” framerates in Quake- e.g. why all serious players strove to run the game at 85 or 125 fps, even on a 72Hz crt…)

THE MOST interesting question from my perspective is “What kind of power consumption is seen when playing the game?” Does the battery get sucked dry in 40mins or can the user see 25fps without turning their phone into a brick mid-day…?

Finally, based on the screenshot on his website, I’m a tad worried that this project is violating ID’s copyright. ID has only open-sourced the game ENGINE, not the models, textures, arenas and sounds that make the game into a PRODUCT. If you want to license the game CONTENT from them, you’re supposed to negotiate that separately.
Eric Ragle

Am I weird for thinking it’s really hot that Cory’s wife is a Quake champ? Chick-geeks rock.