Hello, I am trying to get my improved fork of the icculus Wolf3d ready for release. There are tons of new features, but I am unclear on the license.
The original license supplied with the wolf3d sources (released in 1995) seems to be the same license that the proprietary wolf3d itself was distributed under. It is attached to this message. I see no mention of the GPL or any other license terms, that are mentioned apart from this license document in the original distribution. However, I see wolf3d mods all over the internet such as Wolf3D-GL that are supposedly released under a GPL license. In fact, every mod I've run across while googling have all been under GPL. But, I can't find a reference to this code ever being released under the GPL. I prodded johnc about it a few months ago but never received a reply (unsurprisingly). Does anyone have any more information about the licensing status of the wolf3d source code? I've attached the 3 files that were included in the readme/ directory under the original wolf3d source release. (license.doc is a plaintext file.) Have I overlooked something, or is every single wolf3d mod that hasn't been ground-up rewritten violating the license terms? Thanks, -- Ryan Underwood, <nemesis at icequake.net>, icq=10317253
license.doc
Description: MS-Word document
NOTES: ------ This version will compile under BORLAND C++ 3.0/3.1 and compiled perfectly before it was uploaded. Please do not send your questions to id Software.
We are releasing this code for the entertainment of the user community. We don't guarentee that anything even builds in here. Projects just seem to rot when you leave them alone for long periods of time. This is all the source we have relating to the original PC wolfenstein 3D project. We haven't looked at this stuff in years, and I would probably be horribly embarassed to dig through my old code, so please don't ask any questions about it. The original project was built in borland c++ 3.0. I think some minor changes were required for later versions. You will need the data from a released version of wolf or spear to use the exe built from this code. You can just use a shareware version if you are really cheap. Some coding comments in retrospect: The ray casting refresh architecture is still reasonably appropriate for the game. A BSP based texture mapper could go faster, but ray casting was a lot simpler to do at the time. The dynamically compiled scaling routines are now a Bad Thing. On uncached machines (the original target) they are the fastest possible way to scale walls, but on modern processors you just wind up thrashing the code cash and wrecking performance. A simple looping texture mapper would be faster on 486+ machines. The whole page manager caching scheme is unecessarily complex. Way too many #ifdefs in the code! Some project ideas with this code: Add new monsters or weapons. Add taller walls and vertical motion. This should only be done if the texture mapper is rewritten. Convert to a 32 bit compiler. This would be a fair amount of work, but I would hate to even mess with crusty old 16 bit code. The code would get a LOT smaller. Make a multi-player game that runs on DOOM sersetup / ipxsetup drivers. Have fun... John Carmack Technical Director Id Software
