Id Software - Technology

Technology

Starting with their first shareware game series, Commander Keen, Id Software has licensed the core source code for the game, or what is more commonly known as the engine. Brainstormed by John Romero, Id Software held a weekend session titled "The Id Summer Seminar" in the summer of 1991 with prospective buyers including Scott Miller, George Broussard, Ken Rogoway, Jim Norwood and Todd Replogle. One of the nights, Id Software put together an impromptu game known as "Wac-Man" to demonstrate not only the technical prowess of the Keen engine, but also how it worked internally.

Id Software has developed their own game engine for each of their titles when moving to the next technological milestone, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Shadowcaster, DOOM, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III, as well as technology used in making Doom 3. After being used first for Id Software's in-house game, the engines are licensed out to other developers. According to Eurogamer.net, "Id Software has been synonymous with PC game engines since the concept of a detached game engine was first popularised". During the mid to late 1990s, "the launch of each successive round of technology it's been expected to occupy a headlining position", with the Quake III engine being most widely adopted of their engines. However Id Tech 4 had far fewer licensees than the Unreal Engine from Epic Games, due to the long development time that went into Doom 3 which Id had to release before licensing out that engine to others.

In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major Id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old. Consequently, many home grown projects have sprung up porting the code to different platforms, cleaning up the source code, or providing major modifications to the core engine. Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake engine ports are ubiquitous to nearly all platforms capable of running games, such as hand-held PCs, iPods, the PSP, the Nintendo DS and more. Impressive core modifications include DarkPlaces which adds stencil shadow volumes into the original Quake engine along with a more efficient network protocol. Another such project is ioquake3, which maintains a goal of cleaning up the source code, adding features and fixing bugs.

The GPL release of the Quake III engine's source code was moved from the end of 2004 to August 2005 as the engine was still being licensed to commercial customers who would otherwise be concerned over the sudden loss in value of their recent investment.

On August 4, 2011, John Carmack revealed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that they will be releasing the source code of Doom 3 (Id Tech 4) during the year.

Id Software publicly stated they would not support the Wii console (possibly due to technical limitations), although they have since indicated that they may release titles on that platform (although it would be limited their games released during the 1990s).

Since Id Software revealed their engine Id Tech 5, they call their engines "Id Tech", followed by a version number. Older engines have retroactively been renamed to fit this scheme, with the Doom engine as Id Tech 1.