Understanding quake engines and conversion mods?

[duby2291]

I guess the title pretty much says it all, but I'll elaborate a bit in here....

It is my understanding that the quake, and quake2 engines have been open sourced. So I was looking into installing those games. Turns out that the content is still not free. OK understandable I can certainly agree with that. So instead I was interested in installing some of the conversion mods that are available in Portage. Like the quake1-rally package.

However it seems that those conversion mods only install the data files, and not the game engine? I dont get it. How do I go about installing these conversion mods? Theres alot of them available, especially for the quake3 engine, buit how do I install them?

I'm confused, please help me, and thanks for your patience.

[sonicbhoc]

As far as I know, it's like this: there are two types of quake-based games: MODs and GAMEs. The way I see it, games are completely separate games built upon the quake engine, but with modifications and technically aren't "quake" anymore. Next, are MODs which are mods of Quake, and as such don't have their own engine and require the quake engine, which requires the quake files from the CD.
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[PaulBredbury]

If you want to play Quake for free, the best choices are:

For Quake 1:
emerge =darkplaces-20070412 (grab ebuild) with the following USE flags: alsa demo lights opengl skins textures. You'll first need the lha ebuild.

For Quake 2:
emerge =qudos-9999 (grab ebuild) with USE flags: alsa demo opengl optimize-cflags qmax sdl textures

For Quake 3:
emerge quake3-demo with USE flags: opengl
emerge quake3-wop (grab ebuild).

For Quake 4:
emerge quake4-demo with USE flags: opengl

The full level data is not open-source (although dirt-cheap these days), but the demo data can be downloaded for free. quake3-wop replaces the level data with its own, which is a great achievement.

Gentoo is the best Linux distro for games, because ebuilds can handle custom licenses.