Source code Doom 3 engine will be open source this year

Developer id Software has announced at Quakecon that it will release the source code of Doom 3 this year. The developer thus maintains a long tradition; since Wolfenstein 3D, id has revealed the source code of game engines.

John Carmack, technical director and co-founder of id Software, announced in his Quakecon keynote, the source code of the Doom 3 engine will be made public later this year. According to Carmack, parent company Bethesda has given permission to publish the code of the 2004 shooting game. This will happen after the release of Rage, which hits stores from October 7.

The Doom 3 source code is likely to be released under version 3 of the GPL license, as id Software did with the Wolfenstein source: Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, among others. As then, textures, sounds, models and animations will probably not be released.

In the past, interested developers have released the code from id Software improved, used as the basis for new games and ported to other platforms. According to Carmack, the source of id Tech 5, Rage’s engine, will also be made public one day, but that could take ‘a decade or so’.