Quake 2 / Quake 3 / Quake 4 engine games for Linux on Steam

[Aoi Blue]

Considering that just about any Quake 2, Quake 3 or Quake 4 engine game can be ported to Linux and Mac with little or no effort, I don't know why so few games using those engines are available on Steam.

It would be nice if Valve would create a template SteamPlay setup for these engines in order to make porting them on Steam to be a simple matter of creating WAD files set up for the Steam DRM version of the appropriate engine, and sticking them in the right directory.

This, of course, means adding Direct3D to OpenGL texture and shader converter libs to the Mac and Linux versions of the engine, but that is about the only change needed.

[phillippi2]

If I remember correctly, id doesn't support native linux support. It's usually done by third parties.

Then again, I could be completely wrong; i'm not too sure

[Bytrix]

Exactly, it's not about the ease with which they can be ported, but rather the financial returns the publishers will make by releasing their games on Linux and paying to have someone port them in the first place.

[Aoi Blue]

Well, the ID3 engine runs on Linux, and there is a version supported by id software, however the community supported versions are a lot better at the current time.

The same goes for the ID2 (GLQuake) and ID1 (Doom) Engines.

The ID3 engine was orriginally ported by Loki Software, but id Software has taken over it. Id software has released several officially supported games for Linux on the platform, the most actively suported is QuakeLive, which is a native browser plugin game based on Quake 3 Team Arena. The use of a native browser plugin seems to dramatically reduce issues with compatability. The only issues were early quirks in PulseAudio which have been worked out by moving to the Alsa interface instead of the OSS Audio one.

However, many ID3 games use proprietary extensions that would need to be ported. Currently, only the ID Software games, and various Community-Made games and mods are guarenteed to work on Linux. Even some of those require a specific cross-platform patch.

From how well it could be ported to the NSPlugin Runtime for use on Quake Live, I think the ID3 engine would work well on the Steam Runtime Environment. This would eliminated many of the compatability issues that Linux is about as infamous as Windows for.

The ID1 engine for Linux is completely unsupported, but it also isn't supported under Windows. At tht time the only supported way to run the ID1 engine is on DosBox, and I don't see many developers doing that.

As of the ID2 engine, it is in much the same state as the ID1. The official GLQuake codebase is so obsolete that it cannot be guarenteed run on modern Windows systems, this is not to mention the old software-rendered engine and DirectDraw engine. (Yes, Direct Draw, not Direct3D, and the Windows95 revision at that.)

The ID4 engine, Last I checked, it is partially supported. It is currently supported for developers but not players. According to id Software, their various ID4 engine games haven't been throughly tested on the Linux code base.

[Jogo Detonado]

I cannot understand this logical...
take a look, on this link on idsoftware
"update"
http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/

[Aoi Blue]

Erik Chendo, Like I said that update to run under Linux is unsupported i.e. if you call their tech support department with a problem on the Linux issue they say if you can isolate it, report a bug, otherwise your on your own.

There is no reason they can't run an unsupported Beta on Steam, Valve does it all the time. They simply mark it with a Beta warning. Currently Portal 2 has just been released as such a beta.