Monday, July 20, 2009

Where things are currently at

After that last crash bug I'm holding off on releasing until I'm reasonably certain that there aren't any more nasty little surprises waiting for me. The main reason is that I'm committing to this being a one-time-only release. I don't have the capacity to maintain two codebases concurrently, and the objective of the Quake II build was always to feed results from it back into DirectQ. So even if it does make it out with bugs, and even if it doesn't run on people's cards, there won't be updates.

The other option is not to release at all; my original plan didn't really involve any commitment to releasing, and I'll still achieve my objective anyway. However, having come this far it would be a shame not to.

Anyway, I'm also going to provide a replacement gamex86.dll with it, but probably won't be providing any source code for that. Why not? Because it's just a straight recompile of unchanged ID gamex86 code, and therefore if you want the source code you can just download it from ID. No sense in confusing things by releasing unchanged source code; the dll release will just be as a convenience (cos I'm such a nice guy) for anyone who doesn't have the necessary resources to compile ID's release themselves.

Before anyone goes howling about "GPL violations", I'd encourage you to actually read the text of the GPL. I am "offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place" (GPL section 3c) as I originally received it, and this is the very same source code that was used to compile the gamex86.dll I'll be distributing.

So let's get this nice and confusion-free now: The DirectQII gamex86.dll will NOT be in any way different to ID's 3.21 gamex86.dll, it is just being provided as a convenience for those who can't compile it themselves, the source code is NOT being released by me because I don't want anyone getting confused into thinking that it is different, because it is NOT different. If you want the source code you can download it from ID, it is THE VERY SAME.

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