Dante: Open-Source Doom 3

Oliver McFadden has been working on renderer improvements to the open-source id Tech 4 engine for the Doom 3 game. This project is now going under the name Dante.

McFadden, the developer known for being involved in the early days of open-source ATI Linux graphics development with writing the Revenge reverse-engineering utility plus also toyed with the idea of writing his own video BIOS, has been playing with the open-source Doom 3 / id Tech 4 engine code in his spare time.

Back in April I mentioned this graphics expert wrote a new GLSL back-end for Doom 3 and then proceeded to create OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL support. His OpenGL ES 2.0 and GLSL coding for Doom 3 has been an active project for several months and he's continuing its development now under the Dante name.

"Going forward, the repository will be named "Dante" (based on Dante's Inferno and it's fitting description of the Doom 3 game.) Dante journeyed through Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil," he says on his blog.

He's also playing with different shading algorithms and currently soliciting feedback from those on some sample images he put up on his blog. Doom 3 by default uses the Blinn-Phong shading model while he's been playing with the Phong shading model as well as the exponent value.

His open-source Doom 3 code can be found on GitHub.

Separately, another open-source developer recently added Wayland support to Doom 3 for his own open-source Doom 3 fork.

For the upstream ioDoom3 project, there sadly isn't much going on. For the main Git repository there hasn't even been a commit since December of 2011.