ioquake3 Engine Nears New Version

The team behind the development of the ioquake3 engine, a spin-off of the open-source Quake 3 engine, is preparing for the release of a new update. The second release candidate for ioquake3 1.36 is now available and it features a number of new improvements. This new release of ioquake3 brings off-server data downloading support, OpenAL sound support for surround-sound configurations, Ogg Vorbis audio decoding, full x86_64 architecture support, improved Quake Virtual Machine tools, and there are many other features. There is also an SDL back-end for the OpenGL context, window management, and input.

The complete set of new features available in ioquake3 1.36 RC2 is available on the IOQuake3 web-site. Now all that is left is for the official update to be released and then the various open-source games that utilize the engine (Urban Terror, Tremulous, World of Padman, etc) to pull in this new version. At that time we will also see benchmarks of this ioquake3 engine update thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite.