Spearmint, Macwerks/Watermint Engines Still Running

The Spearmint Game Engine, which aims to be a more impressive and feature-rich version of ioquake3, as well as Watermint, a "realistic" fork of Spearmint, are still actively being pursued.

After earlier today writing about the lack of progress on Doom 3 projects, I was poking around to see if there's anything new out of the ioquake3 projects. Fortunately, the open-source community around the older id Tech 3 game engine is still thriving.

The Spearmint engine fork was first covered on Phoronix back in January as a further improved version of the ioquake3 engine. Spearmint adds in features like four-player split-screen handling, a better virtual machine, a modified pure PK3 system, Ogg Vorbis handling by default, FreeType support out-of-the-box, and much more.

While there's been no compelling titles delivered on the Spearmint engine and it's out-of-date compared to the upstream open-source id Tech 4 engine, the engine is still being developed vigorously.

The GitHub repository on the engine shows the most recent activity being less than one day old at the time of publishing. There's commits going into Spearmint almost every day and it's following closely with ioquake3.

Based upon Spearmint in turn is the Macwerks engine, also hosted on GitHub. Macwerks goal is to become a standalone first-person shooter and its added features include reloading, de-lagged hit-scan, off-hand grappling hook support, more precise health and damage scaling, more control of gameplay through server-side variables, and new game modes like "Survival" and "Scoring Frenzy" and "Rail Factory" modes.

Using this engine is also Turtle Arena and ioid3, but for the latter title they don't seem to have any released code.

From the Macwerks project is also Watermint, a fork of Spearmint, and hosted on GitHub too. The repository about Watermint says, "The intent of this project is to provide a realistic version of Spearmint for future development with open-sourced realism-based first person shooters."

Watermint hasn't seen any activity in one week but there were commits happening in March.