Doom3world

Quake 4 was the first PC game I really liked. Before that I mainly played games on my game console. I loved Quake 4, Doom 3, and even put 200 hours into ET:QW before the site was pulled.
I loved the ID games I have played, but have never touched them beyond playing them. I have worked with Unity 3d, UDK, and several open source engines. I have also worked with Java, Python, and C++.
What I figured was it is better to mod a game than to start from ground 0, especially if you want to make something that the game you are modding did very well.

What I wanted to do was make a multiplayer shooter modification that involved melee combat and shooting. I saw that Quake 4 has an SDK for it and Doom 3 has all of its source code available. I have read that Quake 4 had more robust networking and had some fixes over Doom 3. If I wanted to mod Quake 4 and use the SDK, how would one distribute what they have done? I have never worked with modding a game before, besides simple changes to Quake 3 Arena. Is the Quake 4 SDK well documented? I see on the mod wiki that there are more Doom 3 tutorials than Quake 4. Also I see that there are more Quake 3 tutorials than Quake 4. Was Quake 3 more popular as an Arena game and thus it received more modding attention?


I guess my question boils down to, of all the ID game engines and sdks would you recommend the Quake 4 SDK for a base to work on a multiplayer shooter? Or is it not as well documented and would you recommend something else? Would Your think that Doom 3 would be a better candidate because of its resurgence in interest with it going Open Source? I see that there is more documentation on Doom 3 than Quake 4 on most video tutorial sites.

Thank you for reading

Q4 would work but it's not as popular as ETQW, by far.

For an id mod all you do is put your new content & compiled binary (dll/so) in it's own subfolder under the game's folder. Ex:

Quake4 - base
|-q4mod

It runs the stuff in base first, then runs the mod you loaded.

Q4 has some optimizations that D3 didn't have, it also took some features out of D3. ETQW is a kind of balance between the two, but it's MP only with bots for SP.

Honestly, I'd say mod Quake 2. We're always looking for fun Q2 mods but if you want to mod Q4 go ahead, modding is one heck of a fun ride.