Nuclide
Software Development Kit for id Technology
About The Project

The Nuclide project produces a freely available game-logic component and development platform on top of FTE; which is a featureful engine based on the 1999 GPL source code release of Quake by id Software.

The general idea is that Nuclide takes care of ~90% of the code you shouldn't have to worry about.

It is targeted towards developers with a background/interest in id Technology, and we incorporate design aspects from across the known spectrum of existing engines and tech.

It comes with a simple example game (simply referred to as 'TestGame' or 'Base') and some test maps. There's also some other, third-party example projects.

General feature overview:

  • The 'missing' SDK for engines like FTE
  • Support for client-side predicted movement, weaponry and vehicles
  • Documented APIs for everything you need to interface with the engine
  • APIs and Frameworks for managing updates, mods, servers, and platform specific features
  • Complete re-implementations of hundreds of entities, from GoldSrc/Source engine games
  • Entity communication via traditional one-way triggers, or our Source Engine I/O compatible system
  • Includes BotLib, a framework for multiplayer-AI that can receive game-specific overrides
  • Includes VGUILib, a re-imagining of Valve's GUI library, which can also be used for in-game surface based interfaces
  • Designed to be familar to developers coming from GoldSrc/Source
  • VR/XR aware codebase
  • All permissively licensed

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why might I want to use it?

You might be migrating from an engine that is no longer being licensed and don't want to learn a new engine and toolchain.

You might want to develop a game using a lot of complex and well-tested objects which might be tedious to implement on your own.

You might want to run or make modifications for a game using Nuclide and need full control over what you can do.

2. How free is Nuclide?

Everything in Nuclide is free software. The copyright terms for the game-logic are very permitting. Nuclide does not use the GPL as a point of reference in terms of license, it instead uses a ISC-like license. This means you can use, copy, modify and distribute the code and work resulting from it for any purpose.

Note
Please read the very short 'LICENSE' document for details.

3. What are the alternatives?

Implementing systems such as prediction, complex map objects and entities on your own, from scratch - or licensing another engine such as Source that ships with its own Source SDK Base.

4. Any example projects?