id Tech 4

In late 2011, the id Tech 4 game engine was made open-source by its proprietary company, id Software. More specifically, this is the first version of the engine, which was used to power id's 2004 game Doom 3.

I studied this engine extensively during the production of a mod called Atlanten.

The following pages contain notes on the game, the engine and related tools.

All of these notes having been originally written in French, some of the list items below will not have links as I unfortunately never found the time to translate those sections.

Note: the conversion of my writings to HTML was not perfect, and it's possible some sections contain formatting errors. If you find any such errors, you can notify me through this page.

Working with id Tech 4 involves many different disciplines:

  • Level design
    The most popular level design program for Doom 3 is DarkRadiant.
  • The console
    The Doom 3 console is a subwindow that allows the user to change certain values and input commands in-game.
  • Entities
    All characters, monsters and interactive objects are entities, each with specific properties.
  • GUIs
    GUI: Graphic User Interface. These are the menus that appear upon launching Doom 3, and in-game on computer screens.
  • Scripting
    Used to trigger map events, and manage game entities.

The code

External resources

  • id Dev Net is a resource published by id Software to aid modders with the Doom 3 SDK (software development kit), which contained part of the source code.