game development project

ok im working with some friends on game development. my job is concept, graphics, and research. im in my research mode and our first game will be a shooter(since there are so many free engines and stuff allready available and its not to hard to get unique with a project) well we need a free engine that we can use and im trying to find it. well ive been looking into quake since its so prominent. well ive found open quartz and it kinda sux. i need something more modern(open quartz is an open source version of the quake 1 engine) can anyone give me a good open source quake 2 or 3 engine and point me in the right direction for this project on the forums. if so i would really appriciate it.

Have you checked out this page?:

http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/

The latest quake engine is quake 4, but to use that one you would have to pay a huge amount of money to license it. I believe the quake 3 engine and earlier are free to use/modify. Don't take my word for it though.

I think another good engine might be Ogre 3D:

http://www.ogre3d.org/

You can probably find the majority of the available engines here:

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/

Here is a listing of the engines that use DirectX:

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/list.php?fid=4&sid=1

They have over 123 engines to choose from and they give nice summaries of the pros and cons to each engine, and what features they support. I hope that helps!

Nice links there Bigwebmaster. I've been planning a solo game project for awhile and been thinkin about engines. Was going to design and make my own. Create the gameplay first and develop the engine last.
But I'm lookin into one of those freebies now

Awsome links. I had been poking around for different game engines, but hadnt found any databases quite as large as that. Much appreciated!

Is this in the right forum?

i asked that myself please tell me where it would go. and thanks bigweb ill look into these.

--edit--

i am curently experimenting with the quake 1 and 2 engines. ill probably settle on the quake 3 engine(and it is free)