Quake engine

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Tenebrae, a free software based on the Quake engine

The Quake engine is a 3D - game engine from id Software , which originally for the game Quake developed and later for other games has been further developed.

history

The Quake engine was rebuilt in 1996 together with the title Quake published and is the first 3D - game engine , which takes two-dimensional sprites real uses three-dimensional models. The game world is also not available as 2D information, which is then rendered in 3D, but consists of real three-dimensional data. The use of lightmaps and dynamic light sources is also in contrast to the previously used static light sources.

The engine is a pioneer for immersion - in particular the combination of mouselook and keyboard control opened up new possibilities for game development. A little later, GLQuake showed real hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Much of the programming on the Quake engine was done by John Carmack , who had also worked on the predecessor Doom .

The graphics engine was reused and further developed over many years for a number of other computer games, including Half-Life and Hexen 2 . The Quake engine was also used in the successor titles to the Quake series developed by id Software itself , Quake II ("id Tech 2") and Quake III Arena ("id Tech 3"). On the part of id Software, Quake III Arena was the last major improvement to the Quake graphics engine - a completely re-programmed engine ("id Tech 4") - appeared in August 2004 with the game Doom 3 .

id Software usually publishes the source code of the Quake games under the GNU GPL a few years after the release . The source code of Quake was released on December 21, 1999, Quake II on December 22, 2001, and Quake III Arena on August 19, 2005.

Games based on Quake technology

Quake engines pedigree
Quake family tree, engines and games based on id Tech 2

Here is a hierarchical listing of the engines and the games that emerged from them. It should be noted that these can be both the names of the engines and the names of the games. In addition, games are listed which license a Quake engine and / or use a further developed engine (e.g. Half-Life).

“False derivatives ” or spin-offs from the Quake engine

(For more titles see main article, Source Engine )

The "Source Engine" is one of Valve developed for Half-Life 2 engine, which is heavily based on the Half-Life engine (based on a Quake Licensing), it is based on a project split just before the release of the first half- Life part. According to Valve, it does not contain a single line of source code for the original game or engine, but this is probably not true, as John Carmack mentioned in an interview that Valve is still paying license fees to id Software for Half-Life 2 .

The Doom 3 engine ( id Tech 4 ) was developed for the game of the same name. Basically it is a reprogramming and at the same time a further development of the Quake 3 engine in the programming language C ++ (the predecessor still used C ), but according to id Software it has no source code from the predecessors.

Comparable alternatives

Web links