Quake

This page documents information about a third-party game running on a non-Valve engine. This information is documented here because it has technical and/or historical relevance to Valve's engines.

Quake is a 3D first-person shooter released in 1996 by id Software. Its engine was licensed out to many companies, including Valve. GoldSrc is based off of Quake engine code, specifically, GLQuake and Quakeworld (with some Quake II code), with it's successors Source and Source 2 both still retaining some residual Quake code.

The Quake Engine introduced many of the concepts still used in Source today, such as the modern variant of the BSP, the use of a PVS, precomputated lightmaps, visleafs and brush entities. Early GoldSrc multiplayer was based off the QuakeWorld multiplayer code (until 2001, when some Quake III^{[citation needed]} code was added).

The Quake Engine and its successor, the Quake II Engine, are now both retroactively referred to as id Tech 2. Both engines have been released as free and open source under the GPLv2 license, allowing for many source ports to be created, which add quality-of-life improvements and are now the preferred way of playing the game, including an official source port released in 2021.

Expansions/DLC

• Mission Pack No. 1: Scourge of Armagon is a three-episode expansion pack by Hipnotic Interactive (now Ritual).
• Mission Pack No. 2: Dissolution of Eternity is a two-episode expansion pack by Rogue Entertainment.
• Dimension of the Past is an extra episode created by MachineGames and released for free as a gift for the game's 20th anniversary. This was also included in the Quake Remaster (2021).

New gameplay elements

• Rocket Jump
• Grenade Jump
• Power ups
  • Pentagram of Protection
  • Ring of Shadows
  • Quad Damage
• Unrestricted movement compared to Doom (1993) where at least two players and enemies^[Clarify] can be in the same vertical space.

Gameplay elements

• Telefrag

Compilers

Quake also uses three compiler tools in compiling a map: QBSP, VIS, and LIGHT. The code for these was used as the basis of the compiling tools used by the compilers used by the Valve engine map compilers, as seen below:

	Original Quake compilers	Original GoldSrc compilers	ZHLT, VHLT, and derivatives	Source compilers	Source 2 compilers
CSG	part of QBSP	QCSG	HLCSG	part of VBSP	resourcecompiler
BSP	QBSP (Source code)	QBSP2	HLBSP	VBSP
VIS	VIS (Source code)	VIS	HLVIS	VVIS
RAD	LIGHT, no radiosity lighting (Source code)	QRAD	HLRAD	VRAD	VRAD2 ( and earlier) VRAD3 (in all games since )

ericw-tools uses the same nomenclature as the original Quake compilers.

2021 Remaster

In 2021, Nightdive Studios released an official source port with new remastered lighting and models, using the Kex Engine framework to connect the underlying Quake engine code to modern APIs. The remaster, officially titled "Quake Enhanced", but also colloquially known as "Quake EX" or simply "QEX", runs under Vulkan on Windows 10 and later, and can also run on Linux and the Steam Deck using Proton. It can also unofficially run on Windows 7-8.1, without multiplayer support, and can be forced to run under DirectX 11 by using the +r_rhirenderfamily d3d11 command-line argument.

Although the engine code for the 2021 remaster is closed-source, the updated QuakeC game code has been released under the GPLv2 on id Software's GitHub. This is the first time the game code for the mission packs has been released under this license, as they were previously only available under a less permissive license.^[Clarify]

Source ports

Since the release of the Quake source code, there are various source ports available:

• Quakespasm - Limit-breaking source port focused on vanilla accuracy. Fork of the long-deprecated FitzQuake. Actively maintained.
  • Quakespasm-Spiked (QSS) - Fork of Quakespasm that can run at higher frame rates than 72FPS without breaking physics.
    • vkQuake - Fork of QSS running on Vulkan, with additional features. No longer maintained as of 9 May 2023.
• TASQuake - a port which allows to record inputs for tool assisted speedrunning (TAS) as .qtas files.
• FTEQW - Source port focused on standalone game development. Notably includes clean-room implementations of GoldSrc file formats (BSP, MDL, WAD3, HLSPR), being used for clean-room reverse-engineered ports of Counter-Strike 1.5 (as FreeCS) and Half-Life Deathmatch (as FreeHL). Actively maintained.

Bugs/Limitations

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Bug:Overbright lighting (as found in the original software renderer) was broken on GLQuake with no options to re-enabling it via any command, which makes the color less saturated and lighting much darker.
GoldSrc originally fixed this in its OpenGL renderer (disableable with gl_overbright 0, but it was broken again in an update that added multitexturing support. Details for this bug on GoldSrc can be found on it's page about the engine itself.
Modern source ports fix this, via a gl_overbright command, like GoldSrc.

Confirm:Does this discrepancy exist in Quake 2? It's probably fixed in IdTech 3, as that has r_overbrightbits (which works a bit differently than Quake and GoldSrc).

  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Fullbright texels are broken in GLQuake^[Elaborate?].  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Zigzagging... See Matt's Ramblings, The code behind Quake's movement tricks explained (bunny-hopping, wall-running, and zig-zagging   [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Wall running... See Matt's Ramblings, The code behind Quake's movement tricks explained (bunny-hopping, wall-running, and zig-zagging   [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Bunny Hopping where forward isn't held in the air... See Matt's Ramblings, The code behind Quake's movement tricks explained (bunny-hopping, wall-running, and zig-zagging   [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Strafe Jumping where forward held in the air... See Matt's Ramblings, Strafe-jumping physics explained   [todo tested in ?]

See also

• Quake.fgd

External links

• Quake source code - Original GPL source code for engines, base ID1 game code, and some tools
  • Quake Rerelease QuakeC code - QuakeC source code for the updated game code used in Quake Enhanced; includes GPL game code for all expansions, unlike original source code release
• Quake Map Sources - Original uncompiled MAP source files for all base game maps, including an unreleased map
  • Quake Map Sources and Original WADs - Same as above, but with the necessary WAD texture files as well.
• Quake and Quake Enhanced on the PCGamingWiki
•  Quake (video game)
•  Quake engine and  Games using the Quake engine