Quake engine

The Quake engine is the game engine that was written to power 1996's Quake, written by id Software. It introduced true 3D realtime rendering and is now licensed under the GPL.

After release it immediately forked, as did the level design. Much of the engine remained in Quake II and Quake III Arena. The Quake engine, like the Doom engine, used Binary space partitioning (BSP). The Quake engine also used Gouraud shading for moving objects, and a static lightmap for nonmoving objects.

History

The Quake engine was created in 1996 for Quake. John Carmack did most of the programming of the engine, with help from Michael Abrash in algorithms and assembly optimization. It was later upgraded to the Quake II and Quake III engines.

Derivative engines

On December 21 1999, John Carmack of id Software released the Quake engine source code on the Internet under the terms of the GPL license, allowing programmers to edit the engine and add new features. Soon programmers were releasing new versions of the engine on the net. A few of the most known engines are:

DarkPlaces - An engine modification that adds realtime lighting and shadowing, Quake III BSP support, a completely new renderer, and many other features.
Tenebrae - A derivative that was the first to introduce realtime lighting and shadowing to the Quake engine.
Telejano - A modification that adds many more features and particle effects.
Tomaz Quake - One of the first Quake engine modifications on the net.
Twilight Engine - Fastest of the known Quake engines, this modification is based on performance rather than extra features.

A few other Quake engines on the net are: