Quake II engine
Game engine / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Quake II engine is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II.[1] It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.[2]
Developer(s) | id Software (John Carmack, John Cash, and Brian Hook) |
---|---|
Final release | 3.21
/ December 22, 2001; 22 years ago (2001-12-22) |
Repository | github.com/id-Software/Quake-2 |
Written in | C, Assembly (for software rendering & optimization) |
Platform | Windows, Mac OS 8, Linux, PowerPC Macintosh, Amiga, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Xbox, PlayStation 2 |
Predecessor | Quake engine |
Successor | id Tech 3, GoldSrc |
License | GNU GPL-2.0-or-later |
Website | www |
One of the engine's most notable features was out-of-the-box support for hardware-accelerated graphics, specifically OpenGL, along with the traditional software renderer.[2] Another interesting feature was the subdivision of some of the components into dynamic-link libraries. This allowed both software and OpenGL renderers, which were selected by loading and unloading separate libraries. Libraries were also used for the game logic, with consequences including:
- Since they were compiled for specific platforms, instead of an interpreter, they could run faster than Quake's solution, which was to run the game logic (QuakeC) in a limited interpreter.[3]
- id could release the source code to allow modifications while keeping the remainder of the engine proprietary.[4]
The level format, as with previous id Software engines, used binary space partitioning. The level environments were lit using lightmaps, a method in which light data for each surface is precalculated (this time, via a radiosity method) and stored as an image, which is then used to determine the lighting intensity each 3D model should receive, but not its direction.[5][6]
id Software released the source code on December 22, 2001, under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.[7]