10 ms·

Quake's 3-D Engine: The Big Picture by Michael Abrash (2000)

292 points by jdmoreira 6y ago

trilinearnz 6y ago
Michael Abrash is an excellent chronicler of technical history. Reading through his contributions is always time well spent. See also https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ for a more contemporary take. His 'Black Books' on Wolfenstein and Doom are directly inspired by Abrash.
ctdonath 6y ago
Any word on a modern port of Quake to iOS/macOS?
- theunamedguy 6y ago
  Not quite iOS, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22162834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22162834
- windsok 6y ago
  EzQuake runs on MacOS http://www.ezquake.com/ http://www.ezquake.com/
fabiensanglard 6y ago
This is the book that started it all for me.
dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682394
doomlaser 6y ago
Quake 2 had an interesting model format. It was essentially a set of OBJ mesh keyframes that get linearly interpolated between, for the smoother animation you see in Quake 2 character models when compared to Quake 1. MD2 was what it was called. One of the first things I wrote as a 3D game developer was an OBJ loader, and then an MD2 loader. Carmack's code is something I've always admired. The system he figured out for a client/server networking model in Quakeworld for Quake 1 is still essentially the way most multiplayer games work now, as far as I know.
- Svperstar 6y ago
  True but games also added client side hit prediction which the Quake engine games never did. As late as Quake 3 if you were using a railgun you would have to lead your shots. There was the ZeroPing mod for UT then Valve put client side hit prediction in Counter-Strike. Was some controversy as people said it makes it easier to write cheats, I remember even Cliffy B from Epic Games wrote this blog post about how terrible it is but that is where games went and IMO its a lot better then 1990s netcode.
- dbandstra 6y ago
  The Quake 1 and 2 model formats were very similar, the interpolation was a rendering feature. After the Quake 1 engine source was released in late 1999 the interpolation was quickly added by fans (although it wasn't as easy as it sounds, as IIRC the original Quake 1 source (not QuakeWorld) didn't track entities across frames on the client-side, so that had to be added first). The main difference between the two model format was how they encoded vertex coordinates. They both stored X, Y, Z coords as one byte each. But MDL (Quake 1's format) had a uniform scale/offset for transforming these into the final coordinate space, whereas in MD2, each animation frame had its own scale and offset. This seems like an upgrade but when combined with interpolation it could also result in a pretty ugly "vertex swimming" (jiggling) effect when you tried to portray subtle movements, like the idle anims for the player's weapons. One of the many things I admired from Quake is that there was a pretty uniform scale of detail to everything. There wasn't really anything that had higher polygon detail, texture resolution, or animation rate compared to anything else in the world. Everything looked very solid and consistent because of that. Quantized vertex coords was one of those tricks that seems restrictive but it didn't hurt them with the game they designed
  - taneq 6y ago
    While we're talking about clever quantizing, we should mention the vertex normal encoding. In MD2 (iirc, not sure about MD1) each vertex normal was stored as a byte which indexed into a pre-established array of unit vectors which were more or less uniformly distributed around a sphere. It was a creative way to have good-enough per-frame normals in a tiny amount of space without forcing the engine to do any painfully slow per-frame normal generation (with the floating point division and square root which that entailed).
pritovido 6y ago
A very important thing with software is that the most painful work can be done by the computer itself. Tools like Lisp are essential in your toolbox for whatever language you use for coding. If you can script and automate and test everything life is much better. Most of the pain in software development is self inflicted. The most boring something is for a human, the easiest is for the computer to make it. Lots of people coming from the "code must be efficient" front, like assembly, c and c++ programmers simply ignored the interpreted, functional and painfully slow "you don't know how things are implemented" world and viceversa. But both worlds are complimentary. When I was a kid I discovered Numega SoftIce. That was an incredible debugger and you could automate everything. Turns out you can do the same with gdm and lldb today and bugs just pop up from automatic tests.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  SoftIce is in another league of itself. No other debugger can fully freeze your OS while you hunt down that elusive crypto variable that the other developer obfuscated in several DLL's in order to hide its true purpose. Man, so much fun was back then. Story time. One of my clients wanted to reverse engineer a trading algorithm and the only option was the nuclear option. Fully disassemble and in-memory hunting this encrypted, split into different DLL's function that was holding the entire algorithm. Warned the client that would take as much as half a year and can possibly run up to more than $100k. He accepted saying if it's successful then it can gain him millions. So I started the hunt. A few weeks down the road, my client, while we were chatting the usual status and whatnot, dropped the bomb. This algorithm was actually old, as in WinXP era. And I asked "do you have a WinXP variant of this that you'd be satisfied with if I manage to reverse it?". And he said he has. I took that one, prepared a WinXP machine with SoftIce in it and job was done 3 days later. The level of control you have with SoftIce, you can't achieve it with anything else.
  - voldacar 6y ago
    Is there something that would make it impossible to write the equivalent of SoftIce for Win7/Win10, or has it just not yet been done out of difficulty/laziness/lack of market/etc?
kar1181 6y ago
Oh man - of all my 'nerd crushes' Michael is at the absolute top. I feel like he hasn't been risen up to the stature of John Carmack but if you look at the things he's shipped in his career (no less than Quake AND Windows NT) and at the sheer volume of content he produced during those halcyon days in the late 80s/90s when the PC emerged from dumb as rocks beige business box to premier gaming platform, he is a key figure. I was too young and grew up too remote to have access to his writings as they were written but as an older engineer going back over his Graphics Black Book, the Zen of Assembly books and his Dr Dobbs articles, there's a lot of lessons that you can learn that still have a lot of value today. Actually one of the best lessons - and most easily accessible - is in the first chapter of his graphics black book, he talks about the human element of optimisation, and that it is critical to optimise the right thing. He uses an example of a engineer he knew that in the era of early electronic calculators (still clunky and and slow, but getting faster all the time) honed his slide rule skills to wipe the floor with any desktop calculator operator. But he was spitting into the wind, it was clear calculators were getting faster and there was no more road with slide rules. Ultimately he wasted effort on a legacy technology rather than leveraging what was up and coming. In many ways this mirrored the PC, in its early days, it was slow, dumb and unwieldy, but it was improving at a rate of knots and eventually came to dominate. Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github and maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats. They aren't terribly applicable technologically to computing today but they are very readable and contain a lot of general purpose problem solving and optimisation tips that are as applicable today as they were then. https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book There have been few technical writers emerge that match Michael Abrash and it makes me so happy he's still hacking away at interesting problems today. Shame he doesn't write as much as he did, but I'm sure he's busy trying to usher in the metaverse (snowcrash had a big influence on him)!
- furyofantares 6y ago
  I lucked my way into a lunch with Michael somewhat under 10 years ago and had a chance to pick his brain, and of course express gratitude for his writing which had an influence on me when I was younger. What I found really remarkable, though, was he also picked my brain -- a junior programmer with no notable accomplishments, working on not very interesting problems. And when I bumped into him on a couple occasions after that, he remembered what I worked on and would ask how it was going.
ehvatum 6y ago
"here’s the secret to success in just two words: Ship it" "After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%." I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing the first 90% and the second 90% as updates. Notably, QTest was released on February 24, 1996, followed on June 22, 1996 by the full Quake release.
- lostgame 6y ago
  >> I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing the first 90% and the second 90% as updates. Damn, I feel like you just described everything wrong with the game industry in the last 5-10(?) years in one sentence.
  - goldcd 6y ago
    But the flip-side is we're all used to receiving automatic and continuous bug-fixes and even enhancements. Even the maligned Day-0 mega-patch, is fine if it lets the game master ship earlier and fixes the bugs before I can play it.
    - will_pseudonym 6y ago
      In the short term, yes it's a good thing that automatic bug fixes and enhancements happen. But in the long term it incentivizes shipping unfinished, buggy products. It may be a net positive, but it is not an unalloyed benefit.
  - mysterydip 6y ago
    I think this is why we see so many "early access" games, and why so many of them never leave that stage
  - kace91 6y ago
    > Damn, I feel like you just described everything wrong with the game industry in the last 5-10(?) years in one sentence. Which makes sense because it's how much we've been online first. Games before that era usually worked under the assumption that an internet connection (or at least a higher bandwidth one) wasn't available. Nowadays there's barely any reason to stop development after the GM is being burned on disks. I do wonder what's gonna happen with long term use though. My game boy cartridges still work, but what will happen with current gen games? Even those bought phisically usually depend on patches from a server that won't be available in the long term future.
sushshshsh 6y ago
Insert obligatory reference to the fast inverse square root calculation which, thanks to its ability to more quickly generate (1/x) by using a bit shift with a magic number 0x5F3759DF, allowed performant lighting calculations for use in games. This number was known for this purpose for long before Quake (shout out SGI), but was popularized for the first time there
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  Damn, that's awesome
- blt 6y ago
  The bit manipulation already generates an approximation of 1/sqrt(x), not just 1/x.
- Nition 6y ago
  Fast inverse square root wasn't in Quake until Quake III though, right?
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    That's correct, though there was plenty of other asm and bit level evil graphics voodoo that made quake able to run so fast on consumer hardware a few generations earlier than if they were stuck using slower division:)
    - flohofwoe 6y ago
      The most notable trick in Quake I (at least IMHO) is the triangle rasterizer line-loop which schedules the divide needed for perspective-correct texture mapping to the FPU so that this expensive divide can run in parallel to pixel-span rasterization on the integer ALU. To my young brain who's only done 8- and 16-bit assembly on simple CPUs before this was nothing short of rocket science :)
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  It's not the same without the original comments. Also, I don't know which is crazier, the magic number, or the fact that the code is casting a float to long bitwise and then working on it.
kaspar128 6y ago
Nice read! It reminds me of Jeff Minter's article about the "Bathtub-curve" http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=452 http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=452
29athrowaway 6y ago
If you are interested in id Tech 3 you may also want to read this one: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php
drzel 6y ago
A testament to the quality and simplicity of the engine there are a number of QuakeWorld powered games still actively played today. I've been working on a Team Fortress continuation for the last decade or so, and I'm always surprised that our community continues to grow, both players and developers: https://www.fortressone.org/ https://www.fortressone.org/
Legion 6y ago
The "(2000)" date in the subject can't be correct if he refers to QuakeWorld as still being in development. This has to be from 1996.
- Teslazar 6y ago
  The articles are from 1996 - 1997. According to the appendix (1), this content was posted to Blues News in 2000. First article: Quake's Game Engine: The Big Picture - Dr. Dobbs Sourcebook, Sprint 1997, #279, pp. 58-60. Last article: Inside Quake: Visible-Surface Determination - Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook, Jan/Feb 1996, #255, pp. 41-45. [1] https://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/credits.shtml https://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/credits.shtml
agumonkey 6y ago
Michael's black book got me skipping classes in college. His writing was perfectly paced between asm-fu and story telling. I would start and never stop until I was sweating.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Just curious, how much of the black book is relevant for today?
BlahGod420 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKVImK7DFFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKVImK7DFFU
Gravityloss 6y ago
Quake was not really well playable over modem yet, but Quakeworld was. It's mentioned in the article as the next thing coming. Strange how much new area was quickly covered in such short time. Of course, the platform itself was developing to make this possible. One couldn't have done dynamic lighting 3d worlds with a 386 or multiplayer 3d shooters with 2400 bps modems. There have been attempts to board new, moving platforms like VR but no breakthrough yet?
- klodolph 6y ago
  I don't own a VR headset, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it's on track to adoption this time. Just think about how rare video chat was, and now it's the norm.
  - nothis 6y ago
    What’s holding back VR (for 30 years, now) isn’t tech, it’s a lack of real use cases. Maybe AR for more of an office environment thing. But VR gaming is a niche, just conceptually.
liendolucas 6y ago
Question aside... Does anyone know if it is still possible to do 100% software rendering on today's hardware? I'm really interested in doing graphics but directly talking to the video card (e.g: draw a point, line, polygon, etc) in BSD or Linux and get something like the original Quake and Quake 2 software renderers did. I think those are masterpieces that pushed to the limit the capabilities of the PC at the time. I also think it could be a great way to learn graphics from scratch. Some time ago I played: https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/ https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/ which captures the way Quake engines used to render on DOS.
- GiorgioG 6y ago
  As long as you have access to a 2D API, of course: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497
  - liendolucas 6y ago
    Sure, but that depends on a browser (something that I really dislike). I was thinking more about building something completely from scratch (near zero dependencies) and low footprint (maybe a tiny 3D C engine).
    - GiorgioG 6y ago
      https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraycaster https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraycaster
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Get yourself a PI and have fun coding like I and others used to do. in Assembly no less. :) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ And if you happen to be motivated enough, maybe you end up doing something like this, https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pifox-bare-metal-arm-assembly-language-star-fox/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pifox-bare-metal-arm-assemb...
jonmal 6y ago
Michael Abrash! Wow, this brings back some found memories, as reading Zen of Assembly Language.
Dork1234 6y ago
Really puts things in perspective when he mentioned polygon count "... entities can contain hundreds of polygons". In polygon count for entities games are realistically only one order of magnitude higher than 20 years ago.

292 points by jdmoreira 6y ago

Michael Abrash is an excellent chronicler of technical history. Reading through his contributions is always time well spent. See also https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ for a more contemporary take. His 'Black Books' on Wolfenstein and Doom are directly inspired by Abrash.

ctdonath 6y ago

Any word on a modern port of Quake to iOS/macOS?

theunamedguy 6y ago
Not quite iOS, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22162834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22162834
windsok 6y ago
EzQuake runs on MacOS http://www.ezquake.com/ http://www.ezquake.com/

fabiensanglard 6y ago

This is the book that started it all for me.

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682394

doomlaser 6y ago

Quake 2 had an interesting model format. It was essentially a set of OBJ mesh keyframes that get linearly interpolated between, for the smoother animation you see in Quake 2 character models when compared to Quake 1. MD2 was what it was called. One of the first things I wrote as a 3D game developer was an OBJ loader, and then an MD2 loader. Carmack's code is something I've always admired. The system he figured out for a client/server networking model in Quakeworld for Quake 1 is still essentially the way most multiplayer games work now, as far as I know.

Svperstar 6y ago
True but games also added client side hit prediction which the Quake engine games never did. As late as Quake 3 if you were using a railgun you would have to lead your shots. There was the ZeroPing mod for UT then Valve put client side hit prediction in Counter-Strike. Was some controversy as people said it makes it easier to write cheats, I remember even Cliffy B from Epic Games wrote this blog post about how terrible it is but that is where games went and IMO its a lot better then 1990s netcode.
dbandstra 6y ago
The Quake 1 and 2 model formats were very similar, the interpolation was a rendering feature. After the Quake 1 engine source was released in late 1999 the interpolation was quickly added by fans (although it wasn't as easy as it sounds, as IIRC the original Quake 1 source (not QuakeWorld) didn't track entities across frames on the client-side, so that had to be added first). The main difference between the two model format was how they encoded vertex coordinates. They both stored X, Y, Z coords as one byte each. But MDL (Quake 1's format) had a uniform scale/offset for transforming these into the final coordinate space, whereas in MD2, each animation frame had its own scale and offset. This seems like an upgrade but when combined with interpolation it could also result in a pretty ugly "vertex swimming" (jiggling) effect when you tried to portray subtle movements, like the idle anims for the player's weapons. One of the many things I admired from Quake is that there was a pretty uniform scale of detail to everything. There wasn't really anything that had higher polygon detail, texture resolution, or animation rate compared to anything else in the world. Everything looked very solid and consistent because of that. Quantized vertex coords was one of those tricks that seems restrictive but it didn't hurt them with the game they designed
- taneq 6y ago
  While we're talking about clever quantizing, we should mention the vertex normal encoding. In MD2 (iirc, not sure about MD1) each vertex normal was stored as a byte which indexed into a pre-established array of unit vectors which were more or less uniformly distributed around a sphere. It was a creative way to have good-enough per-frame normals in a tiny amount of space without forcing the engine to do any painfully slow per-frame normal generation (with the floating point division and square root which that entailed).

pritovido 6y ago

A very important thing with software is that the most painful work can be done by the computer itself. Tools like Lisp are essential in your toolbox for whatever language you use for coding. If you can script and automate and test everything life is much better. Most of the pain in software development is self inflicted. The most boring something is for a human, the easiest is for the computer to make it. Lots of people coming from the "code must be efficient" front, like assembly, c and c++ programmers simply ignored the interpreted, functional and painfully slow "you don't know how things are implemented" world and viceversa. But both worlds are complimentary. When I was a kid I discovered Numega SoftIce. That was an incredible debugger and you could automate everything. Turns out you can do the same with gdm and lldb today and bugs just pop up from automatic tests.

unnouinceput 6y ago
SoftIce is in another league of itself. No other debugger can fully freeze your OS while you hunt down that elusive crypto variable that the other developer obfuscated in several DLL's in order to hide its true purpose. Man, so much fun was back then. Story time. One of my clients wanted to reverse engineer a trading algorithm and the only option was the nuclear option. Fully disassemble and in-memory hunting this encrypted, split into different DLL's function that was holding the entire algorithm. Warned the client that would take as much as half a year and can possibly run up to more than $100k. He accepted saying if it's successful then it can gain him millions. So I started the hunt. A few weeks down the road, my client, while we were chatting the usual status and whatnot, dropped the bomb. This algorithm was actually old, as in WinXP era. And I asked "do you have a WinXP variant of this that you'd be satisfied with if I manage to reverse it?". And he said he has. I took that one, prepared a WinXP machine with SoftIce in it and job was done 3 days later. The level of control you have with SoftIce, you can't achieve it with anything else.
- voldacar 6y ago
  Is there something that would make it impossible to write the equivalent of SoftIce for Win7/Win10, or has it just not yet been done out of difficulty/laziness/lack of market/etc?

kar1181 6y ago

Oh man - of all my 'nerd crushes' Michael is at the absolute top. I feel like he hasn't been risen up to the stature of John Carmack but if you look at the things he's shipped in his career (no less than Quake AND Windows NT) and at the sheer volume of content he produced during those halcyon days in the late 80s/90s when the PC emerged from dumb as rocks beige business box to premier gaming platform, he is a key figure. I was too young and grew up too remote to have access to his writings as they were written but as an older engineer going back over his Graphics Black Book, the Zen of Assembly books and his Dr Dobbs articles, there's a lot of lessons that you can learn that still have a lot of value today. Actually one of the best lessons - and most easily accessible - is in the first chapter of his graphics black book, he talks about the human element of optimisation, and that it is critical to optimise the right thing. He uses an example of a engineer he knew that in the era of early electronic calculators (still clunky and and slow, but getting faster all the time) honed his slide rule skills to wipe the floor with any desktop calculator operator. But he was spitting into the wind, it was clear calculators were getting faster and there was no more road with slide rules. Ultimately he wasted effort on a legacy technology rather than leveraging what was up and coming. In many ways this mirrored the PC, in its early days, it was slow, dumb and unwieldy, but it was improving at a rate of knots and eventually came to dominate. Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github and maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats. They aren't terribly applicable technologically to computing today but they are very readable and contain a lot of general purpose problem solving and optimisation tips that are as applicable today as they were then. https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book There have been few technical writers emerge that match Michael Abrash and it makes me so happy he's still hacking away at interesting problems today. Shame he doesn't write as much as he did, but I'm sure he's busy trying to usher in the metaverse (snowcrash had a big influence on him)!

furyofantares 6y ago
I lucked my way into a lunch with Michael somewhat under 10 years ago and had a chance to pick his brain, and of course express gratitude for his writing which had an influence on me when I was younger. What I found really remarkable, though, was he also picked my brain -- a junior programmer with no notable accomplishments, working on not very interesting problems. And when I bumped into him on a couple occasions after that, he remembered what I worked on and would ask how it was going.

ehvatum 6y ago

"here’s the secret to success in just two words: Ship it" "After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%." I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing the first 90% and the second 90% as updates. Notably, QTest was released on February 24, 1996, followed on June 22, 1996 by the full Quake release.

lostgame 6y ago
>> I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing the first 90% and the second 90% as updates. Damn, I feel like you just described everything wrong with the game industry in the last 5-10(?) years in one sentence.
- goldcd 6y ago
  But the flip-side is we're all used to receiving automatic and continuous bug-fixes and even enhancements. Even the maligned Day-0 mega-patch, is fine if it lets the game master ship earlier and fixes the bugs before I can play it.
  - will_pseudonym 6y ago
    In the short term, yes it's a good thing that automatic bug fixes and enhancements happen. But in the long term it incentivizes shipping unfinished, buggy products. It may be a net positive, but it is not an unalloyed benefit.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  I think this is why we see so many "early access" games, and why so many of them never leave that stage
- kace91 6y ago
  > Damn, I feel like you just described everything wrong with the game industry in the last 5-10(?) years in one sentence. Which makes sense because it's how much we've been online first. Games before that era usually worked under the assumption that an internet connection (or at least a higher bandwidth one) wasn't available. Nowadays there's barely any reason to stop development after the GM is being burned on disks. I do wonder what's gonna happen with long term use though. My game boy cartridges still work, but what will happen with current gen games? Even those bought phisically usually depend on patches from a server that won't be available in the long term future.

sushshshsh 6y ago

Insert obligatory reference to the fast inverse square root calculation which, thanks to its ability to more quickly generate (1/x) by using a bit shift with a magic number 0x5F3759DF, allowed performant lighting calculations for use in games. This number was known for this purpose for long before Quake (shout out SGI), but was popularized for the first time there

ladyanita22 6y ago
Damn, that's awesome
blt 6y ago
The bit manipulation already generates an approximation of 1/sqrt(x), not just 1/x.
Nition 6y ago
Fast inverse square root wasn't in Quake until Quake III though, right?
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  That's correct, though there was plenty of other asm and bit level evil graphics voodoo that made quake able to run so fast on consumer hardware a few generations earlier than if they were stuck using slower division:)
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    The most notable trick in Quake I (at least IMHO) is the triangle rasterizer line-loop which schedules the divide needed for perspective-correct texture mapping to the FPU so that this expensive divide can run in parallel to pixel-span rasterization on the integer ALU. To my young brain who's only done 8- and 16-bit assembly on simple CPUs before this was nothing short of rocket science :)
skocznymroczny 6y ago
It's not the same without the original comments. Also, I don't know which is crazier, the magic number, or the fact that the code is casting a float to long bitwise and then working on it.

kaspar128 6y ago

Nice read! It reminds me of Jeff Minter's article about the "Bathtub-curve" http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=452 http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=452

29athrowaway 6y ago

If you are interested in id Tech 3 you may also want to read this one: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php

drzel 6y ago

A testament to the quality and simplicity of the engine there are a number of QuakeWorld powered games still actively played today. I've been working on a Team Fortress continuation for the last decade or so, and I'm always surprised that our community continues to grow, both players and developers: https://www.fortressone.org/ https://www.fortressone.org/

Legion 6y ago

The "(2000)" date in the subject can't be correct if he refers to QuakeWorld as still being in development. This has to be from 1996.

Teslazar 6y ago
The articles are from 1996 - 1997. According to the appendix (1), this content was posted to Blues News in 2000. First article: Quake's Game Engine: The Big Picture - Dr. Dobbs Sourcebook, Sprint 1997, #279, pp. 58-60. Last article: Inside Quake: Visible-Surface Determination - Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook, Jan/Feb 1996, #255, pp. 41-45. [1] https://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/credits.shtml https://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/credits.shtml

agumonkey 6y ago

Michael's black book got me skipping classes in college. His writing was perfectly paced between asm-fu and story telling. I would start and never stop until I was sweating.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Just curious, how much of the black book is relevant for today?

BlahGod420 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKVImK7DFFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKVImK7DFFU

Gravityloss 6y ago

Quake was not really well playable over modem yet, but Quakeworld was. It's mentioned in the article as the next thing coming. Strange how much new area was quickly covered in such short time. Of course, the platform itself was developing to make this possible. One couldn't have done dynamic lighting 3d worlds with a 386 or multiplayer 3d shooters with 2400 bps modems. There have been attempts to board new, moving platforms like VR but no breakthrough yet?

klodolph 6y ago
I don't own a VR headset, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it's on track to adoption this time. Just think about how rare video chat was, and now it's the norm.
- nothis 6y ago
  What’s holding back VR (for 30 years, now) isn’t tech, it’s a lack of real use cases. Maybe AR for more of an office environment thing. But VR gaming is a niche, just conceptually.

liendolucas 6y ago

Question aside... Does anyone know if it is still possible to do 100% software rendering on today's hardware? I'm really interested in doing graphics but directly talking to the video card (e.g: draw a point, line, polygon, etc) in BSD or Linux and get something like the original Quake and Quake 2 software renderers did. I think those are masterpieces that pushed to the limit the capabilities of the PC at the time. I also think it could be a great way to learn graphics from scratch. Some time ago I played: https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/ https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/ which captures the way Quake engines used to render on DOS.

GiorgioG 6y ago
As long as you have access to a 2D API, of course: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778497
- liendolucas 6y ago
  Sure, but that depends on a browser (something that I really dislike). I was thinking more about building something completely from scratch (near zero dependencies) and low footprint (maybe a tiny 3D C engine).
  - GiorgioG 6y ago
    https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraycaster https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraycaster
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Get yourself a PI and have fun coding like I and others used to do. in Assembly no less. :) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ And if you happen to be motivated enough, maybe you end up doing something like this, https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pifox-bare-metal-arm-assembly-language-star-fox/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pifox-bare-metal-arm-assemb...

jonmal 6y ago

Michael Abrash! Wow, this brings back some found memories, as reading Zen of Assembly Language.

Dork1234 6y ago

Really puts things in perspective when he mentioned polygon count "... entities can contain hundreds of polygons". In polygon count for entities games are realistically only one order of magnitude higher than 20 years ago.