I worked on Quake4 as a programmer for a bit over a year, though little of my work ended up in the final game. The Doom3 engine is mostly C++. If I recall cor

I worked on Quake4 as a programmer for a bit over a year, though little of my work ended up in the final game. The Doom3 engine is mostly C++. If I recall correctly, the renderer still looked more like a blend of C with some C++ slowly drifting in (which makes sense, given how good of a C programmer Carmack is), but the rest of the game code is very heavily C++, for some definition of C++, along with a scripting layer. Having worked extensively with the Quake 2 engine previously, I really didn't like the Doom 3 engine, myself. It was radically less... pragmatic. Earlier id engines, to me, were masterpieces of concision. They weren't amazing feats of black box abstraction by any measure, and they implicitly assumed you needed a lot of domain knowledge to understand what they were doing, but they did exactly what they needed to do with a minimum of fuss. Features were included because they were used, generally with the smallest and simplest code and tool footprint possible. Not so with Doom 3. Huge amount of code appears to have been written because someone prolific thought it would be lots of fun to write it, many features end up going unused or are in the way, and ultimately (because it's more typically software engineered in style), every feature requires about 30 times as much code to be written properly and has several extra unused layers of abstractions crufting things up. The game code (in C++) in particular bears an unfortunate resemblance to Windows MFC-style C++, with a giant 12 layer deep inheritance graph with everything inheriting from a few enormous base objects. All of that to my eyes, anyway. But then, I really cut my teeth on Quake 1 and 2, and found that their concision and brevity really helped them stay out of the way when adding new, innovative features. The funny thing about the code for Doom 3 is that, looking through it all, you'd get the impression that Doom 3 was a radically more complicated game that what you ultimately experience when you play the game. The best way I could put it is this: Quake 1 and 2 and 3 were well made games that ended up being enormously fruitful for white box reuse. You couldn't do much with them without understanding fair bits of their internals, but they didn't actively resist being understood. Doom3 was built to be used in a more black box fashion (like the Unreal Engine), with all that entails from an architecture perspective. I'm sure others might disagree with me from a code ideology perspective, but it is hard to ignore how fruitful the Quake engines were for licensing, and how much Doom 3 sank like a stone. The code bases make really fascinating studies in contrast about the consequences of different software engineering values, at the very least. TL; DR: Quake 1 - 3 remind me of linux code, Doom 3 reminds me of MFC.