Quake II engine

The Quake II engine, later dubbed id Tech 2,[1] is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II.[2] It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.[3]

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.[3] 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, for two reasons:[citation needed]

  • id could release the source code to allow modifications while keeping the remainder of the engine proprietary.
  • 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.

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.[citation needed]

id Software released the source code on 22 December 2001 under the terms of the GNU General Public License.[4]

Games using the Quake II engine

Games using a proprietary license

Games based on the GPL source release

See also

References

  1. ^ John Carmack [ID_AA_Carmack] (2016-02-25). "@viciarg it was retroactively named, don't put much importance on it" (Tweet) – via Twitter. 
  2. ^ Grant, Christopher (2011-08-09). "id Software looking to shorten dev cycles, stop building new engines for every game". Joystiq. AOL. Archived from the original on 2011-08-28. 
  3. ^ a b "Technology Licensing: id Tech 2". Archived from the original on November 8, 2009. Retrieved September 17, 2008. 
  4. ^ DiBona, Chris (2011-12-22). "Quake 2 Source Code Released Under the GPL". Slashdot. Retrieved 2016-09-04. 

External links