This project is a test to see what it would take to upgrade WinQuake to use modern game development methods. It is not intended to be used for actual game development purposes. If you are looking to make a Quake engine fork i would recommend checking out the Quake engine source ports that exist today.
CMake does a lot of work to set up project files for different build systems as well as different versions of them. Over the course of development Visual Studios 2017, 2019 and 2022 as well as makefiles using G++ 9, 10 and 11 have been used without requiring any project configuration changes or upgrades. CMake allows the debugging settings on Windows to be configured to target the game installation, which persists even after completely deleting the build directory and regenerating all files.
Doing so allows the use of C++ standard library APIs such as std::thread, std::chrono and std::filesystem.
It also enforces stricter rules like no implicit conversions from void* and requiring functions to be forward declared.
Functions cannot be called with an arbitrary number of parameters unless they are using variadic argument syntax.
The use of default values for function parameters allows the removal of some global variables used to implement such behavior.
The codebase now uses C++17.
Most of the third party dependencies are acquired using vcpkg which simplifies dependency management and speeds up rebuilds.
As-is the game will crash on launch due to trying to print the value of glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS) which now exceeds the console buffer.
Quake uses the older insecure string APIs from the C runtime library which do not check if an operation would write past the end of a buffer.
The game does not render correctly in OpenGL mode due to trying to use an old color table extension to reduce GPU memory usage. Quake uses a shared palette that all textures reference. This extension allows images to reference the palette instead of containing the RGB values directly. The extension seems to malfunction on newer systems causing textures to render as pure white (typically meaning texture data was not uploaded correctly). Disabling this feature allows textures to render correctly.
The Software renderer's assembly code has been removed since its presence complicates some project configuration settings and requires changes to the C++ code to be mirrored to assembly code. With modern CPUs being able to vectorize instructions, as well as compilers that can optimize code much more effectively this assembly code is no longer as efficient as it once was compared to the C++ version.
The platform-specific window and OpenGL context management, keyboard, mouse and joystick/game controller code has been replaced with SDL2.
This simplifies most of the logic involved since SDL2 provides abstractions that hide most of the work that would otherwise need to be handled by programs. Some system requirements have changed as a result of this work. You will need a display that supports 24 or more bits per pixel.
Linux now uses the same code as Windows for all of these systems.
The loading disc image is rendered on top of that when it is active. This allows Software mode to work without depending on the MegaGraph Graphics Library, which is a precompiled static library exclusive to Windows. This ensures all code is compiled with the same compiler and allows Software mode to work on Linux.
The platform-specific networking implementations have been replaced with GameNetworkingSockets.
OpenAL provides a cross-platform sound API. This implementation makes direct use of OpenAL's 3D audio APIs to allow low-latency sound playback.
Music is now played using OpenAL just like all other game audio.
The QuakeC game code is now implemented in C++ to allow direct use of engine APIs, as well as better ways to handle some things like animation. This change removes the last remaining roadblock preventing a 64 bit engine build from working.
This enables the dedicated server GUI to directly access the engine through an interface.
This is the complete source code for winquake, glquake, quakeworld, and glquakeworld.
The projects have been tested with visual C++ 6.0, but masm is also required to build the assembly language files. It is possible to change a #define and build with only C code, but the software rendering versions lose almost half its speed. The OpenGL versions will not be effected very much. The gas2masm tool was created to allow us to use the same source for the dos, linux, and windows versions, but I don't really recommend anyone mess with the asm code.
The original dos version of Quake should also be buildable from these sources, but we didn't bother trying.
The code is all licensed under the terms of the GPL (gnu public license).
You should read the entire license, but the gist of it is that you can do
anything you want with the code, including sell your new version. The catch
is that if you distribute new binary versions, you are required to make the
entire source code available for free to everyone.
Our previous code releases have been under licenses that preclude
commercial exploitation, but have no clause forcing sharing of source code.
There have been some unfortunate losses to the community as a result of
mod teams keeping their sources closed (and sometimes losing them). If
you are going to publicly release modified versions of this code, you must
also make source code available. I would encourage teams to even go a step
farther and investigate using public CVS servers for development where
possible.
The primary intent of this release is for entertainment and educational purposes, but the GPL does allow commercial exploitation if you obey the full license. If you want to do something commercial and you just can't bear to have your source changes released, we could still negotiate a separate license agreement (for $$$), but I would encourage you to just live with the GPL.
All of the Quake data files remain copyrighted and licensed under the original terms, so you cannot redistribute data from the original game, but if you do a true total conversion, you can create a standalone game based on this code.
I will see about having the license changed on the shareware episode of quake to allow it to be duplicated more freely (for linux distributions, for example), but I can't give a timeframe for it. You can still download one of the original quake demos and use that data with the code, but there are restrictions on the redistribution of the demo data.
If you never actually bought a complete version of Quake, you might want to rummage around in a local software bargain bin for one of the originals, or perhaps find a copy of the "Quake: the offering" boxed set with both mission packs.
Thanks to Dave "Zoid" Kirsh and Robert Duffy for doing the grunt work of building this release.
John Carmack Id Software