Quake II engine
The Quake II engine is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II. It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.
A screenshot of Quake II | |
| Developer(s) | id Software (John Carmack, John Cash, and Brian Hook) |
|---|---|
| Final release | 3.21
/ December 22, 2001 |
| 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. 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.
- id could release the source code to allow modifications while keeping the remainder of the engine proprietary.
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.
id Software released the source code on December 22, 2001, under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.