Quake Engine Indicators (opens in new tab)

Example: the slow-motion replay of this demo causes the flashing of the net icon due to the packet frequency red-shift:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkDjsBiO58

You're assuming a consistent connection - if your ping is 2 seconds, it's unlikely you're receiving each packet precisely 1 second late - much more likely the delay will be variable over time, probably not normally as high as +/-15% to cause 300ms gaps, but certainly possible.

Oh sweet summerchild.

When OG games were released we were playing on LAN with BNC terminators. That's why the Q1 netcode is so bad.

When we moved to online we didn't had the infra we have today.

Bonus point: CS at one point just halved the ping in the UI so players would think it was more responsive.

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

The naming of the ‘showturtle’ command may be a Logo reference https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/docs/html/usermanual_6.... . It’s highly likely that Carmack encountered Apple Logo on the Apple II at some point. Someone should ask him …

> Trivia: The icon doesn't actually depict a turtle but a tortoise. A turtle swims in the water while a tortoise walks on land.

Turtles walk on land, too. All turtles are tortises? /s

I think that the ingame terminal window inherited from Quake that continued onto the original Half life, onto recent games like CS2, rather than a place for entering debug/cheat commands that other game developers seem to only imagine it as, is a QoL feature that me and many other people have missed before. Any game setting (graphics options, FPS cap, FOV) can be changed by tab-completing commands from the ingame terminal. Actions like shooting, jumping, cycling weapon-in-hand are also available as text commands.

Text commands might seem like a impractical, though quaint interface to the game, but that terminal also lets you bind any command to any key (this includes settings-changing commands). Not just a command, you can run more than one command at once like "cl_command1 ; cl_command2; ...". The terminal has some more scripting-like features that are readily available to the player, but just with that, you could have, for example, a key bound to a bunch of commands that turn up graphics settings to make the game as beautiful as possible for a screenshot, and another that undoes those commands for situations where you need higher performance.

You can also bind the key "K" to write in chat "My people need me" and instantly respawn:

  bind K 'say "My people need me" ; kill'

Almost total input freedom as it will turn out.

It is basically a keyboard macroing system but offered to you on a platter by the game, making ever-crufty external macroing or bringing out something like AutoHotKey unnecessary. Though not as deep, it has just the right amount of depth. Binding keys to commands is not done through a special GUI, it is being done through a text command as well (just 'bind'), and that implies that you can nest bind commands:

> Scripting in Team Fortress 2 involves using configuration files to change keybinds, create aliases, adjust advanced graphical settings, automate complex actions, and execute sequences of console commands. Unlike hacking, scripting is an official feature built into the game and will not trigger a Valve Anti-Cheat ban. The complexity of scripts can range from simple keybindings to intricate loops and nested aliases that change themselves dynamically.[1]

[1] https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Scripting

along those lines, I saw a video where a light strobing pattern from quake was still used in a section half-life alyx (with much better lighting lol)

the fact the quake engine’s internals still live on in so many modern games is quite a feat

I believe it still lives on in the Call of Duty series, being based on id tech. There's even memes about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/edmai1/connection_in...

Yeah. Looks like an ethernet jack. True, buts its a modem jack (rj11 maybe?)

You can still see it while playing in 2025, for Quake 2 at least, on Tastypleen servers in the U.S. The servers crash for some reason. Or if you connect to Chinese servers, sometimes I experience it, but rarely.

I'm with you on everything except "it was terrible" :) The only problem with 300+ping, at the time, was when those damn LPBs connected

In-match comms between teammates is my favorite memory. The ease of voice chat in MP games since then is underappreciated. Feeling like a dinosaur writing this but...

... before discord/mumble/ventrilo/teamspeak, the only choice to gain an edge in competitive online gaming was to be physically in the same space or team text chat binds. The binds would cover 10-15 common situations so we could communicate while playing.. In hindsight, when things got hectic, reading the team chat text spam hindered us more than helped us. But we had good intentions with those binds and boy we had a blast competing. And let's be real, that's all that really matters.

I think nobody tackled it because Quake is so fast. There is quake.exe but also glquake.exe and winquake.exe. Each have different capabilities.

And of course there is quakeworld which is a complete fork with different net protocol, prediction, and commands. Example of new features is that skins can be downloaded on the fly, you no longer needed skinpacks.

I am not familiar with chocolate doom what makes it better than any other doom source port?

There are many good source ports of quake, I always liked darkplaces but it intentionally and willfully tries to push improvements so not really for purists. There is stuff like fitzquake/quakespasm that stays much closer to vanilla quake and if you like quakeworld ftequake.

> My understanding is that a new client coming from the same IP and different port will now be treated as a new player instead of a reconnect

Indeed. It could be a gap of my understanding but I believed that in pre-QuakeWorld there was no "coming back". How would a connect differ from a reconnect from a user experience perspective? Was it expected they keep their previous score/name?

You are right, the link and the text should have said `Draw_BeginDisc`. Fixed.

The ZMachine it's its own computer too (an emulator in the end).

Probably a simple virtual stack machine. Quite easy to build in ASM and any language.

How come you are playing q2 daily?! Campaign is not that long, and multiplayer servers sucks (all are instagib thing with railguns)

The remaster from a few years ago is great. It has minor graphical improvements such that it looks how you remember it.