Quake 3 Engine is it written from scratch??

I would like to know if John Carmack wrote Quake 3 engine from scratch or from parts of his earlier engines I know he makes a new one from scratch but was Quake written from scratch also??

ok chances are the whole thing was not written from scratch but in each of the engins there are many changes but some parts are used from other engins. quake3 is most likly a totaly redone quake2 engin wich is a redone quake1 engin just more stuff gets added or removed and updated as time goes by

My guess:

Wolf3D was obviously a new engine. DOOM was entirely from scratch. Quake was entirely from scratch. AFter that - I think they're based on previous engines as the other person who replied said. DOOM 3 will also be based on the quake 3 engine is my guess - rather than being entirely from scratch.

WOLF3d may not be from scratch..maybe if somebody found the source for Catacombs 3D we could find out...

Hellbent said:

My guess:

Wolf3D was obviously a new engine. DOOM was entirely from scratch. Quake was entirely from scratch. AFter that - I think they're based on previous engines as the other person who replied said. DOOM 3 will also be based on the quake 3 engine is my guess - rather than being entirely from scratch.

Carmack has already said that the Doom 3 engine will be from scratch.

I think that for Q2 they rewrote a lot of stuff but kept things which couldn't be optimised anymore, e.g. the bsp and wad storage systems. They rewrote at least the rad part of it, and I'm sure the interpretation of the bsp because they have more advanced faces and coloured lighting. I think they went radical and rewrote almost the lot again for Q3, but it considered the same technology because they arent inventing new concepts, just cleaning up and optimising existing ones.

Quake 3 was not written from scratch, it was just upgraded from the Quake 2 engine, which was upgraded from the Quake engine.

Doom 3 as some people have already said will be made entirely from scratch...oh Carmack is the man.

Kaopectate said:

WOLF3d may not be from scratch..maybe if somebody found the source for Catacombs 3D we could find out...

Ok some people don't understand something. 'Quake' identifies an engine. The reason Quake2 and Quake3 had Quake in their names was because they used the Quake engine, modified of course. If the new Doom used the quake3 engine modified, why would it be doom? That would make it another Quake. Get it?


Also, I'm sure Carmack used his 3d math routines from Catacombs. They both were on a grid, with blocks 64x64 in pixels. It was pretty much the same. The difference is the graphics. Catacombs used EGA/VGA mode 0Dh (yuck.. programming nightmare!), and Wolf3d was VGA mode 13h.

I guess it was pretty much different enough that Carmack gave Wolf3d its own name. The quakes were too similar to give them their own names. The only difference between Quake2 and Quake for example was opengl support, and the 3dfx API's, and then quake2 drew models properly... and the radiosity of course. If you notice, Quake did a bad job on deciding where each vertex goes. The models of dead bodies for example appear to move and jiggle as you look at them. I believe this is probably due to the fact that each x y and z was of type int, which in dos (quake's original platform) is only 16 bits in size, which would limit you to what you can do. So it was a pretty rough thing I guess. I'm no 3d expert, but thats my best guess. Quake2 was created in Win32. You get a ton more freedom and larger map area with an extra 16bits per integer.

true true...

Too bad I only played Catacombs 3d once in my life...
i wish I knew more about it..

should start it all in linux..lol...win32 is like fake-o 32-bit OS...it's like it's emulated..I could get into some greater technical detail on this but I don't wanna bore people...