quake engine family tree

quake engine family tree
 

A family tree of Quake-based game engines. By Tei, published at Wikipedia. Licence.

This is just to illustrate the enormous influence and impact of John Carmack‘s game-engines on the whole lot of computergames as we know them today. The time and again up-popping assumption that with every engine Carmack starts from a blank slate, and that hence no code from previous engines is to be found in the next generations, is definitely wrong. In an Interview on Doom III Carmack said the following to Stephen L. Kent: “Since then, the moves from QUAKE to QUAKE II to QUAKE III have been much more evolutionary than the earlier steps. Lots of the code stayed common between all of those systems.” (Kent 2004: 168) Additionally, on 31 December 2004 Carmack wrote in his blog: “There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won’t be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before.”

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