Development status Discontinued | ||
Developer(s) id Software, (John Carmack, John Cash, and Brian Hook) Initial release December 9, 1997; 19 years ago (1997-12-09) Stable release 3.21 / December 22, 2001; 15 years ago (2001-12-22) Repository ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/q2source-3.21.zip Written in C, x86 assembly (software rendering) | ||
The Quake II engine, later dubbed id Tech 2, 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.
Contents
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, for two reasons:
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 22 December 2001 under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Games using a proprietary license
Games based on the GPL source release
Ports
Jake2 is a Java port of the Quake II engine's GPL release. It has since been used by Sun as an example of Java Web Start capabilities for games distribution over the Internet. In 2006, it was used to experiment playing 3D games with eye tracking. The performance of Jake2 is on par with the original C version.