Difference between revisions of "QuakeWorld"

Revision as of 09:09, 12 July 2009

QuakeWorld is an alternative, official but unsupported Quake engine which id Software released in order to make multiplayer games of Quake more playable over the Internet. Its networking code was rewritten, the in-game physics is slightly different, and there are various improvements in the client.

QuakeWorld is also an informal name for multiplayer Quake games played with the QuakeWorld networking code. This term is used in contrast to NetQuake, which is an informal name for the original Quake engine, or for Quake games played with the same networking code as in the original engine.

Some people prefer to think of QuakeWorld as an entirely separate game from Quake/NetQuake.

Comparison to NetQuake

The main enhancement offered by QuakeWorld over NetQuake is completely overhauled TCP/IP support. When QuakeWorld was introduced, it allowed people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on servers on the Internet. Modern broadband connections such as cable and DSL also benefit greatly from the improved network handling and game physics.

The original QuakeWorld releases split the client and server into separate programs. Players would only get the client and would use it to connect to a server on some other machine, usually one elsewhere on the Internet.

Compatibility

An engine will generally either have NetQuake code or QuakeWorld code, not both.

Quake (NetQuake) clients aren't compatible with QuakeWorld servers, and QuakeWorld clients are compatible with ordinary Quake (NetQuake) servers.

Virtually all multiplayer Quake games on the Internet are QuakeWorld games. So if you want to play online, you need to get a QuakeWorld-compatible engine.

Releases

"Official" releases are those distributed by id Software in 1997-1998, for the following platforms:

• 32-bit Windows (at the time, 95/98/NT4, but any Win32 OS will work)
• Linux 2.0 i386 libc5 (RedHat 4.x, Slackware, et al.)
• Linux 2.0 i386 glibc (libc6) (RedHat 5.x, et al.)
• Linux 2.0 Alpha glibc (libc6) (RedHat 5.x, et al.)
• BSDI 3.0
• Solaris 2.5.1

The last versions were the following:

• QuakeWorld 2.30, the last official stable release (August 28, 1998), consisting of clients and servers for all supported platforms.
• QuakeWorld 2.33-0005 test release (December 21, 1998), a Win32-only client and server which addressed denial-of-service vulnerabilities, fixed a few minor bugs, and made some minor enhancements.

Official development stopped after the 2.33-0005 test release.

GLQuakeWorld

The official QuakeWorld clients were released with two executables. One used software rendering, the other used OpenGL. The latter is GLQuakeWorld.

Single-player support

Since the client and server were separate programs, the official versions of QuakeWorld don't support single-player games, but some of the unofficial engines do.

More info

• The Wikipedia article on QuakeWorld goes into much more detail about QuakeWorld.
• The QuakeWorld.net site is the official distribution, news & info site for QuakeWorld.