Doom3world

Is this true?

The first Half-Life used the Quake 1 engine. Half-Life 2 uses the Source engine.

The source engine is an extension of the HL1 engine, so in a sense it is based on quake 1, yes, but so are all the other ID engines, including Doom 3 .

That's just plain wrong. The only way that most of the id engines are based on each other is from what remains in Carmack's mind. It's common knowledge (or so I thought) that Carmack was fond of rewriting engines from scratch (probably up until whatever is after Doom 3 from what I've gleamed from Carmack's comments).

Of course a lot of that was by necessity. The change from Quake 1 to Quake 2 was the obvious integration of OpenGL. Then from Quake 2 to Quake 3 was the abadonment of software rendering altogether and them from Quake 3 to Doom 3 was the unified lighting model change.

At the same time, Carmack was learning (I presume) object-oriented design concepts and up until I think Doom 3 (or maybe Quake 3) his engines were largely in C style C++.

But I've digressed..

Carmack does write new engines from scratch sometimes, but Quake 2 was not done from scratch and I'm pretty sure that Quake 3 wasn't done entirely from scratch either (close to it, though, if memory serves).

If you want to be philosophical about it, then we could reason that Carmack could never create a graphics engine from scratch because he's always drawing upon knowledge from the previous engines he created. Discuss... actually please don't

If you look at the HL2 SDK, the debt that Source owes to Quake is fairly obvious. Anyone familiar with id tech will recognise what those func_* thingies are, let alone the terms BSP, PVS, lightmap, blocksize, detail brush. Source is clearly heavily derived from Quake/HL tech, and that shouldn't really be much of a suprise.

Mind you, anyone claiming that HL2 actually uses the Quake engine is a total biscuit.

No engine is really 'rewrote from scrath', although sometimes they only share some certain small scheletal code. The Quake 2 code was wrote on top of the Quake 1 code, whereas the Quake 3 code was rewrote from scratch as much as possible. The D3 code was rewrote from scratch in that sense too, but the console shell is all from Q3 (for example).

HL1 was done under license from the Quake 1 engine, so it's a heavily modified Q1 engine. Sometime when they were creating the game Q2 was released and they used some small code from that engine, so you can say it's a mix of Q1 and Q2 code, heavily modified.

The HL2 engine is the HL1 engine with a lot rewritten. Although fanboys like to say it's "100% new, rewrote from scratch" (maybe in an attempt to show valve is far superior to id and doesn't need any of the original licensed code) and valve employees have said that on interviews too, it's not. Yes, many of the engine functionality (ie, mods) is still bound to the id way, which is a good thing (I personally hate the way you have to deal with mods on the ut2kx engines, for example)... but more than that, there's a lot of code that still comes directly from the HL1 version. Nothing shocking, of course, since some code like directinput handling or file reading or whatever doesn't have to be changed between different engines anyways.

So you can say HL2 is a heavily modified engine based on an engine that is itself a heavily modified version of the Q1/Q2 engine.

Afaik HL1 was based on the Q2 engine, Q2 were to be released soon and they shifted from Q1 to Q2 in the middle of the development. It's obvious HL1 has never been a complete Q1 improvment anyway. They rewrote all the Q2 features inside HL1 though. It was not intended at first to use the Q2 engine in HL1 but they had to. When HL1 came out, the game was obsolete yet, i didnt play it a lot, there were other and better FPS at this time. Like HL2 they were sooooo late.

And i here I thought it was common knowledge that HL1 was based on the 1.5 version of the quake1 engine. All the enhancements in the Q2 engine were already implemented into the HL engine at the time that Q2 came out. And due to them being one of the first to feature a unique skeletal animation system (unique for the time) most of the Q2 enhancements couldn't even work on their already enhanced Q1 engine.

First time I'm reading this.

BTW I've heard somewhere that Valve has licenced the Q3 engine at some point... Anyone heard this?

Do you have a quote or something to back this up? I wouldn't be terribly surprised, I just never saw this bit of information anywhere.

What part? I think it's common knowledge it was rewrote (meaning it's a new engine) but some parts were left, like the console, I meant it myself as an example. I didn't see any reference to the console anywhere, but it's widely know Carmack has redone the core of the engine since it has a new rendering system and whatnot.

PS -- I don't think HL has ever licensed the q3 code, but I know id licenses carry on (as was the case with q1 -> q2 for hl and daikatana).. does that information help?

Did you happen to notice my post before that one. I'm the one that originally said all the Quake engines are largely rewrites. Anyway, the part I was inquiring about was the comment you made about the console being all from Quake3. I mean certainly there's a lot of empirical evidence to support that, just the matter of fact way you said it lead me to believe maybe there was an interview I missed somewhere.

slightly OT (probably a slightly stupid question as well but..).. does all this mean id get royalties from HL2 sales if the engine contains 'snippets' or ideas based on the HL code (and thus based on licenced material from id)???

Well considering the Quake engine can be licensed for a flat $10,000 fee now I would doubt it requires royalty payment.

Oh, ok, no, there's no interview mentioning that. It was just a personal example.

I also believe all engines are rewrites, but some of them are .. to a larger degree. When Q3 was being done, Carmack posted something on his .plan mentioning how was Q2 done (on top of Q1) then how they were doing something completelly different for Q3 (rewriting anew, then just using a few assets from the previous engines).

I remember well a Carmack interview where he says clearly "console stuff is not programmed from scratch". Renderer is surely 100% new code

Hm the D3 console seems quite different form Q3 if you ask me, but than again I'm not a programmer...

BTW about the Q series engine licences: IONS had to licence both Q1 and Q2 engine for Daikatana when they considered moving on to Q2 during the development process and the same happened to 3DR with DNF - it's not like you licence one engine and you get another one in 3 years for free... Maybe it works (had worked) the other way - licence Q2 ang get Q1 for free - Special Offer!!! On the other hand Valve has licenced Q1 and 'has used some code from Q2' - noone says they licenced that one as well so I can't tell.

That's true. Certainly licensing the Quake 1 engine doesn't get you the Quake 2 engine when it comes out. I think the person that made that statement is mistaken. At best, you get revisions and updates that are made to THAT code base, often times by other companies that are working closely with id.

In fact, anyone that is interested in this matter as much as I am, should really just go here: http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/.

It's the same thing... it even duplicates the bugs the Q3 one had on international keyboards, something developers never notice because they don't use ` for accented characters like à è ì ò ù (I do).