QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C

Re:QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C by matttproud on Monday February 06, 2023 @03:27AM (#34674763)

As a former QuakeC hacker and id engine spelunker, I think this is great. A parsimonious codebase here is to be welcomed. The original engine was littered with globals and cruft. Reasoning with the original implementation took considerable effort.

Unless you were playing the game at the time, it’s impossible to comprehend how important QuakeC was. It lit afire an ecosystem of modifications, some of which became full-fledged independent franchise of their own like Team Fortress. If you ever played with DOOM’s Dehacked, QuakeC is absolutely next-level.

For me personally, it amplified my interest in programming in a way nothing before it had. And that’s not counting the number of people who used QuakeC as a way to develop their own skills and create their own names for themselves in the game development industry.

1996-7 represents a golden period of hacker innovation and exploration.

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Re:QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C by rasz on Monday February 06, 2023 @05:52AM (#34675756)

> how important QuakeC was

and a great investment:

https://mrelusive.com/oldprojects/obots/ObotDoc/index.htm

https://mrelusive.com/oldprojects/obots/obots.html

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/J.M.P_van_Waveren_(MrElusive)

Van Waveren started doing a map for Doom map pack, but with access to QuakeC build Omicron - the best Quake 1 bot landing him a job at ID architecting core Quake 3 technology. He followed Carmack all the way to Oculus.

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Re:QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C by wink on Monday February 06, 2023 @07:10AM (#34676228)

I guess I was simply too young (and not motivated enough), but QuakeC was kinda impenetrable for me and my online research didn't really yield a lot of good resources.

So I guess you're right, and a friend's older brother and his friends did some stuff that looked cool but it was one of those "nope" learning experiences for me.

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Re:QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C by barryp on Monday February 06, 2023 @04:49PM (#34684932)

I had a huge amount of fun back in those days messing with QuakeWorld and Quake2, learned a ton of stuff.

One project was embedding a Python2 interpeter in QuakeWorld, along with a QuakeC->Python translator. The translator and the resulting Deathmatch and CTF games are here: https://github.com/barryp/qwpython

The other was embedding a JavaVM in Quake2, and instead of trying to translate the C game logic, we recreated the whole thing from scratch in an object-oriented Java fashion: https://github.com/barryp/q2java

Thanks to Carmack for opening up those old engines, that was a real education.

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