Qfusion
Quake II engine
Game engine
The Quake II engine is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II.[1] It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.[2]
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.[2] 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, with consequences including:
- Since they were compiled for specific platforms, instead of an interpreter, they could run faster than Quake's solution, which was to run the game logic (QuakeC) in a limited interpreter.[3]
- id could release the source code to allow modifications while keeping the remainder of the engine proprietary.[4]
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.[5][6]
id Software released the source code on December 22, 2001, under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.[7]