These articles are Copyright © 2000 by Michael Abrash, all rights reserved except as explicitly granted herein. Permission is granted for unmodified non-commercial electronic reproduction and printing for personal use. In other words, you can do whatever you want with this material for your own use, and it can be electronically copied and posted on the Internet freely so long as the material is not modified (all files must be kept together and the contents must be unchanged), but you may not put it in a book or on a CD or other non-electronic medium, and you may not charge for download or access specifically to this material. You may use the code and techniques described herein without limitation; the intent is not to reserve rights to the ideas or technology, but rather to disseminate the ideas and technology so that it may be widely used.
These are the articles about how Quake works that I wrote during the period 1995-1997, when John Carmack and I were developing Quake. They certainly don't cover everything, but they cover a number of design and implementation aspects of Quake, and offer some history of the development process as well. John recently made the Quake source code freely available, and in that spirit I am making these articles, which together are a useful annotation to that code, available as well. I'd like to thank the Coriolis Group, publisher of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book, in which these articles first appeared as a group, for granting me permission to do this.
The architecture of Quake, and most of the technology discussed in these articles, is the creation of John Carmack. John, I figure that making this freely available is the form of "thank-you" that would mean the most to you.
I could not possibly have written about the many topics covered in the Black Book without help and encouragement from many people. Due to a mistake by an editor, the acknowledgements were omitted from that book. I would like to correct that omission here.
Thanks to my good friend Jeff Duntemann, editor of PC Techniques, without whom not only this material but pretty much my entire writing career wouldn't exist. Thanks to Jon Erickson, editor of Dr. Dobb's (in which most of this material originally appeared), both for encouragement and general good cheer and for giving me a place to write whatever I wanted about realtime 3-D. I'd also like to thank Chris Hecker and Jennifer Pahlka of the Game Developers Conference, without whose encouragement, nudging, and occasional well-deserved nagging there is no chance I would ever have written a paper for the GDC—a paper that's included in this material and is the most comprehensive overview of the Quake technology that's ever likely to be written.
Thanks to Dan Illowsky for getting me started writing articles long ago, when I lacked the confidence to do it on my own—and for teaching me how to handle the business end of things. Thanks to Will Fastie for giving me my first crack at writing for a large audience in the long-gone but still-missed PC Tech Journal, and for showing me how much fun it could be in his even longer-vanished but genuinely terrific column in Creative Computing (the most enjoyable single column I have ever read in a computer magazine; I used to haunt the mailbox around the beginning of the month just to see what Will had to say). Thanks to Robert Keller, Erin O'Conner, Liz Oakley, Steve Baker, and the rest of the cast of thousands that made Programmer's Journal a uniquely fun magazine—especially Erin, who did more than anyone else to teach me the proper use of the English language. (To this day, Erin will still patiently explain to me when one should use "that" and when one should use "which," even though eight years of instruction on this and related topics have left no discernible imprint on my brain.) Thanks to Tami Zemel, Monica Berg, and the rest of the Dr. Dobb's crew for excellent, professional editing, and for just being great people. Thanks to the Coriolis gang for their tireless hard work: Jeff Duntemann and Keith Weiskamp on the editorial and publishing side; Brad Grannis, Rob Mauhar, and Michelle Stroup, who handled art, design, and layout; and Jim Mischel for helping in a variety of ways. Thanks to Jack Tseng, for teaching me a lot about graphics hardware, and even more about how much difference hard work can make. Thanks to John T. Cockerham, David Stafford, Terje Mathisen, the BitMan, Jim Mackraz, Melvin Lafitte, John Navas, Phil Coleman, Anton Truenfels, John Miles, John Bridges, Jim Kent, Hal Hardenberg, Dave Miller, Steve Levy, Jack Davis, Duane Strong, Daev Rohr, Bill Weber, Dan Gochnauer, Patrick Milligan, Tom Wilson, the people in the ibm.pc/fast.code topic on Bix, and all the rest of you who have been so generous with your ideas and suggestions. I've done my best to acknowledge contributors by name, but if your name is omitted, my apologies, and please consider yourself thanked.
Special thanks to loonyboi and Blue for converting and formatting these files.
And, of course, thanks to Shay and Emily for their generous patience with my passion for writing and computers.
Michael Abrash
Bellevue, WA 2000