It's really ironic that this appeared on the front page when it did, because I've spent the last couple days replacing the ZQuake sound system with FMOD and Atmoky TrueSpatial for HRTF and such. This was my first time ever working on a code base from 1996-2000. And in pure C no less. C feels so foreign to me since I'm so used to writing in C++ and Zig and such. But it was still really fun!
And I mean it doesn't seem super impressive, but it's something. Lol
you could have chosen a far worse codebase than Quake from the 90s. Quake was pretty clean in comparison. Sensible use of macros for doing things. A type system that made sense.
Descent on the other hand...
I mean... It's ugly from a modern standpoint. Zero encapsulation to speak of. Global state everywhere. But doing the modifications I did were pretty easy all things considered. So yeah, the code is clean, if "ugly" when viewed from a modern standpoint. It was definitely fun to do either way! Idk what other changes I'll make, we'll see. Especially since I don't know the architecture very well yet
Of course! Global state IS game state!
It definitely was an amazing codebase for the time. You didn’t need to get hung up on architecture because it is very singular… it’s just a level, you, and the entities that were created when the level loaded.
There’s no pre-caching, no virtual textures, no shaders (there are materials for later quake 3), it’s just pure load -> set -> loop. The “client” renders, the “server” has the state.