[HN Gopher] Quake Engine Indicators
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Quake Engine Indicators
Author : liquid_x
Score : 161 points
Date : 2025-11-24 08:10 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
| whou wrote:
| Cool curiosities! The chocolate quake source port is great as
| well. I've always wondered why there wasn't a chocolate doom
| equivalent for quake. It was nice to see its announcement earlier
| this year, so I've been quietly following its development ever
| since. The guy behind it did a great job, now we just need a
| crispy doom equivalent for quake!
|
| I also wonder where is that tortoise texture from. Seems such a
| small thing to have the effort to create art for during
| development.
| somat wrote:
| I am not familiar with chocolate doom what makes it better than
| any other doom source port?
|
| There are many good source ports of quake, I always liked
| darkplaces but it intentionally and willfully tries to push
| improvements so not really for purists. There is stuff like
| fitzquake/quakespasm that stays much closer to vanilla quake
| and if you like quakeworld ftequake.
| bitwize wrote:
| Chocolate Doom attempts to replicate the original Doom
| experience in a modern source port, without the
| embellishments, bug fixes, and features offered by source
| ports like GZDoom. It's like the difference between building
| a modern clone of the Amiga 500, hewing as close to the
| original designs as possible, and building a "modern Amiga"
| with a PPC CPU, modern GPU, AmigaOS 4.x support, etc. Sure,
| the second is neat, but some people want to work within the
| exact constraints and quirks of the first.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| > I am not familiar with chocolate doom what makes it better
| than any other doom source port?
|
| The earliest doom variants once the source code released
| started adding features that weren't faithful to the original
| dos version 1.9.
|
| Even Boom which was a pretty conservative codebase that
| focused on limit removal for level editing added weird things
| like weapon recoil pushing the player back when you shoot a
| weapon.
|
| So chocolate doom's name is wordplay on "vanilla doom" - it's
| the version of doom we all played in the 90s just updated
| with current i/o libraries (libSDL) so it can run on modern
| platforms.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| The turtle/tortoise note is correct for UK English, but in the US
| (where Id software was headquartered during the development of
| Quake), tortoises are considered a subset of "turtles". Per
| Webster:
|
| > Turtle (noun): any of an order (Testudines synonym Chelonia) of
| terrestrial, freshwater, and marine reptiles that have a
| toothless horny beak and a shell of bony dermal plates usually
| covered with horny shields enclosing the trunk and into which the
| head, limbs, and tail usually may be withdrawn.
| leoc wrote:
| The naming of the 'showturtle' command may be a Logo reference
| https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/docs/html/usermanual_6....
| . It's highly likely that Carmack encountered Apple Logo on the
| Apple II at some point. Someone should ask him ...
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > Trivia: The icon doesn't actually depict a turtle but a
| tortoise. A turtle swims in the water while a tortoise walks on
| land.
|
| Turtles walk on land, too. All turtles are tortises? /s
| toast0 wrote:
| > The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received
| any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely
| aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was.
|
| This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss
| of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server
| should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received
| anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you
| have some epic buffering somewhere.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Example: the slow-motion replay of this demo causes the
| flashing of the net icon due to the packet frequency red-shift:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkDjsBiO58
| sph wrote:
| > packet frequency red-shift.
|
| Hmmm. Is that a term of art? I thought you were being funny,
| but I found at least one paper talking about packet red-
| shift: https://upcommons.upc.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0
| 0bbf88...
| dmurray wrote:
| In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets
| or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000
| km long ethernet cable.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Unless you are playing Quake through Iridium.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games
| on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping
| time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get
| over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.
| toast0 wrote:
| Geostationary satellite internet has garbage pings too.
| girvo wrote:
| We used to play these games on dial-up where ~300ms pings
| were pretty common.
|
| Moving to a cable connection in ~2001 was shocking in
| comparison!
| Sxubas wrote:
| Lovely read.
|
| Just a curious question if the authors or any maintainers read
| this comment:
|
| Does this bug fix break the functionality of re-connecting the
| client? Or how would the client know they need to use the same
| port as the previous session?
|
| (My understanding is that a new client coming from the same IP
| and different port will now be treated as a new player instead of
| a reconnect)
| firmretention wrote:
| I saw that NET indicator plenty when playing on 56k back in the
| day. Funny to see it written about as some curious historical
| artifact.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Yeah. Looks like an ethernet jack. True, buts its a modem jack
| (rj11 maybe?)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Are you sure it's not meant to be an RJ45 plug? The
| cylindrical thing to the bottom left corner of the wall
| socket looks like it might be a BNC plug. Which would make
| sense for the era of quake when Ethernet wasn't yet
| ubiquitous.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Yes i look closer. Maybe it is a rj45.
| cluckindan wrote:
| RJ45 next to BNC implies a token ring network, not ethernet
| :)
| jandrese wrote:
| The proportions look more like RJ11 than RJ45 to me. Not how
| big the clip is compared to the plug. Of course this is a
| hand drawn icon so take everything with a grain of salt.
| veeti wrote:
| I believe it still lives on in the Call of Duty series, being
| based on id tech. There's even memes about it:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/edmai1/connection_in...
| system2 wrote:
| You can still see it while playing in 2025, for Quake 2 at
| least, on Tastypleen servers in the U.S. The servers crash for
| some reason. Or if you connect to Chinese servers, sometimes I
| experience it, but rarely.
| system2 wrote:
| Amazing, after playing all the Quake series (still playing Quake
| 2 daily), I learnt something new about it. I will definitely try
| the turtle command and try to make it appear (somehow), maybe
| artificially with the maxfps command. There is no way I can
| organically produce it on a 32-core CPU. Maybe I can try with a
| VM with very low specs.
| malux85 wrote:
| When I was young I got the plans of the Titanic, and I started
| implementing it in Quake, after an afternoon of hard work
| building out the outer hull to scale, that was the first time I
| saw that RAM icon :)
| mtlebe wrote:
| I might be wrong but it seems the DISC part needs some
| correction:
|
| > The DISC indicator wraps HDD access done via Sys_FileRead. ...
| The code for this indicator is in SCR_DrawRam.
|
| I can't find the image itself but just judging by its name
| SCR_DrawRam is for displaying the image for the RAM indicator.
| foota wrote:
| ... Now I want to add these to slack.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| When I read the title I was expecting it to talk about indicators
| in the inheritance sense, say how you can tell if an engine has a
| Quake Engine pedigree. Like looking at the graphics or the online
| behavior of a game and tracing it back to Quake's renderer or
| netcode.
|
| Still a cool article though.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Engines used to be cool. The original Theme Park engine was it's
| own application in it's emulator. You had SCRUMM which was
| another interactive cool thing of it's own. DOS games amazed me
| as a kid.
| lgl wrote:
| Always awesome content from Fabien Sanglard! +1
|
| Quake 1/Quakeworld gladly live on! I'm a big fan for many years
| so I always encourage anybody to try it. [0] Still one of the
| best FPS ever built imho.
|
| The community [1] keeps on improving the game and infrastructure
| and we can now even spectate games straight through the browser
| without having to download anything. [2]
|
| [0] Download free (and legal) at https://nquake.com
|
| [1] EU Discord: http://discord.quake.world | US Discord:
| http://discord.usquake.world
|
| [2] Check out the "Web QTV" links at https://hub.quakeworld.nu
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(page generated 2025-11-27 23:00 UTC)