QuakeC is a scripting language developed in 1996 by John Carmack of id Software to program parts of the computer game Quake. Using QuakeC, a programmer is able to customize Quake to great extents by adding weapons, changing game logic and physics, and programming complex scenarios. It can be used to control many aspects of the game itself, such as parts of the AI, triggers, or changes in the level. Scripting programming languages (commonly called scripting languages or script languages) are computer programming languages designed for scripting the operation of a computer. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... John Carmack is a widely recognized and influential game programmer. ... id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Zombies attacking the player. ...

Overview

The QuakeC source to the original id Software Quake game logic was published in 1996 and used as the basis for modifications like capture the flag and others. QuakeC source code is compiled using a tool called qcc into a bytecode kept in a file called progs.dat. The programmers of Quake modifications could then publish their progs.dat bytecode without revealing their source code. Most Quake mods were published this way. id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Capture the flag is a traditional outdoor game often played by children where two teams have a flag each and the objective is to capture the other teams flag, located at the teams base, and bring it back to their own base. ... Byte-code is a sort of intermediate code that is more abstract than machine code. ...

Despite poor reviews by many of the leading magazines, and despite a public favoring of Duke Nukem 3D, QuakeC allowed the Quake engine to dominate the direction of the first-person shooter genre. Thanks to Carmack's idea of extending computer game life by adding unlimited expandability, an enormous Internet community of gamers and programmers alike has arisen and nearly every modern multiplayer game is completely expandable. Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms and released on January 29, 1996 by Apogee Software, featuring the adventures of Duke Nukem, based on a character that had appeared in earlier platform games by the company: Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II. // Synopsis Murderous aliens... The Quake engine is the engine that runs Quake. ... Doom, one of the games that defined the first-person shooter genre. ... Multiplayer is a mode of play for computer and video games in which multiple people can play the same game at the same time. ...

Limitations

The syntax of QuakeC is based on that of the C programming language, explaining its name, although it is much more limited. For example, QuakeC does not allow the implementation of new types through either structures or objects. QuakeC also suffers from the fact that many builtin functions (functions prototyped in the QuakeC code but actually defined within the game engine written in C) that return strings in a temporary string buffer, which can only hold one string at any given time. In other words, a construct such as Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ...

SomeFunction (ftos (num1), ftos (num2));

will fail because the second call to ftos (which converts a floating-point value to a string) overwrites the string returned by the first call before SomeFunction can do something with it. Other prominent examples of these quirks include the fact that QuakeC does not contain any string handling functions or file handling functions, which were simply not needed by the original game. Although other programmers certainly could have used them, APIs for things like file manipulation were purposefully left out to prevent security concerns when downloading a precompiled progs.dat bytecode.

Most computer games have their game logic written in plain C(++) and compiled into the executable, which is faster. However, this makes it harder for the community to create mods and it makes the process of porting the game to another platform (such as GNU/Linux) more costly. A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ... 2004 Banshee car modification for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City - replacement of original Banshee Mod or modification is a term generally applied to computer games, especially first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. ... In computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. ... Tux, a cartoon penguin frequently featured sitting, is the official Linux mascot. ...

Despite its advantages, the concept of implementing the game logic in a separate scripting language and writing an interpreter for it was soon dropped (even by John Carmack who had implemented this concept) because of the overall inflexibility of an interpreted language, the increasingly complex game logic and the fact that releasing part of the source code would be sufficient for the mod community. Interpreter can mean one of the following: In communication, an interpreter is a person whose role is to facilitate dialogue between two parties that do not use the same language. ... John Carmack is a widely recognized and influential game programmer. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ...

Modified compilers and syntaxes

As is their custom to do with nearly everything they make, id Software released the source of qcc, their QuakeC compiler, along with the original QuakeC code in 1996. Modified versions soon sprung up, including Jonathan Roy's fastqcc and Ryan "FrikaC" Smith's FrikQCC. These added functionality, optimizations, and compiling speed boosts. id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...

In 1999 when id Software released the code from Quake's engine under the GPL, the workings of the bytecode interpreter were examined and new QuakeC compilers were released, such as J.P. Grossman's qccx and a new version of FrikQCC. These compilers took advantage of newly discovered features in a backwards-compatible way so that the bytecode could still be properly interpreted by unmodified Quake engines. New features include arrays, pointers, integers, for loops and string manipulation. 1999 (MCMXCIX) is a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... The GNU logo For other uses of GPL, see GPL (disambiguation). ...

With the Quake engine source code now able to be changed, further features were added to QuakeC in the form of new builtin functions. Features long yearned for by QuakeC coders finally reached realization as QuakeC now had file and string handling functions, enlarged string buffers, more math functions, and so on. However, programmers taking advantage of these changes lost backwards compatibility with the unmodified Quake engine.

See also: Computer programming Wikibooks has more about this subject: Computer programming Computer programming (often simply programming) is the craft of implementing one or more interrelated abstract algorithms using a particular programming language to produce a concrete computer program. ...

External links

• id's public FTP containing the C source code of qcc (QuakeC compiler)
• id's public FTP containing the QuakeC source code to the original Quake game logic
• Unofficial QuakeC specifications
• QuakeC at the Quake Wiki
• Planetquake's gamers's guide
• Planet AVP