QuakeWorld (abbreviated QW) is an update to id Software's seminal multiplayer deathmatch game, Quake, that enhances the game's multiplayer features (namely UDP support) to allow people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on Internet game servers. Modern broadband connections such as cable and DSL can use the QW model of network handling and game physics. Official id Software development stopped with the test release of QuakeWorld 2.33 on December 21, 1998. The last official stable release was 2.30.
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Quake's network code, the part of the software that handles multiplayer gaming over a network, was designed for low-latency play over a LAN. The original Quake did not address the fact that Internet connections have generally much higher latency and packet loss compared to a LAN connection, and over some connections, performance of this model did not provide an optimal experience.
QuakeWorld, written by John Carmack with help from John Cash and Christian Antkow, was released in December 1996. Further development was later taken over by David Kirsch (a.k.a. "Zoid" from Threewave, of Capture the Flag fame) and Jack 'morbid' Mathews. It included a useful program called QuakeSpy, written by Mathews, which later evolved into GameSpy.
For the first four months of its existence from December 1996 until April 1997, QuakeWorld (Version 1.25) sported its own global player ranking system where users were required to log into id Software's master server with their own unique identifications each time so that game statistics were logged in a central location. This spurred competition between players striving to attain the highest rank, but also controversy over the fairness of the formula used in its calculation. This, and more significantly, the incredible network and manpower load placed on id software's servers overwhelmed the company's rankings system that led them to abandon rankings entirely with the release of QuakeWorld Version 1.5 early in April 1997. The master servers thereafter only provided a list of active QuakeWorld servers.
The most popular QuakeWorld modification to date, Team Fortress, was released in Dec 1996 for QuakeWorld. During 1997 Team Fortress received praise from players and industry media alike and quickly gathered a base of thousands of players and hundreds of clans.
The True Gamers Invitational, or TGi for short, was a LAN event held in April 1999 in Gothenburg, Sweden admined by Izn0. It gathered the best duel players in the world, with Intel sponsoring the flight of the Australian player 'Reload'. Other countries represented were Sweden (victorious by LakermaN), Germany, United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. No cash was awarded, but this was the most significant international competition at the time, and most participants went on to earn sponsorship to travel to other tournaments. This event marks the beginning of QuakeWorld's submergence underground, as most players went on to newer games such as Counter-Strike, and Quake III Arena, and there has never been such an international LAN competition in QuakeWorld since (although QHLan has come close).
The CPL 4-Year Anniversary Event - 6/28/01 > 7/1/01
QuakeWorld's most important feature is its rewritten networking code (for client-side player prediction and delta compression). Player prediction allowed QuakeWorld clients to compensate for high latency, thus allowing dialup users to move around in the virtual world without being affected by the disorienting effects of latency. This helped Quake network play reach an additional market, as opposed to those who had LAN or broadband connections at the time.
It did not address what some considered exploits, namely bunny hopping, wall-hugging, and zig-zagging. These bugs have shaped the recent part of QuakeWorld's life, allowing for additional dimensions to playing style, and are now seen as features by much of the community.
QuakeWorld was seminal in popularising deathmatch, and, alongside Ultima Online, internet multiplayer. It is considered even today by many die-hard players to be the best multiplayer game, such that several games featuring QuakeWorld-like gameplay elements have been developed, including the Quake III mod: Challenge ProMode Arena, Painkiller, the freeware game Warsow, a mod for Quake 4 called Quake4World, and a free game called Quake2World based on the Quake 2 engine.[1]
A license to QuakeWorld was given to Valve Software L.L.C. in 1996, which was heavily modified into the GoldSrc engine, which powers Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic (a follow-up to the QuakeWorld mod Team Fortress), and Counter-Strike, among others.
In December 1999, John Carmack of id Software released the server and client source code of Quake and QuakeWorld under the GNU General Public License as a Christmas present to the world, and this spawned a plethora of 21st century updates to this famous game first released in 1996. A few years later John Romero released the map sources under the GNU General Public License in October 2006. Among the popular clients today are FuhQuake, ezQuake, More QuakeWorld, with ezQuake being most popular.[2]
QuakeNet, the largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, originated in 1997 as a network for QuakeWorld players.[3]
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