The Quake engine is the engine that runs Quake. It introduced true 3D realtime rendering and is licenced under the GPL. After release it immediately forked, as did the level design. Much of the engine remained in Quake II and Quake III. The quake engine, like Doom used Binary space partitioning. Quake also used Gouraud shading for moving objects, and a static lightmap for nonmoving objects. Quake was GPL'd in 1999 and lives on at QuakeForge.

History

The quake engine was created in 1996 for Quake. John Carmack did most of the programming of the engine.