Virtual Machine
id Tech 3 uses a virtual machine to control object behavior on the server, effects and prediction on the client and the user interface. This presents many advantages as mod authors do not need to worry about crashing the entire game with bad code, clients could show more advanced effects and game menus than was possible in Quake II and the user interface for mods was entirely customizable.
Virtual machine files are developed in ANSI C, using LCC to compile them to a 32-bit RISC pseudo-assembly format. A tool called q3asm then converts them to QVM files, which are multi-segmented files consisting of static data and instructions based on a reduced set of the input opcodes. Unless operations which require a specific endianness are used, a QVM file will run the same on any platform supported by Quake 3.
The virtual machine also contained bytecode compilers for the x86 and PowerPC architectures, executing QVM instructions via an interpreter.
Read more about this topic: Id Tech 3, Engine Features
Famous quotes containing the words virtual and/or machine:
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Above all, however, the machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)