Expansions
There have been two official expansion packs for Quake. The expansions pick up right where the first game left off, use all the same weapons and powerups, monsters and gothic atmosphere/architecture and continue/finish the story of the first game and its protagonist. A third unofficial expansion pack, Final Mission: Abyss of Pandemonium, was developed by the Impel Development Team.
Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon is the first official mission pack released on February 28, 1997. It was developed by Hipnotic Interactive. It features fifteen new single player missions, a new multiplayer arena, and gameplay features not originally found in Quake, including rotating structures and breakable walls. New enemies include Centroids, large cybernetic scorpions with nailguns, Gremlins, small goblins that can steal weapons and multiply by feeding on enemy corpses, and Spike Mines, floating orbs that detonate when near the player. New weapons include Mjolnir, a large lightning emitting hammer, a laser cannon, which shoots bouncing bolts of energy, and a Proximity Mine Launcher, which fires grenades that attach to surfaces and detonate when an opponent comes near. The storyline follows Armagon, a general of Quake's forces, planning to invade Earth via a portal known as the 'rift'. Armagon resembles a giant gremlin with cybernetic legs and a combined rocket launcher/laser cannon for arms.
Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity was the second official mission pack, released on March 31, 1997. Developed by Rogue Entertainment, it featured sixteen new single player levels as well as several new enemies and bosses. New enemies included Electric Eels, Phantom Swordsmen, Multi-Grenade Ogres (which fire cluster grenades), Hell Spawn, Wrath (floating, robed undead), Guardians (resurrected ancient Egyptian warriors), Mummies, and statues of various enemies that come to life. The bosses were Lava Men, Overlords, large Wraths, and a dragon guarding the "temporal energy converter". Rather than offering new weapons, the mission pack gave the player new ammo for already existing weapons, such as "lava nails" for the Nailgun, cluster grenades, rockets that split into four in a horizontal line, plasma cells, and a grappling hook to help in moving around the map.
In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using Rendition Vérité chipset. Aside from the expected benefit of improved performance, VQuake offered numerous visual improvements over the original software-rendered Quake. It boasted full 16-bit color, bilinear filtering (reducing pixelation), improved dynamic lighting, optional anti-aliasing and even improved source code clarity, as the improved performance finally allowed the use of gotos to be abandoned in favor of proper loop constructs. As the name implied, VQuake was a proprietary port specifically for the Vérité; consumer 3D acceleration was in its infancy at the time, and there was no standard 3D API for the consumer market. After completing VQuake, John Carmack vowed never to write a proprietary port again, citing his frustration with Rendition's Speedy3D API.
To improve the quality of online play, id Software released QuakeWorld on December 17, 1996, a build of Quake that featured significantly revamped network code including the addition of client-side prediction. The original Quake's network code would not show the player the results of his actions until the server sent back a reply acknowledging them. For example, if the player attempted to move forward, his client would send the request to move forward to the server, and the server would determine whether the client was actually able to move forward or if he ran into an obstacle, such as a wall or another player. The server would then respond to the client, and only then would the client display movement to the player. This was fine for play on a LAN—a high bandwidth, very low latency connection. But the latency over a dial-up Internet connection is much larger than on a LAN, and this caused a noticeable delay between when a player tried to act and when that action was visible on the screen. This made gameplay much more difficult, especially since the unpredictable nature of the Internet made the amount of delay vary from moment to moment. Players would experience jerky, laggy motion that sometimes felt like ice skating, where they would slide around with seemingly no ability to stop, due to a build-up of previously-sent movement requests. John Carmack has admitted that this was a serious problem which should have been fixed before release, but it was not caught because he and other developers had high-speed Internet access at home.
With the help of client-side prediction, which allowed players to see their own movement immediately without waiting for a response from the server, QuakeWorld's network code allowed players with high-latency connections to control their character's movement almost as precisely as when playing in single-player mode. The netcode parameters could be adjusted by the user, so that QuakeWorld performed well for users with high and low latency.
The tradeoff to client-side prediction was that sometimes other players or objects would no longer be quite where they had appeared to be, or, in extreme cases, that the player would be pulled back to a previous position when the client received a late reply from the server which overrode movement the client had already previewed; this was known as "warping". As a result, some serious players, particularly in the USA, still preferred to play online using the original Quake engine (commonly called NetQuake) rather than QuakeWorld. However, the majority of players, especially those on dial-up connections, preferred the newer network model, and QuakeWorld soon became the dominant form of online play. Following the success of QuakeWorld, client-side prediction has become a standard feature of nearly all real-time online games. As with all other Quake upgrades, QuakeWorld was released as a free, unsupported add-on to the game and was updated numerous times through 1998.
On January 22, 1997, id Software released GLQuake. This was designed to use the OpenGL 3D API to access hardware 3D graphics acceleration cards to rasterize the graphics, rather than having the computer's CPU fill in every pixel. In addition to higher framerates for most players, GLQuake provided higher resolution modes and texture filtering. GLQuake also experimented with reflections, transparent water, and even rudimentary shadows. GLQuake came with a driver enabling the subset of OpenGL used by the game to function on the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card, the only consumer-level card at the time capable of running GLQuake well. Previously, John Carmack had experimented with a version of Quake specifically written for the Rendition Vérité chip used in the Creative Labs PCI 3D Blaster card. This version had met with only limited success, and Carmack decided to write for generic APIs in the future rather than tailoring for specific hardware.
On March 11, 1997, id Software released WinQuake, a version of the non-OpenGL engine designed to run under Microsoft Windows; the original Quake had been written for DOS, allowing for launch from Windows 95, but could not run under Windows NT-based operating systems because it required direct access to hardware. WinQuake instead accessed hardware via Win32-based APIs such as DirectSound, DirectInput, and DirectDraw that were supported on Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 and later releases. Like GLQuake, WinQuake also allowed higher resolution video modes. This removed the last barrier to widespread popularity of the game. In 1998, LBE Systems and Laser-Tron released Quake: Arcade Tournament Edition in the arcades in limited quantities.
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