> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was.

This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you have some epic buffering somewhere.

The turtle/tortoise note is correct for UK English, but in the US (where Id software was headquartered during the development of Quake), tortoises are considered a subset of "turtles". Per Webster:

> Turtle (noun): any of an order (Testudines synonym Chelonia) of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine reptiles that have a toothless horny beak and a shell of bony dermal plates usually covered with horny shields enclosing the trunk and into which the head, limbs, and tail usually may be withdrawn.

Always awesome content from Fabien Sanglard! +1

Quake 1/Quakeworld gladly live on! I'm a big fan for many years so I always encourage anybody to try it. [0] Still one of the best FPS ever built imho.

The community [1] keeps on improving the game and infrastructure and we can now even spectate games straight through the browser without having to download anything. [2]

[0] Download free (and legal) at https://nquake.com

[1] EU Discord: http://discord.quake.world | US Discord: http://discord.usquake.world

[2] Check out the "Web QTV" links at https://hub.quakeworld.nu

When I read the title I was expecting it to talk about indicators in the inheritance sense, say how you can tell if an engine has a Quake Engine pedigree. Like looking at the graphics or the online behavior of a game and tracing it back to Quake's renderer or netcode.

Still a cool article though.

I saw that NET indicator plenty when playing on 56k back in the day. Funny to see it written about as some curious historical artifact.

When I was young I got the plans of the Titanic, and I started implementing it in Quake, after an afternoon of hard work building out the outer hull to scale, that was the first time I saw that RAM icon :)

I'm old enough to remember all of these. Under the link below, you can still find old screenshots from deathmatch games we played in clans back in 1998. On dial-up modems with pings sometimes exceeding 400ms. It was terrible, but we played anyway :) That unplugged icon would appear when there were connection issues (not lag) and sometimes just for a moment. https://archive.quake.world/clans/ol-team/walki.zip

Mr. Sanglard's blog is one of my favorites. I hope the recent posts on Quake are indicative of his intent to write a Game Engine book on Quake. His others were excellent.

Cool curiosities! The chocolate quake source port is great as well. I've always wondered why there wasn't a chocolate doom equivalent for quake. It was nice to see its announcement earlier this year, so I've been quietly following its development ever since. The guy behind it did a great job, now we just need a crispy doom equivalent for quake!

I also wonder where is that tortoise texture from. Seems such a small thing to have the effort to create art for during development.

Lovely read.

Just a curious question if the authors or any maintainers read this comment:

Does this bug fix break the functionality of re-connecting the client? Or how would the client know they need to use the same port as the previous session?

(My understanding is that a new client coming from the same IP and different port will now be treated as a new player instead of a reconnect)

I might be wrong but it seems the DISC part needs some correction:

> The DISC indicator wraps HDD access done via Sys_FileRead. ... The code for this indicator is in SCR_DrawRam.

I can't find the image itself but just judging by its name SCR_DrawRam is for displaying the image for the RAM indicator.

Engines used to be cool. The original Theme Park engine was it's own application in it's emulator. You had SCRUMM which was another interactive cool thing of it's own. DOS games amazed me as a kid.

Amazing, after playing all the Quake series (still playing Quake 2 daily), I learnt something new about it. I will definitely try the turtle command and try to make it appear (somehow), maybe artificially with the maxfps command. There is no way I can organically produce it on a 32-core CPU. Maybe I can try with a VM with very low specs.

I think it should say "present" instead of "prevent" in this sentence: "The NET indicator is prevent and active in Quake 2."

Thought I should report since I saw Mr. Sanglard in the comments :)

Quake 1 was such a vibe when it first came out. It was nearly an utterly unique experience for that time.

... Now I want to add these to slack.

I think that the ingame terminal window inherited from Quake that continued onto the original Half life, onto recent games like CS2, rather than a place for entering debug/cheat commands that other game developers seem to only imagine it as, is a QoL feature that me and many other people have missed before. Any game setting (graphics options, FPS cap, FOV) can be changed by tab-completing commands from the ingame terminal. Actions like shooting, jumping, cycling weapon-in-hand are also available as text commands.

Text commands might seem like a impractical, though quaint interface to the game, but that terminal also lets you bind any command to any key (this includes settings-changing commands). Not just a command, you can run more than one command at once like "cl_command1 ; cl_command2; ...". The terminal has some more scripting-like features that are readily available to the player, but just with that, you could have, for example, a key bound to a bunch of commands that turn up graphics settings to make the game as beautiful as possible for a screenshot, and another that undoes those commands for situations where you need higher performance.

You can also bind the key "K" to write in chat "My people need me" and instantly respawn:

  bind K 'say "My people need me" ; kill'

Almost total input freedom as it will turn out.

It is basically a keyboard macroing system but offered to you on a platter by the game, making ever-crufty external macroing or bringing out something like AutoHotKey unnecessary. Though not as deep, it has just the right amount of depth. Binding keys to commands is not done through a special GUI, it is being done through a text command as well (just 'bind'), and that implies that you can nest bind commands:

> Scripting in Team Fortress 2 involves using configuration files to change keybinds, create aliases, adjust advanced graphical settings, automate complex actions, and execute sequences of console commands. Unlike hacking, scripting is an official feature built into the game and will not trigger a Valve Anti-Cheat ban. The complexity of scripts can range from simple keybindings to intricate loops and nested aliases that change themselves dynamically.[1]

[1] https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Scripting

along those lines, I saw a video where a light strobing pattern from quake was still used in a section half-life alyx (with much better lighting lol)

the fact the quake engine’s internals still live on in so many modern games is quite a feat