Thread: C for the pros

Hi found some game code on the web created by the world famous 'id software' and it is for the game quake. It is large file containing about 60 souce files.

You can check it out by visiting

www.planetsourcecode.com

and clicking on C++ then games, type in quake in the find box.

I think id software must of released this as open souce code. Anyway, my point is I did not think that Quake would of been coded in pure C. I know C++ is well known for games programming, but I thought C was used to create the modules and stuff.

I am not sure when Qauake was originally released, but perhaps they thought of using C over C++ for portablility. I guess now all game programmers ( proffesionals ones ) use C++ over C, but that is not an absolute, just my view on it. Others may differ. C++ is object orientated, where as C is more structured.

Quake was developed on NEXTSTEP, right? Yeah.
Quake 4 / Doom 3 was the first of their games (that they've GPL'd / released SDK's for) that was written in C++. (As far as I know)

q1 - q3 = C. Same for DOOM and Wolf3D, and the Commander Keen series I expect.

Radiant (the editor line for the Quake games) was written using MFC (so C++).

I'm writing my engine in C++ and all the tools in C, purely because I can. I felt like not having the STL at my disposal and forcing myself to implement data structures in C, just for the experience.

However, I'm not sure how much of the editor (that I'm yet to design) this could apply to since it'll need to interface with the engine (most likely) and that'll be written in C++. Meh.

EDIT:

I just re-read my reply and realised how quickly I managed to float off-topic. Sorry about that