Architectural Studies of Games Engines – the Quake Series

The move of commercial companies to “open-source”
their products presents challenges for both the proposing
company and the wider open source (OS) communities. The
former has to align their source code to the OS practices,
while the latter has to cope with large amounts of closely developed
code.
This paper aims to present relevant data and results from
the analysis performed on the Quake family of OSS game
engines, including findings and an initial interpretation of
the data. This forms the basis for the architectural understanding
necessary to design and develop improvements
and new features to the studied game engines.
The presented approach constitutes a useful resource for
games developers who wish to contribute to the further evolution
of these games engines; and it provides insights into
how the Quake engine architecture has evolved in practice
since it was released as an open source project.

Citation:
Munro, J; Boldyreff, C; Capiluppi, A. (2009) ‘Architectural Studies of Games Engines – the Quake Series’ International IEEE Consumer Electronics Society's Games Innovations Conference, 25-28 Aug. 2009 (ICE-GIC 2009) pp. 246 - 255.