Editing Quake (video game) (section)

====QuakeWorld====
To improve the quality of online play, id Software released QuakeWorld in December 1996, a build of the ''Quake'' engine 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 their actions until the server sent back a reply acknowledging them. For example, if the player attempted to move forward, the 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 it 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 that should have been fixed before release, but it was not caught because he and other developers had high-speed Internet access at home.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

After months of private beta testing, QuakeWorld, written by John Carmack with help from John Cash and Christian Antkow, was released on December 13, 1996. The client portion followed on December 17.<ref>{{Cite web |date=October 16, 2006 |title=GameSpy.com - Articles |url=http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/quakeworld_a.shtm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061016094830/http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/quakeworld_a.shtm |archive-date=October 16, 2006 |access-date=December 21, 2020}}</ref> Official id Software development stopped with the test release of QuakeWorld 2.33 on December 21, 1998. The last official stable release was 2.30.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Blue's News - August 22-28, 1998 |url=http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/aug98-4.html |website=Blue's News}}</ref> QuakeWorld has been described by [[IGN]] as the first popular [[first-person shooter]] meant to be played [[Online game|online]].<ref>{{Cite web |date=January 7, 2010 |title=The History of Online Shooters |url=http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/01/07/the-history-of-online-shooters |access-date=November 7, 2015 |website=[[IGN]]}}</ref>

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 trade off 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 U.S., 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.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

In January 1997 an independant developer, Nick Maher, developed a version of the Quake World master server (called QuakeWorld Local) that could be run on a LAN without an Internet connection. The software tracked player statistics over time and allowed international players without a QuakeWorld server on their continent, or without Internet access at all, to enjoy the new client.<ref>{{Cite web |date=January 5, 1997 |title=QuakeWorld Local |url=https://www.bluesnews.com/s/225281/quakeworld-local|website=Blue's News}}</ref>