[CodeCompost]

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.

[arboles]

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

[doubletwoyou]

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

[epolanski]

Half life was built on quake 1 code and the codebase was never abandoned but they kept improving and improving on it, essentially all valve games have something inherited from it from TF2 to Dota to Alyx.