Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
6
3D Shooters for Quake
This is where things start to get really exciting. I've always been a huge fan of first-person
shooters (FPS), and when Android came along, I had to jump at the chance of getting
involved in bringing this gem (Quake) to the platform in all its beauty. Almost everybody
knows of or has played this astounding game for the PC. It was originally created in 1996 by
the great game developer John Carmack for id Software.
Quake is the successor to the Doom game series. At the time of this writing it was possible
The Quake engine of the game was developed by id Software when powering their 1996
video game Quake. It is a 3D real-time rendering and like Doom, it is licensed under the
terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
In this chapter, you will learn how a minimum investment in development time can translate
into maximum return on investment (ROI) for your organization. That is my goal. I am sure you
have a lot of invested PC code or engines gathering dust somewhere on your servers. Well,
why not reuse that code for your mobile projects? The GPL Quake I Engine brought to Android
kept 98% of the original code intact. This chapter demonstrates the power of code reuse.
Note
All the code included in this chapter was developed, compiled and tested using Eclipse IDE
for Java Developers instead of Android Studio 1.0.1 since, when this manuscript was written, NDK
and JNI were not supported by Android Studio.
A Little About the Quake Jargon
The Quake engine, like the Doom engine, uses binary space partitioning (BSP) to optimize
the world rendering.
I don't want to explain the inner workings of the Quake engine (an entire book will not be
enough for that); instead, I want to demonstrate how to get this engine quickly up and
running in Android. But before I do, let's go over the basic lingo used in this 3D engine.
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