QuakeC is a compiled language developed in 1996 by John Carmack of id Software to program parts of the video game Quake.
Using QuakeC, a programmer is able to customize Quake to great extents by adding weapons, changing game logic and physics, and programming complex scenarios.
The QuakeC source to the original id Software Quake game logic was published in 1996 and used as the basis for modifications like capture the flag and others.
[citation needed] Thanks to Carmack's idea of extending video game life by adding unlimited expandability (extensibility already played a big role in Doom), an enormous Internet community of gamers and programmers alike has arisen and many modern multiplayer games are extensible in some form.
Despite its advantages, the choice of implementing game logic using a custom scripting language and interpreter was dropped from the next generation Quake II engine in favor of compiled C code due to the overall inflexibility of QuakeC, the increasingly complex game logic, the performance to be gained by packaging game logic into a native dynamic link library, and the advantage of leveraging an already established programming language's community, tools, educational materials, and documentation.
Compiling to native code added an additional barrier to entry for novice mod developers, because they were being asked to set up a more complicated programming environment.
These compilers took advantage of newly discovered features in a backwards-compatible way so that the bytecode could still be properly interpreted by unmodified Quake engines.
With the Quake engine source code now able to be changed, further features were added to QuakeC in the form of new built-in functions.