According to Petersen, Willits had his eye on id's upper echelon of management from the moment he became a full-time hire. After Romero was fired, Willits had coveted McGee's status as John Carmack's golden boy. According to this developer, Willits set his sights on eliminating McGee. Their feud reached a boiling point when McGee ran into trouble designing levels for Quake 2.

"American could tell something [was not right]," Petersen said. "So he went to Carmack and said, 'What should I do?' John Carmack said, 'Okay, to make your levels look better, go and talk to Tim.' And Tim Willits could make absolutely spectacular-looking levels. They were great levels. He said, 'Talk to Tim. Look to him to show you how to make your levels look really nice.'"

Willits deployed misdirection to further attenuate McGee's status with management. When McGee submitted new and revised levels for appraisal, Carmack lost his temper and accused him of doing A when he had expressly wanted B.

"American was horrified," Petersen said. "He said, 'Yes, I did just what he said.' Basically, what had happened was Tim Willits had literally told American the opposite of what he should do, to get him in trouble with John Carmack. And Carmack couldn't believe it. Who could be that dirty? He absolutely refused to believe that Willits had done it, but he had. That was Tim Willits literally tanking American McGee." 

Altho that's from the "Rocket Jump" book which presents an uncritical collection of self-serving retro-gossip from the id guys who, god love 'em, were largely a bunch of infighting egomaniacs. I'm a little sad to see it get picked up as ammunition for current Quake-community beefs. 

1. I did not get the impression it's uncritical, by far.

2. What "current Quake-community beefs"?? 

Oh the general Willits-is-Satan thing. 

Willits wishes he was as convincing in his trickery as Satan. 

So if you quit DOSQuake, it summons Tim Willits all over your hard drive? 

Don't we all... 

I think history has been kinder to the McGee maps - any time I do a replay I always find myself enjoying the McGee and Jacquays maps most, whereas the Willits ones tend more and more to bland and formulaic. They do look very nice though. 

The start of the warehouse unit isn't great. It's just a collection of linked rooms with buttons to open doors and a handful of enemies in each. Very uninspired. But I'd say it hugely improves after you get a little into the first map, and the second and third maps are probably as good as Quake 2 gets.

The weaker maps for me are the Torture Chambers map (get stuff in Cell Block A, then Cell Block B, then wander around badly lost in samey-looking corridors for far too long), the symmetrical Hangar map, the two Pumping Stations cause the Power/Waste unit to drag on, and there's something else in the middle of the Jail unit that's quite nondescript. I think some people find the Mines drags on a bit too long as well, and that's probably fair criticism. 

I mean, I've always assumed it doesn't and in all my years of playing it's never felt like it does, but I recently saw someone on Doomworld claim that Quake just uses a more toned-down RNG than Doom -- a claim no-one's contradicted so far:

Quake has less absurd RNG damage than Doom does, and I still think it's dumb when an Ogre takes 3 grenades instead of 2, or I need 5 to kill a Vore.

Is there any truth to this? Have I been wrong all these years in thinking there's no RNG in Quake? I tried searching for information on this but couldn't find anything. 

The rocket launcher is explicitly random on a direct hit, doing between 100 and 120 damage. It then does fixed radius damage to everything else in the area. So there's a random element, but it can't ever lead to an ogre surviving three direct hits (he has 200hp, so two minimum damage rockets suffice).

Grenades differ because they don't have a separate damage mechanism for the target they collide with. They just do 120 radius damage to everything, even the entity they hit. The key to maximising damage is to hit the ogre close to centre mass. If the grenade strikes the bounding box more than 20 units from the ogre's origin, you do less than 100 damage. Do that twice in a row, and the ogre takes three shots.

So there's no random number generation going on with the grenade, but it's subject to some mechanisms that can be arbitrary. For example, if you attack an ogre from the south-west direction, the corner of the bounding box is facing you, so your grenade can't get as close. If you attack from due south, you're presented with a flat face of a bounding box and the grenade gets closer before exploding. 

From what can see in the code: dogs, Fiends, both Knights, fish, Ogres, Shamblers, Spawn and Vore use some RNG for damage.

As far as dealing damage to them this is the only RNG that I can see:

T_MissleTouch (rockets) damg = 100 + random()*20;

There are more experienced coders who can probably talk about T_RadiusDamage a.k.a. splash damage which I assume has some randomness.

Also shotgun pellets are in a random spread but not too sure if that affects the damage. 

Nice to see a expert level explanation! 

Thanks for the answers and especially that detailed explanation, Preach!

By the way, would someone be so kind as to give me a link to the code in question? I assume it's on github somewhere, but I always get confused looking for things there. Doubt I'll be able to understand much of the code, but I'd like to have a look anyway -- presumable that's the first step towards understanding it. 

This is as far as I get on my own (which I assume is the right place): https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/tree/master/WinQuake

I have no idea in which of the several files or sub-directories I should be looking, though... 

I believe this is the file you're looking for:
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/qw-qc/weapons.qc 

otp collected these Quake links for the Quake Mapping Discord - might be helpful:

QuakeWiki Modding Tutorial:
https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Getting_Started_Modding

QuakeC tutorial:
http://www.insideqc.com/qctut/

QuakeC Reference Manual in PDF:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jeremyp/quake/quakec/quakec.pdf

QuakeC Manual website version (with nice text formating):
http://www.cataboligne.org/extra/qcmanual.html

FTEQCC compiler:
http://fte.triptohell.info/moodles/fteqcc/

FTEQCC documentation:
http://icculus.org/~marco/quakec/fteqcc_manual.txt

Progs v1.01 source code:
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-Tools/tree/master/qcc/v101qc

Progs v1.01 source code: (cleaned):
https://gitlab.com/quakec-v1-01-clean/quakec-v1-01-clean/commits/master

Progs v1.06 source code:
http://www.moddb.com/games/quake/downloads/quake-c-version-106

Hipnotic SDK:
http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/more_idstuff/hipnotic/ 

The source Strogg-Sothoth linked is for quakeworld, just be aware that quake and quakeworld had slightly different calculations for weapon attacks (at least, the shotguns are different.)

The "progs 1.01 sourcecode" dumptruck linked is the original quake version which is also what almost everyone would use for playing single player maps. 

The "progs 1.01 sourcecode" dumptruck linked is the original quake version which is also what almost everyone would use for playing single player maps.

Brilliant, thanks! 

correction, the "Progs v1.06 source code" is actually what most people would play (but the difference is only bug fixes, not major gameplay changes AFAIK) 

The source Strogg-Sothoth linked is for quakeworld, just be aware that quake and quakeworld had slightly different calculations for weapon attacks (at least, the shotguns are different.)

Oops, my bad. 

(The four anonymous posts above were mine). 

Target "C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Quake\quakespasm\quakespasm-0.93.1_win64\quakespasm-0.93.1_win64\quakespasm.exe" -hipnotic -game quoth

Start inC:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Quake\quakespasm\quakespasm-0.93.1_win64\quakespasm-0.93.1_win64"

I'm trying to play the ad mod but all I get is Quake start. Same when I try to play this mod. Tried Quake injector but even with java installed I get how do you want to open this file. 

lizard: try "-game ad" instead of "-hipnotic -game quoth" 

An observation from adding maps to Quaddicted:
There's no need to use BSP2 format unless the map is really really large and detailed - like Tronyn/Orl/ad_sepulcher type of stuff. Don't just switch format as soon as a warning message pops up. Engine protocol 666 can handle most levels that exceed vanilla (=protocol 15) limits.

More often than not you don't even need that. Frankly, I'm surprised how seemingly even the smallest maps are exceeding some limits these days. Then again, just an old geezer tilting at windmills. :)