Quake Engine Indicators

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was.

This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you have some epic buffering somewhere.

The turtle/tortoise note is correct for UK English, but in the US (where Id software was headquartered during the development of Quake), tortoises are considered a subset of "turtles". Per Webster:

> Turtle (noun): any of an order (Testudines synonym Chelonia) of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine reptiles that have a toothless horny beak and a shell of bony dermal plates usually covered with horny shields enclosing the trunk and into which the head, limbs, and tail usually may be withdrawn.

I saw that NET indicator plenty when playing on 56k back in the day. Funny to see it written about as some curious historical artifact.

Lovely read.

Just a curious question if the authors or any maintainers read this comment:

Does this bug fix break the functionality of re-connecting the client? Or how would the client know they need to use the same port as the previous session?

(My understanding is that a new client coming from the same IP and different port will now be treated as a new player instead of a reconnect)

Cool curiosities! The chocolate quake source port is great as well. I've always wondered why there wasn't a chocolate doom equivalent for quake. It was nice to see its announcement earlier this year, so I've been quietly following its development ever since. The guy behind it did a great job, now we just need a crispy doom equivalent for quake!

I also wonder where is that tortoise texture from. Seems such a small thing to have the effort to create art for during development.

Amazing, after playing all the Quake series (still playing Quake 2 daily), I learnt something new about it. I will definitely try the turtle command and try to make it appear (somehow), maybe artificially with the maxfps command. There is no way I can organically produce it on a 32-core CPU. Maybe I can try with a VM with very low specs.