nuclide/doc/history

NUCLIDE PROJECT HISTORY

In November 2016 eukara started work on 'OpenCS', a project which focused
solely on creating a clean-room implementation of Counter-Strike 1.5 in QuakeC
for FTEQW, which then was the only Quake engine fork which adhered to the
GPL and supported the level and model format of Half-Life mostly to spec.
Its strong game-logic enhancements such as Client-Side QC as well as its
QuakeWorld backbone also made it more desirable over other Quake engine forks.

OpenCS was feature complete with all CS 1.5's content had to offer by December
of 2016, however the name conflicted with the 'OpenMW' sub-project 'OpenCS',
so eukara changed it to avoid any future conflicts.

To emphasize the free-software aspect, eukara renamed the project FreeCS.

Work on FreeCS had then paused so more work could be done on what would later
become the 'gs-entbase' component. Another project required more compatibility
with the full set of map entities present in Half-Life.
When those matured, they were then backported to the FreeCS tree.

In November of 2017, FreeCS was featured on Phoronix.

After the release of The Wastes in April 2018, the game which introduced the
'gs-entbase' component, more work was done on FreeCS in regards to the netcode.

A lot had been learned about prediction and taking full advantage of the
custom networking available in FTEQW, but new features have also been
added to the engine to take full advantage of what the content had to offer.
Features like interacting with OpenAL's EAX extension, model-events, support
for WAD3 decal parsing and countless QuakeC extensions were all added by
either Spike or eukara himself to make FreeCS possible.
Many projects running on FTE have since taken advantage of these extensions
as well!

By the summer of 2019, the Half-Life Deathmatch component started taking shape.
At this point, the tree was overhauled so it would support multiple mods easier
and that a lot of code would be shared between all of them.
This is the structure of the src tree we still use to this day.

So a name had to be thought of that would neatly tie all projects under one
roof together: Nuclide!

The name Nuclide calls back to an earlier project, which tried to create
a work environment similar to GoldSrc for the original Quake engine.

In April of 2020, the weapons were rewritten to be fully client-side predicted.
This brought the Counter-Strike component on par with the advances of the other
games that Nuclide supports.

So the meaning and scope of Nuclide has changed, mainly to make work easier
as at one point TW and FreeCS were two seperate code-trees. Now they're unified
into one. I'd like to consider Nuclide to be FTE's reference SDK for game-logic,
like 'Source SDK Base' is to 'Source Engine'.