FTEQW

Powerful engine for playing and modding idTech based games.

What is FTEQW?

FTEQW is an advanced and portable Quake engine. It supports multiple games running on idTech, plus its own set of games that developers have created.

Due to the vast amount of supported formats, features, and innovations inside the engine and its very own QuakeC compiler (FTEQCC), it's very much considered the swiss-army knife of Quake engines.

Highlights:

• Single & multi-player support
• Supports multiple games
• Vast amount of map, model, & image formats are supported
• Advanced console, with descriptions & autocompletion
• Plugin support, enabling use of FFMPEG, Bullet/ODE physics & more
• Extensive suite of QuakeC/entity debugging features
• Deep integration with FTEQCC (fork of QuakeC created for FTEQW), which can even be executed in-game
• Support for split-screen local multiplayer
• Voice-chat via Opus & Speex
• Support for hundreds of players on a single server
• Works on Windows, Linux, OpenBSD... & more
• New features are added all the time in cooperation with modders

Contributions

Contributions and help is always welcomed.

Guidelines:

• Be kind and respectful
• We follow Gentoo's AI policy, It is expressly forbidden to contribute any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns. IBM also has a great page listing the many risks with current language models
• Engine contributions must be GPL2 licensed. Plugins may be under any other GPL-compatbile licenses
• This codebase follows TRIPS copyright laws
• Always give credit from other codebases and make sure licenses are compatible
• Test your changes and ensure nothing else has been broken (games, plugins, formats, etc)

Reporting Issues

Bug reports are welcomed! :)

Required Information:

• Your system information such as your Operating System and Hardware (GPU/CPU)
• If the binary is pre-built (e.g. from fteqw.org) or if it was built manually
• What version of FTEQW you're using (type version in console)
• If it is a supported game/mod/plugin/etc you're having issues with, then provide the version info for it, and tell us how it should be behaving
• Make sure you have read the included documentation and ensure you have done everything right
• Remember to double check the problem hasn't already been reported
• Screenshots and/or video are generally desired if it is a visual malfunction

Windows Users

Please make sure you have not renamed your executable, fteqw.exe, to be winquake.exe or glquake.exe as Windows attempts compatability fixes that are not required for FTEQW and will cause problems.

Documentation

Please see the documentation folder inside the repo for building, using the engine, tools, and more.

The specs folder is for more advanced users seeking QuakeC and idTech file format related information or examples.

Contact

Matrix

https://matrix.to/#/#fte:matrix.org

IRC

Server: irc.quakenet.org

Channel: #fte

Forums

Spike and eukara can be found on insideqc.com

Discord

https://discord.gg/p2ag7x6Ca6

Credits

Please see the Credits.md file.

License

Copyright (c) 2004-2025 FTE's team and its contributors Quake source (c) 1999 id Software

FTEQW is supplied to you under the terms of the same license as the original Quake sources, the GNU General Public License Version 2. Please read the LICENSE file for details.

Download

The latest source & binaries are always available at:

fteqw.org

fteqcc.org