QuakeWorld revolutionised online FPS. I believe — and yes I'm biased — that it still has the best netcode of any online FPS game. My fondest memories in front of a computer are of playing QW on a dialup modem, then eventually on LAN, where in Perth we had a pretty big community. New games come and went, but QW stuck around and for us die-hards no FPS has ever lived up to the speed, mechanics and "flow" you can experience in QW. Many things may have been a fluke, and Carmack even posted his dislike for the "bunnyhopping" bug found in QW, which ended up improving the game 100x fold:
"Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug. Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance. When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way." - Carmack
If you're curious to see some gameplay from 2016, there was an "all-star" 4on4 competition recently, on YouTube with commentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6s1nh6nV0
It might look different to the Quake you remember — after id open-sourced it, some really great community projects sprouted up improving both the clients and servers, but the gameplay stays exactly the same.
It's embarrassing that QuakeWorld on a 166 MHZ Pentium with a 200ms ping is more playable than some modern FPS games on multi GHZ, multi-core, broadband equipped machines.
I can't fathom the amount of suboptimal bullshit going on in today's netcode to achieve that.
It's even more embarassing that Xonotic, which runs off of DP7, a sort of mash-up of NetQuake and QuakeWorld can stomp a lot of newer games on 100+ pings.
CS:GO is way better at higher pings (possible to play "competitive" at 100+ ping) than old CS (based on QW engine) was. 300ping was acceptable when I had dialup, but only because I didn't know any better lol
CS was based on the QW engine, but had a lot of netcode changes attempting to make it better for very high pings, but came with some frustrating adverse effects. These changes were the source of a lot of "registration" issues with hitbox locations between server/clients.
I think two games came close to offering the speed & fluidity that QW offers.
One is CPMA (http://playmorepromode.org/) which is basically Q3 with QW physics. It's based on Quake 3, which I was never a fan of, and really fast & fun!
The other one is Warsow (https://www.warsow.gg/). I enjoyed playing this game a lot, but I think a lot of us got bored at version 0.4 or 0.5 when it seemed to become more "beginner friendly" and less... fast. (If there's any Warsow players in here you might remember eml from bolted.nu :)
I still watch QW games occasionally, especially duels. The longevity of the game is insane. Seems to me that the FPS duel genre is dying off though. (Not that I follow anything closely anymore.)
Ahh how much I'd love to play QW on LAN again! Hope you have a blast.
The easiest method would be to install nQuake: http://www.nquake.com. You'll need to find pak1.pak from a full Quake install to have all the original maps — I believe it's available on Steam, otherwise Google... ;)
For info on setting up modern dedicated servers (with KTX for example, which provides 1on1, team deathmatch, readying up, automatic demo recording etc.), this is helpful: http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/How_to_server
Nquake is a pretty great client package, but binding switch weapon doesn't work, you have to bind each weapon to a separate key, which is a better config anyway. Also, you have to press the "reload settings" button EVERY SINGLE TIME you start nquake to get your custom settings working.
... However, they don't document a lot of server stuff, and the nquake server package is only okay for internet servers. If you're running a lan server, you're gonna need to install the mvdsv server. Find it at https://github.com/deurk/mvdsv. you may want ktx, as mentioned above, which is at https://github.com/deurk/ktx. Both must be compiled as 32-bit, or they refuse to run. Fortunately, the Makefiles document how to force 32-bit, and it's fairly simple. After that, put the compiled ktx folder in the same folder as your id1 folder (but not inside it!), and do the same for the mvdsv binary. You can then launch mvdsv with the -game ktx argument, and any other args you want. And it won't work. You still need the original qwprogs from id in order to run the thing. Luckily, I tracked them down so you don't have to. You can get them at https://www.bluesnews.com/archives/aug98-4.html. Download the server zip, put the qw folder into the same directory as the rest of this junk, and now your server will FINALLY work.
"Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug. Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance. When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way." - Carmack
If you're curious to see some gameplay from 2016, there was an "all-star" 4on4 competition recently, on YouTube with commentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6s1nh6nV0
It might look different to the Quake you remember — after id open-sourced it, some really great community projects sprouted up improving both the clients and servers, but the gameplay stays exactly the same.