FTEQW
November 6, 2025 ยท View on GitHub
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
- GPL2 licensed contributions are preferred, but plugins can be different but GPL-compatbile licenses
- This codebase follows USA/EU/UK 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
versionin 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
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: