The only thing QW really added over vanilla "netquake" was client side movement prediction. Hitscan weapons (infinite velocity bullets) only let you know if you had hit or missed based on the response from the server. You had to lead your shots a certain amount based on your current latency in order to hit your target.
It was great though. It meant you could bunny hop around corners at extremely high speeds without running into walls.
Hm, I think the engineering story is the interesting aspect:
What an elegant client-as-terminal I have for this incredibly popular physics simulation! Oh no! it takes up too much bandwidth. Welp - time to throw out the old lock-step game-loop architecture, and allow each client to stream incremental updates
I'm sure many contemporary engineers had similar problems, and considered the same approach, but either shrank-from or gave-up on rustling together an elegant solution. Like many problems in the early days of 3d/internet gaming, Carmack seems to have rapidly and nicely solved it with imagination & experimentation, all informed by a broad and deep understanding of data structures, & algorithms, and presumably an industry-leading amount of experience.
You say "only", but for those of us who's ping on a good day was between 250-300ms, it was miraculous. It is interesting though, how lag compensation on one particular aspect of the game can make such a big difference, even though the lag is still there in full force in other (just as critical) aspects of the game.
Even to this day playing from Australia it's not uncommon to have a 250-300ms ping on US/EU servers (depending on the game may be the closest English servers).
There are some changes in the movement physics which might not be obvious. QW is more forgiving wrt bunnyhopping as you can gain momentum more easily compared to NQ. The speedrunners still use NQ afaik because it is the original single player game.
Hard to "hack" your machine by typing things when you step away for a minute. Also makes it harder to capture your passwords by looking over your shoulder...
I am still confused. I was prompted again today to install the security update I installed yesterday. Did they silently release another improved security update?
Yeah, the day after they put out the initial update (17B1002), they put out a second update (17B1003) that fixed the file sharing issue caused by the first one.
One low maintenance way of doing this would be to setup a SSH server at home (and configure your home NAT/Router to forward traffic to that machine)
Once you have SSH access to home there are a number of ways to tunnel your traffic (on desktop platforms, not sure about mobile). Sshuttle works pretty nice. You can also optionally just tunnel traffic for certain apps or browser profiles by using ssh -D (SOCKS5 proxy)
It has the option to block HTTP traffic, making sites that don't support HTTPS unusable.
You could create a separate "secure" profile and feel safe that all traffic is secured, while still being able to browse HTTP in another profile, for instance.
It was great though. It meant you could bunny hop around corners at extremely high speeds without running into walls.