qfalse

qfalse is a predefined constant used in the Quake engine family to represent the boolean value false within QuakeC and related scripting. The constant is typically defined as the integer 0, while its counterpart qtrue is defined as 1. In practice, qfalse can appear in conditional expressions, function return values, and as a parameter when a function expects a boolean-like indicator. It is part of the early game scripting conventions that preceded modern boolean types, and remains in use in many open-source ports and mods for compatibility with legacy code.

Origin and usage: The Quake engine introduced QuakeC, a C-like language for game logic. In that environment, booleans were commonly represented as qtrue and qfalse to emphasize truthiness and to avoid relying on the C 0/1 semantics in pure script. Over time, some projects replaced qfalse with the standard false or 0 in C, but many others retained qfalse for compatibility with legacy code and tooling.

In modern contexts: In codebases derived from Quake, qfalse may appear as a macro in header files (for example, #define qfalse 0) or as an enum value. In others, it is simply treated as a historical alias and not required by newer compilers. The concept persists mainly in open-source recreations, ports, and mods that aim to preserve the original QuakeC style and readability.

See also: qtrue, QuakeC, id Tech engine, boolean constants.