I'm not familiar with the implementation of Quake's physics, but my recollection of the PBD paper was that it was basically a "mathing up" of what was already a fairly common way of handling physics in games. Thomas Jakobsen wrote a very influential paper in 2001 about the character physics in the original Hitman that popularized a lot of the same ideas later presented in the PBD paper.
What is really interesting to me is that later on in 2016 Miles Macklin et al. from Nvidia released the Extended Position Based Dynamics paper (the XPBD referenced in the article), which bridged the gap between hacky-gamey PBD and a principled fully physics-based derivation. The physical derivation was explored and refined further in Primal/Dual Descent Methods for Dynamics.
And finally most interesting was the Small Steps in Physics Simulation paper by the same Nvidia group that showed that a simplified variation of XPBD that got rid of iterative solving in order to increase the physics sim framerate is actually a state of the art dynamics solver. As in, many dynamics problems are currently solved most accurately/efficiently using this overgrown hacky algorithm game programmers came up with to make dragging around corpses look better.
Kind of parallels the whole graphics cards for gamers morphing into GPUs for AI transition, just in a more niche way.
What is really interesting to me is that later on in 2016 Miles Macklin et al. from Nvidia released the Extended Position Based Dynamics paper (the XPBD referenced in the article), which bridged the gap between hacky-gamey PBD and a principled fully physics-based derivation. The physical derivation was explored and refined further in Primal/Dual Descent Methods for Dynamics.
And finally most interesting was the Small Steps in Physics Simulation paper by the same Nvidia group that showed that a simplified variation of XPBD that got rid of iterative solving in order to increase the physics sim framerate is actually a state of the art dynamics solver. As in, many dynamics problems are currently solved most accurately/efficiently using this overgrown hacky algorithm game programmers came up with to make dragging around corpses look better.
Kind of parallels the whole graphics cards for gamers morphing into GPUs for AI transition, just in a more niche way.