In November 2016 eukara started work on OpenCS, a project which focused solely on creating a clean-room implementation of Counter-Strike 1.5 in QuakeC for FTEQW, which then was the only Quake engine fork which adhered to the GPL and supported the level and model format of Half-Life mostly to spec.

Its strong game-logic enhancements such as Client-Side QC as well as its QuakeWorld backbone also made it more desirable over other Quake engine forks.

OpenCS was feature complete with all CS 1.5's content had to offer by December of 2016, however the name conflicted with the OpenMW sub-project OpenCS, so eukara changed it to avoid any future conflicts.

To emphasize the free-software aspect, eukara renamed the project FreeCS.

Work on FreeCS had then paused so more work could be done on what would later become the gs-entbase component. Another project (The Wastes) required more compatibility with the full set of map entities present in Half-Life.

When those matured, they were then backported to the FreeCS source tree.

Then, in November 2017, FreeCS was featured on Phoronix.

After the release of The Wastes in April 2018, the game which introduced the gs-entbase component, more work was done in the FreeCS source tree in regards to the netcode.

A lot had been learned about prediction and taking full advantage of the custom networking available in FTEQW, but new features have also been added to the engine to take full advantage of what the content had to offer:

Features like interacting with OpenAL's EAX extension, model-events, support for WAD3 decal parsing and countless QuakeC extensions were all added by either Spike (FTEQW Author) or eukara himself to make everything possible.

Many projects running on FTE have since taken advantage of these extensions as well!

By the summer of 2019, multiple other mods from other engines started taking shape. At this point, the tree was overhauled so it would support multiple mods easier and that a lot of code would be shared between all of them. This is the structure of the src tree we still use to this day.

So a name had to be thought of that would neatly tie all projects under one roof together: Nuclide!

Trivia: The name Nuclide calls back to an earlier project of ours, which tried to create a work environment similar to GoldSrc for the original Quake engine.

In April of 2020, the weapons were rewritten to be fully client-side predicted.

So the meaning and scope of Nuclide has changed, mainly to make work easier as at one point The Wastes and FreeCS were two seperate code-trees. Now they're unified into one. We'd like to consider Nuclide to be FTE's reference SDK for game-logic, like Source SDK Base is to Source Engine.