Quake 2 source ports

[Graf Zahl]

So I was in the mood to play some Quake 2 again.

However...

The original EXE doesn't really work that well anymore due to its dependence on CD audio and non-support of widescreen.
So I went to look for some source ports and the horror ensued.
It seems that everything out there is broken by design, either removing single player capabilities or implementing at least some parts in such a broken way that the port becomes useless.

Is there even one single port out there that actually just works?
By 'just working' I mean that it can be started on modern systems without puking all over the place - and most importantly - not depend on custom made game DLLs? The latter issue seems to be where even the more promising ones fall apart, only having support for the main game and id's official mission packs but refusing to play anything else.

[leileilol]

DirectQ II is my favorite because

• It is clean and just only one exe file
• Just uses DirectX, Direct3D9 and Xaudio (IIRC). No SDL, OpenAL or FmodEx
• Real gamma correction, not the 'process gamma on texture washing it out hoping for the best' shit all the other ports just have
• Overbright lighting sampling the software renderer does, that all the other source ports just don't do
• Native non-power-of-2 texture support, another thing other source ports don't have. so models will not look just like a blurry mess.
• Fast and works great with just Intel onboard video hardware
• True Horz+ expansion for just widescreen support
• Pixel shaders for recreating just the software renderer's turbulence and warp effects
• Compatible with mods and just the missionpacks
• gl_monolightmap can help turn the saturation down, which is great because 1st-generation colored lighting just never ages well
• Minimum cruft, no gamex86.dll or pak%.pak just to have around to support it
• Still looks just like Quake2 and doesn't try to pretend to look like a newer game with badly shoehorned particle and decal effects.

It has no site anymore but it did have one release ever which I just uploaded. Source included and maybe someday one can just fork it for the greater good, just making the fps counter optional and just adding the virtual cd track thing making it just the perfect source port.


/thread. Everything else is just Doomsday/D2X-XL-tier.

[Xtyfe]

Source Ports for Quake2 are not like ones for Doom. Most focus on multiplayer aspects so they often remove CD audio and the single player movie support to keep things lean. I'm only familiar with the multiplayer ones, so I'll have to try that one you suggested leileilol.

If you ever want to deathmatch Graf, there is still a small community operating called Tastyspleen that runs a number of servers.

On the subject of single player, there is (or was) a game .dll that fixed some kind of save game overflow in single player. The person who made this fix no longer has his site up anymore or else I'd point you towards that too. The bug happens often in the mission pack levels and causes saved games to become corrupted. Maybe you might know about it leileilol?

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Yamagi.

[Dark-Assassin]

I've got no problems for both Quake 2 XP and KM Quake 2.
KM is more focused on Multiplayer. It has it's own protocol as well. But Single Player is just as good as the original.
XP is not as focused on Multiplayer as KM. Also has eyecandy if you wish to use it. (Darkplaces of Quake 2)
XP also supports both CD music and PKX (renamed zip) music, and supports both expansions.

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Code: Select all • Expand view

D:\Games\Quake 2 XP\baseq2>dir q2xpMusic\music\
 Volume in drive D is Stuff
 Volume Serial Number is 3CD5-8592

 Directory of D:\Games\Quake 2 XP\baseq2\q2xpMusic\music

10/06/2012  04:47 PM    <DIR>          .
10/06/2012  04:47 PM    <DIR>          ..
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         4,648,899 track02.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,058,215 track03.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,291,767 track04.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,796,959 track05.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,268,284 track06.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         4,565,718 track07.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,812,639 track08.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,332,981 track09.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         2,679,544 track10.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         2,564,086 track11.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,690,966 track12.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,193,251 track13.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         4,075,660 track14.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,670,605 track15.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,797,553 track16.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,846,155 track17.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,827,356 track18.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         3,625,375 track19.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         2,957,186 track20.ogg
10/06/2012  04:47 PM         5,656,142 track21.ogg
              20 File(s)     73,359,341 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  625,258,250,240 bytes free

Note: I extracted the .pkx

[Nash]

DirectQ II is as vanilla as it gets. Everything else is just too grafic's-ey

[Graf Zahl]

Yamagi.

That's the best one I could find. I'd say it works 90% but something about the sound volume control is broken in this port when using OpenAL, it also saves everything in the user's Documents folder making a portable install impossible. This needs a bit of fixing but getting it to compile to do this and add a better customizable music system is going to be a pain in the ass (made for MinGW only... ) but of everything I've seen it's the only one which doesn't butcher the single player campaign and doesn't depend on altered game DLLs.

But all the rest: Ugh...


Regarding DirectQ II: All I get is a black screen. And it doesn't seem to have an alternative music system to CD Audio which makes it quite useless for me since my computer has no support for directly playing CDs, this is the #1 reason I even need a port.

[leileilol]

doesn't depend on altered game DLLs.

It does. It ships game.dll files with it, and it touts this funny bulletpoint on their site

- Compatible with most mods (as long as their source is available).

implies closed source mods as such based on the Q2 SDK are SOL as they would require recompiling for this source port


also at least you get a black screen with DirectQ (it probably initialized a fullscreen 640x480 at an unsupported refresh rate). I can't start Yamagi at all.

[Graf Zahl]

doesn't depend on altered game DLLs.

It does. It ships game.dll files with it, and it touts this funny bulletpoint on their site

- Compatible with most mods (as long as their source is available).

I've tried, the native interface is unaltered and everything I tested so far - even the original game itself - works with the 3.2 version of the game DLL.
The issue here is not that the game DLLs need to be changed but that some older mods never updated beyond the version they were created with - but that's an entirely different story with Quake2...

also at least you get a black screen with DirectQ (it probably initialized a fullscreen 640x480 at an unsupported refresh rate). I can't start Yamagi at all.

No, it doesn't AT ALL! Even in a window I just get a black screen with nothing rendered.

[Graf Zahl]

So, some work on Yamagi Quake...

- Creating a Visual Studio project was quite a bit of work because the source was extremely scattered across directories. No big deal, but there were two 'sound.c' files which caused a clash with the compiled output and with the scattered organization a bit hard to find - I had to rename one of them to make it compile successfully
- The code throws a shitload of warnings, 4 specific warnings had to be silenced globally or the message spam would have buried everything else - a classic issue for old C code...
- not surprisingly this code had a few GCCisms and C99 dependencies that MSVC does not support. Easy to fix, though.

So after 2 hours of configuring and compiling I got the basics running, what's still missing is OGG support and a few minor improvements I want to make:

- fixing the sound volume issue I experienced
- adding remappable music (so it can be set through a config file, not just doing a 1:1 mapping of CD tracks.
- finally eliminate the texture scaling that has been plaguing Q2's visuals since all eternity. NPOT texture support was something Yamagi did not add to the engine even though it's utterly trivial to so. Weird...
- remove saving to 'Documents' as I want to have this on an USB stick

In case someone is interested, I sure can post the result somewhere.

[Edward-san]

All hail the new GZQuake2 source port!

[Graf Zahl]

Don't get your hopes up.
I am merely going to fix a handful of issues that bother me, just so that I can play the game myself.

[Nash]

*chants* GZQuake 2... GZQuake 2... GZQuake 2...

[Graf Zahl]

No chance!

[MG_Man]

R1Q2 with R1GL renderer is another conservative Q2 port I recall (has things like HUD scaling, mono lightmap support, in addition to turning the colored lighting to .5 of its saturation, proper overbright lighting) though I do not recall if it supported external music files or not. I do know that the game dlls are untouched.