Quake 2 source ports

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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Xtyfe »

R1Q2 strips single player stuff out, it's also pretty much abandoned now
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by YukiHerz »

I use KMQuake2, i don't give a damn how it works or if it's open or shizzle, it just works, it can load all the mission packs, including zaero.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by leileilol »

Before DirectQ2 existed I got fed up with all the broken port bullshit and tried to do my own. It was an unfinished ref_gl.dll though, and it was compatible with vanilla Q2's exe so nothing breaks :P and it did a lot of the things I wanted a Q2 port to have. npo2 textures, overbrights, proper monolightmaps, proper screen gamma...

unfortunately it had issues with the npo2 support and crashed a lot. I never released it. I never released this either but qbism forked my unfinished code for that, at least.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Graf Zahl »

HazeBandicoot wrote:I use KMQuake2, i don't give a damn how it works or if it's open or shizzle, it just works, it can load all the mission packs, including zaero.

I tried that but it really didn't work that well.

So, after mucking around with all this, the sad conclusion is that no single port really is in a good state, they all got serious to crippling issues.
Not even Yamagi Quake 2 is immune from that (mostly thanks to SDL2 and the semi-broken keyboard handling it exhibits with non-English keyboards - the key binding uses localized key and unless I switch to an English layout, some keys using special characters with codes above 128 just can't be used) but at least it runs the game.
And the OpenAL sound backend that's in Yamagi is so broken that it's unusable, the fallback using its own mixer works fine, btw.
I also had to add NPOT support myself because this trivial issue had been overlooked

But with other ports, I either got no gameplay (multiplayer only), no music (no CD-Audio replacement), no widescreen support and so on and so on.
And we have to consider ourselves lucky that the source was released and these necessary adjustments are even doable.
What about all those games that broke because they take hardware configurations for granted that no longer exist.
One old game I'd really like to play again is Klingon Honor Guard but to make that one work one would basically have to run it on a 3dfx Voodoo, on anything more recent it has so many issues that it's unplayable.

It just shows us how lucky we Doomers are with several ports at our disposal that get developed by competent coders who keep the game working well on current hardware.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Big C »

Is it due to Quake II's source code being hard to work with or something? We've got solid, quality ports for DooM and Q1, but Q2 is a very different game and I figure maybe it got patched together too much during when iD was changing out of the Carmack + Romero era.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by GooberMan »

Klingon Honor Guard is an Unreal Engine game though. There are modern DirectX renderers that may work as a result apparently don't work. Probably wouldn't require too much work I'd imagine.

EDIT:
Big C wrote:Is it due to Quake II's source code being hard to work with or something?
More like Doom is the game everyone remembers. And it's also sold on basically every modern platform.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Kinsie »

I've been using the Unofficial 3.24 patch. It includes custom game DLLs, but I'm not sure how necessary those are. It's purely bug fixes and some minor engine tweaks like custom resolution support and Ogg music support. Outside of that, it functions the same as vanilla Quake 2.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Graf Zahl »

Big C wrote:Is it due to Quake II's source code being hard to work with or something? We've got solid, quality ports for DooM and Q1, but Q2 is a very different game and I figure maybe it got patched together too much during when iD was changing out of the Carmack + Romero era.

No, the source itself is not the problem, but there seems to be a profound lack of interest in creating a port that 'just works'. 90% of what's to find either amputates the game (multiplayer only) or is so careless with its changes that it requires recompilation of game DLLs - which is a big problem if you have mods without the source for these DLLs.

The game DLL concept was surely an interesting approach but they just offloaded too much of the basic game logic into these DLLs instead of just using them for actor AI. This means that you can't really do that much with the source unless you are willing to break the protocol between the main engine and the DLLs.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Graf Zahl »

Kinsie wrote:I've been using the Unofficial 3.24 patch. It includes custom game DLLs, but I'm not sure how necessary those are. It's purely bug fixes and some minor engine tweaks like custom resolution support and Ogg music support. Outside of that, it functions the same as vanilla Quake 2.

That one actually looks like something done right. No SDL brokenness. no 'modern Windows conventions' nonsense, a working project and fully configured OGG support.
The game DLLs included here seem to be mere bugfixes with no protocol changes so they should be fine.

I still have to run some tests, I hope it's better than Yamagi which turned out to have too many small issues that showed themselves only after prolonged playing.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Blzut3 »

Graf Zahl wrote:mostly thanks to SDL2 and the semi-broken keyboard handling it exhibits with non-English keyboards - the key binding uses localized key and unless I switch to an English layout, some keys using special characters with codes above 128 just can't be used
I'm fairly sure this is not an SDL2 issue. More likely and SDL1->SDL2 porting issue as as far as I know SDL2 recommends using scan codes for input (basically treating the keyboard as a joystick). In the cases where you need the actual character then you consult the key map.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Xtyfe »

Graf Zahl wrote:It just shows us how lucky we Doomers are with several ports at our disposal that get developed by competent coders who keep the game working well on current hardware.
The interest just isn't there like Doom, plus the need to port it to modern systems is also not there. We are lucky

I had a look at that 3.24 patch, it does fix that saved game corruption thing I was talking about plus a whole lot of other stuff. It looks awesome
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Graf Zahl »

The 3.24 patch does indeed look like it addresses the critical issues but unlike Yamagi it doesn't add any useless shit that makes using the port a pain in the ass.
So off to the dumpster with that port... :twisted:
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by leileilol »

The Q2 community grew up without the awareness of GLQuake's rendering deficiencies which is why there isn't a lot of ports that fix them. They consider the dark colors of the OpenGL mode as absolute canon, and almost every port in GPL Q2's first few years were practically particle system pissing contests with no care to fix any of the basic inadequacies of the renderer. I personally didn't find the engine difficult to work with, those 'Q2unsuck' changes I did happened in a matter of hours.

Q3A can be just as bad. The only source port that attempts to fix overbrights and proper widescreen (that's compatible with mods and it's more versatile than QL) happens to be the engine fork for OA3 since only I cared to fix them. I did similar fixes on the vanilla source too.
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by MG_Man »

leileilol wrote:Before DirectQ2 existed I got fed up with all the broken port bullshit and tried to do my own. It was an unfinished ref_gl.dll though, and it was compatible with vanilla Q2's exe so nothing breaks :P and it did a lot of the things I wanted a Q2 port to have. npo2 textures, overbrights, proper monolightmaps, proper screen gamma...

unfortunately it had issues with the npo2 support and crashed a lot. I never released it. I never released this either but qbism forked my unfinished code for that, at least
R1GL's ref does all that. It also includes a gl_hudscale cvar which is nice. It also has other small improvements like optional dynamic lights that fall off with distance instead of almost opaque circles. It should be compatible with the 3.24 patch, too, since that doesn't do anything about ugly dark lighting and hud scaling
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Re: Quake 2 source ports

Post by Ghastly »

I used KMQuake 2 for a while, but I've been looking for another, myself. I wanted to do some testing with certain things, and was looking for a source-port with a Spawn CCMD, a la ZDoom's Summon and IdTech4's Spawn. Haven't found anything.
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