Quake II Fully Ray Traced

[rcproam]

Not sure if it was my setup but I preferred the graphics to Quake 1 in a strange way. The Q2 graphics had a harsh blockiness about it, but Quake just looked softer and realer. Also I preferred the lighting in Q1.

[Dudley]

It's pretty much luck, I've got Dosbox to go as fast as possible with protected mode games, which Quake is.

[SJ_Sathanas]

If you do go back and play Quake now, get Quakespasm. It fixes the daft implementation of mouselook and pushes the whole thing into hires.

Last year I went and played through all of Quake 1 via a source port that I cant recall. Playing the game natively was impossible due to how the game was coded.

Putting my games dev hat on for a sec: They coded the game without any time delta or frame rate restricting, so the game will run as fast as your cpu will let it. Which as the game came out in the 90s = super fast. The source ports fix this entirely and have plenty of other nice benefits (more resolutions to choose from, good music options etc), much like the Doom source ports.

Quake 1 also links in with Doom 1 & 2 unlike Quake 2.

Whats the quake-doom link?
Personally, I prefered Doom over Quake.

[icemann]

Its in the same universe. Its referenced in the story somewhere.

[Sephiroth81]

Meh, I'd take the PS1 port of Quake 2, by Hammerhead, over all others any day.

[outdated_gamer]

Its in the same universe. Its referenced in the story somewhere.

Not sure if this is true. Quake was taking place in some H.P. Lovecraft-inspired world full of dark medieval castles, zombies, knights, odd monsters and the like rather than bases on Mars and Hell itself like Doom did.

Quake II is still very much "Doom-like" too, with many Doom-style weapons making a comeback (e.g. blaster pistol, chaingun, BFG, etc) and sporting a metal soundtrack. The only difference is that they removed all the fantasy stuff and went all out Sci-Fi (also the levels in QII are segmented and feature backtracking).

Meh, I'd take the PS1 port of Quake 2, by Hammerhead, over all others any day.

Good port for sure, but let's be fair here - the Quake games only feel "right" on the PC, with proper mouse and keyboard control, online multiplayer and a ton of mods. Console ports were fine but usually compromised a tad (Sega Dreamcast's port of Quake 3 did feature mouse and keyboard support and online play though).

[SJ_Sathanas]

PS Quake 2 is much shorter than the PC game but IIRC had some unique sections. I think there was a level with a long ramp down to an orange, mech type boss thing?
I didn't know they did an N64 port. I'd probably moved into PCs by then.

That was my favourite period for gaming, the late 90s/early 2000/post-3dfx PC years. Seems odd I didn't get into Quake 2 modding like I did with other games at that time. I see my old go-to site for 3DSMax tutorials,
www.3d-palace.com, is still going, though it's behind a paywall nowadays. Not too surprising.

[outdated_gamer]

Trailer is out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unGtBbhaPeU

Free update for all owners of Steam version of Quake II and a RTX Nvidia card (and GTX 10x0 series which support RT).

[SJ_Sathanas]

The fancy lighting does look at odds with the low poly models....

[outdated_gamer]

The fancy lighting does look at odds with the low poly models....

The weapon models are new/high-poly and the textures are "HDfied", the enemy models and scenery are the same though.

Personally, I like a mix of "low-poly" with higher quality lighting and sharper textures. It's about as good as it comes for remasters (as we know, remaster =/= remake, although I'm seeing many people mix the two terms up).

[NorthWay]

This is the first time ever I'd say Quake _looks_ agreeable. It was everything wrong with PC gaming. Raytracing does all kinds of good things to it.

[SJ_Sathanas]

This is the first time ever I'd say Quake _looks_ agreeable. It was everything wrong with PC gaming. Raytracing does all kinds of good things to it.

Wow really? That's totally at odds with my opinion lol!

[Matt_B]

I'm inclined to side with those that think it still looks very much like an old game tarted up.

Still, in terms of illustrating what the possibilities for ray tracing are, it does the job; and that's something that Nvidia haven't been able to do with more modern games on current hardware without tanking the frame rate.

[learnedrobb]

This is the first time ever I'd say Quake _looks_ agreeable. It was everything wrong with PC gaming. Raytracing does all kinds of good things to it.

Really?

At the time, it was the showcase for just how powerful PC hardware was. Even more so when the OpenGL patch was released. I mean, that's like saying that Ridge Racer was everything wrong with PS One gaming.

[SJ_Sathanas]

I'm inclined to side with those that think it still looks very much like an old game tarted up.

Still, in terms of illustrating what the possibilities for ray tracing are, it does the job; and that's something that Nvidia haven't been able to do with more modern games on current hardware without tanking the frame rate.

Well it looks like an old he tarted up because that's precisely what it is.