Quake sourceports, a recommendation for getting a "classic" quake

[Mijo]

With the recent sale on Quake, i guess a lot of people will get it. Undoubtedly, the next thing you will do is get a decent sourceport for it. I've read several threads, and some list a decent variety of those, the most popular being Dark Places (for the graphical enhancements I guess), followed by ezquake, qrack and some others.

However, I'd like to recommend another sourceport (or engine, as the author calls it). It is UQE Quake (Ultimate Quake Engine for Quake). What I like of this port is that it keeps a lot of the original feel of the game itself. On the graphics department, it supports some kind of post processing, but I feel the "Classic Rendering Mode" to be the best part.

Quake is a great game on itself, and I think it should be experienced like it was originally (yes, pixels included), at least 1 chapter, so you can appreciate the game and the technology that fuels it better. Yes, you can disable all the bells and whistles on Dark Places, but to achieve that, you have to fiddle with a lot of menus, particle options, rendering options and what-not. And even then, I never like the final result or the feel.

Finally UQE comes with a nice support for high resolution textures, external BSP textures, colored lightmaps (get some colored lighting for a better ambience ;)), MDL skins and OGG vorbis, mp3 or WAV music files (no need to mount the cd image to get music in game). Finally, the port has the best "no input lag" vsync of all the sourceports that I have tested.

For those interested, all you need is the game's .PAK's. Here is the link to the author's page: http://www.korvinkorax.com/games/ultimate-quake-engine

Anyway, no matter what your sourceport of choice is, I really hope you enjoy Quake as much as I did when it was released (and pretty much every time i get to replay it :)). Happy Ogre hunting!

[Serathis]

A long long time ago, I can still remember. There was a source port called Tenebrae. What happened to that? It kicked some serious ass.

[eXiledheretic]

I remember Tenebrae. It was around the time of the development of Doom3 and what I remembered was the graphics were very very close if not surpassing what Doom3 was doing. It had all the lighting effects and bump mapping and whatnot that Doom3 was pioneering. My poor computer at the time couldn't run it worth ♥♥♥♥ though.

The old sourceforge page is still up but looks like no activity has happened in years. Sad.

I think what I played a few years back was something called nQuake I think.. It had High Res textures and resolution support and better opengl graphics (and still ran great on my POS PC then). I think ezQuake is the successor.

[JLaw]

nQuake ( www.nquake.com ) is a package of "everything you need for QuakeWorld multiplayer these days", and EZQuake is the engine in that package.

[Mijo]

As far as I know, you can still get the tenebrae sourceport (with a proper google search of course). Unfortunately, the author didn´t completely finish it, so it is optimized as **** but if you have a decent rig you whouldn´t have much problems running it. Also, the project to replace the quake models for the tenebrae engine pretty much died (a shame). I prefer tenebrae over Dark Places maxed out.

[Jacques Krige]

Thanks Mijo :)
The link for UQE Quake changed recently, and the engine had a few minor tweaks aswell.
http://www.korvinkorax.com
http://www.korvinkorax.com/news/2012/03/uqe-quake

Check out the brand new screenshots I made a few days ago for it. :)