Quake II PSX released

[FixbotWill]

Hey there folks. Quake II PSX release is just a few days away (October 5th) - an unofficial community project that's a love letter to HammerHead's Quake II Playstation port from 1999, modernised and balanced for the 2023 PC re-release.
I served as Lead QA on the project and I wanted to give you some news on what's in the release. There'll be a full and more in-depth changelist in the readme, of course, but here's some info in the meantime to whet your appetite.

QUAKE II PSX CAMPAIGN
- All 20 levels of the Playstation single-player campaign have been recreated, including nearly 700 textures seen in the original Playstation levels.
- Co-op support - the campaign is fully playable with up to three teammates. (We've made a couple of necessary tweaks to levels in co-operative play to prevent "softlock" issues)
- Recreations of the original intermission videos between the campaign's five mission units.
- Fixed various bugs and issues with the original release. There's no infinite ammo chaingun or monster "stunlock" bug here. Three of the Playstation campaign levels suffered from missing enemies who didn't spawn correctly, preventing the player from achieving 100% completion, and five of the levels suffered from an oversight which meant there was stronger enemy opposition on Easy than on Hard; we've fixed all that.
- Sensible and cautious rebalancing of certain levels to address balance concerns with the original - for example, there are certain segments of the Playstation campaign which were very lacking in ammunition and armor pickups; we've made some reasonable tweaks to address that kind of thing. We've also tweaked one or two of the boss fights to make them more engaging and not so easy to "cheese"
- A little re-working of the secrets. Several items in the PSX campaign were only obtainable by rocket jumping, and there was one secret which required a long trudge through toxic slime with no Environment Suit available. You can still do that.... or you can try to find a better way to get those goodies. You might also find one or two new secrets along the way.
- Power-ups aren't instant use anymore - the Playstation campaign had a rather bad habit of placing immediately consumable power-ups in places where they simply didn't help at all; for example placing Quad Damages at the end of the level when you've already cleared the area of Strogg.
- Nightmare difficulty is available now, which wasn't a thing in the console release.

ARACHNIDS AND THE GUARDIAN
The Playstation port introduced two new Strogg - the Arachnids and the Guardian. As cool as these concepts were, they were working with hardware limitations and weren't as impressive foes as they could have been. We've done our best to rework them.
- Complete balance overhaul for both these Strogg. I won't spoil the details just yet, but we've tweaked their existing weapon systems, addressed some of their original weaknesses to make them foes to be reckoned with, and given them one or two new tricks up their cybernetic sleeves. Not long until you can see for yourself.
- Brand-new high-quality models for them both, including pain skins for when they're down to less than half their original health.
- New sound effects for both - no more recycled sounds from the Medic Commander.

DEATHMATCH
All twelve of the Playstation deathmatch maps are included in the release, plus as a bonus, the 13th map "Fragtowe" that found itself cut from the original release, now restored and named "Frag Tower". These maps are playable in Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, and bots can be used in them as well. Bear in mind these maps are rather small, and designed for 2-4 players.

COMPATIBILITY
You'll be able to load up a game of Quake II PSX and then skip to the starting map of any of the five single-player campaigns in the release (Quake II, The Reckoning, Ground Zero, Quake II 64, and Call of the Machine), which will allow you to play those campaigns using the bug fixes and balance changes included in the Quake II PSX release.

BUG FIXES AND BALANCE CHANGES
We have found the time to fix a few bugs and oversights in general Quake II gameplay along the way (this is nothing like a complete list, in fact it's a very trimmed-down version; see the forthcoming readme for more)
- fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if a certain enemy was revived by a Medic/Fixbot.
- fixed a bug that caused a revived monster to get stuck cycling their animations when revived by a Fixbot
- fixed a bug that can cause a Medic to get confused and think he's a Medic Commander, causing him to keep trying and failing to spawn reinforcements
- fixed a rare issue that could cause flying monsters to keep drifting in the wrong direction until hitting a surface
- update to the movement behaviour of most flying enemies (Icarus, Daedalus, Technician, Hornet and Fixbot) allowing them to move more like flying enemies, sometimes backing away from an approaching player and not just getting into melee range and staying there for no good reason.
- in addition to the above, Icarus and Daedalus have been further tweaked to allow them to move more dynamically around their target once in close quarters combat
- Berserker's two basic melee attacks have had their "knockback" effects reversed, so the upward spike swing knocks the player back more - this is more true to the original Quake II
- Heat-seeking missiles have an improvement to their tracking logic, allowing them to better seek their firer's original target - this addresses issues in co-operative play as well as when monsters are infighting.
- fixed visual issues with the BFG10K's laser sparks and its interaction with glass surfaces.
- fixed an issue with players being "telefragged" by item spawns
- Hand Grenade, Grenade Launcher and Prox Launcher projectiles now deal full damage if striking the monster directly, instead of dealing damage according to the distance between the impact and the monster's center, which made them comparatively ineffective against large enemies such as bosses. This change allows for more consistent damage regardless of the size of the monster.
- Prox Launcher projectile damage reduced to 60 (from 90), in accordance with the above change (they gained too much of a damage boost when we were testing the change above, but this new value allows them to consistently deal roughly the same damage as before against smaller enemies, as well as that same amount of damage against larger foes)
- Grenade Launcher and Prox Launcher now benefit from the "double damage if the Strogg is unaware of the player" bonus other weapons benefit from, if a direct hit is achieved. However, as a balance consideration, Hand Grenades still do not.
- Rocket Launcher and Phalanx now correctly deal the "knockback" effect on a direct hit.

Link to the release platform:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-ii-psx

[FixbotWill]

And if anyone didn't see the trailer... check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkRs7ko2TB4

[erc]

I'm pretty hyped for this release, so I have been checking the forums every day since last week. It is great to read that it is going to be polished release. Much appreciated!

[LEGUSOR]

This is definitely a significant event!

[Metal Maniac]

Release when?

[FixbotWill]

Originally posted by Metal Maniac:

Release when?

We're looking good for tomorrow (October 5th), probably in the afternoon EST time.

*update* countdown added to the moddb page, set for 7 hours from now. so 6pm GMT, or 1pm EST.

[RIVET]

Hope compass will be working

[FixbotWill]

Compass does work on all the single-player levels in the campaign, yeah.

[Metal Maniac]

Originally posted by FixbotWill:

Originally posted by Metal Maniac:

Release when?

We're looking good for tomorrow (October 5th), probably in the afternoon EST time.

*update* countdown added to the moddb page, set for 7 hours from now. so 6pm GMT, or 1pm EST.

It´s not a Steam update? It´s a Mod?

[FixbotWill]

Correct, it's an unofficial community-made project. It's not an official update from id software/Bethesda.

[Metal Maniac]

Originally posted by FixbotWill:

Correct, it's an unofficial community-made project. It's not an official update from id software/Bethesda.

There are no Files in the Link, where can i get this?

[erc]

Originally posted by Metal Maniac:

Originally posted by FixbotWill:

Correct, it's an unofficial community-made project. It's not an official update from id software/Bethesda.

There are no Files in the Link, where can i get this?

There is. Just released a minute or so ago.

[FixbotWill]

Yep, the release just went live. Enjoy!

[Metal Maniac]

It does not work for me. I did the download and set the start options..... nothing.

[Void]

How do you start it up

[FixbotWill]

Installation Instructions (copied from the ModDB page)

This mod will only work with Quake II Re-release, or any engines that are compatible with rereleases' game DLLs! It will not work on the vanilla 3.20 or any other version of Q2.

For Windows, installation is fairly simple.

Find your Quake II user data folder; on Windows, this will be located at
%userprofile%/saved games/nightdive studios/quake ii
Pasting that address into a File Explorer window will bring you to the right place.

Download the zip file above.
If using the built-in Windows zip utility, open the zip file and drag/drop the "psx" folder into your Quake II folder as listed above.
If using 7zip, winzip or winrar, open the zip file, select Extract To, and enter the path above into the box. This should extract everything automatically.
Check the folder above to make sure the "psx" subfolder was created during extraction, and that inside of that folder is "game_x64.dll", "pak0.pak", "readme.txt", etc.
Running the mod:

For Steam, to easily launch directly into the mod, right-click Quake II in Steam, select Properties... and at the bottom of the dialog, enter "+set game psx" in the "Selected Launch Option" box. This will launch directly into Quake II PSX. You can then see the new campaign in New Game.
For other targets, create a shortcut to the "quake2ex.exe" for the target (ie quake2ex_gog.exe, quake2ex_steam.exe, or for other compatible engines), and enter "+set game psx" under command line arguments. This should launch the engine directly into that mod and you should see the campaign available under New Game.
If these fail or you simply want to run the mod manually, you can open Quake II Re-release, drop the console with ~ and type "disconnect" to stop the demo, and then enter "game psx" to switch to the PSX mod. Enter "set skill 0" for Easy, "set skill 1" for Medium, "set skill 2" for Hard or "set skill 3" for Nightmare. Then, type "newgame_psx" to launch into the new campaign. Note that running this way won't let you launch a server with PSX due to the mapdb not being loaded; the game must be immediately launched into the mod for that to function.