UQE Quake 2

[Jacques Krige]

From the outset of this project the idea was to ensure that the engine is as much as possible a purist build of the game. Most of the changes made to the engine were under-the-hood with a very small amount of actual visual changes. Its the perfect engine for those that are not inclined to care about having any extras like custom 32-bit texture support and other eye candy that transforms the game into something other than what was intended by the original.

Its most probably also a pretty good candidate to be used when buying Quake 2 through digital online services like Steam since the effort required to make the jump from the original to UQE Quake 2 is extremely minimal from an upgrade perspective only requiring the original fully patched PAK files and optionally also the CIN files for cinematic playback.

UQE Quake 2 is downloadable from the following url:
http://www.jacqueskrige.site

If the game fails to start it may be that the machine is missing the redistributable package.

Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012[www.microsoft.com]

At this time the binaries are not compatible with any Windows release older than Windows Vista.

[Ruiner]

Nice work Jacques!
I followed the progress of UQE since it was an open source XNA / C# project. I think back then it was hosted on Korvin Korax

https://web.archive.org/web/20120711145548/http://www.korvinkorax.com/tag/quake2/

I'm glad to see that you're still working on UQE and making progress. What would be real cool is if you could add modding support to it via dlls. This way I'm sure other people within the community would be able to tinker with it and add all sorts of neat things like unique guns. I for one am a big fan of C# and Quake 2 and would find such and option very interesting.

[Jacques Krige]

Hey thanks Ruiner. Well, actually the C# engine is more like a renderer which renders everything except particles. Its enirely possible though to build it into a complete engine.
(if Microsoft didn't throw me under the bus by cancelling XNA)

You can check out the source on my github page if you're interested. :)
https://github.com/jacqueskrige

On that strange Big Gun crash, I'll take a look at that. I've actually did some extensive playthoughs with friends before releasing it, so its surprizing that it crashes. Maybe its something related to the game dll or something along those lines.

Just a heads-up that I've moved the download for UQE Quake 2 to my personal site since the original site I hosted it on expired recently.

I've updated all the links on this thread, but here it is again:
http://www.jacqueskrige.com

[Enri M. Louvre]

It'd be nice if there was some way to turn off the whole "Mouse 2 is unbound" thing since it's so annoying. Otherwise, this looks really great.

[Jacques Krige]

I'm actually busy with an update for UQE Q2 (v3.23)... would you mind giving me some details about replicating this issue with "Mouse 2 is unbound" ?

[Jacques Krige]

Most of the changes for this release were under-the-hood fixes to various issues. The FMOD sound system used by UQE Quake to perform music playback were ported to UQE Quake 2, updated to the latest build and the playback code has been tweaked to conform to Quake 2 music playback rules.

The list of video mode slots have been freed-up to allow the possibility to run at 4K screen resolution. The libraries exposing OpenGL 4.5 extensions were updated. There were various tiny NPOW2 flaws with model skin texturing that has been fixed.

The infamous "ReadLevel: function pointers have moved" bug has been fixed. It occasionally occurs while loading a saved game when running either one of the official mission packs. The code attempts to make sure that the saved game being loaded is the same version as the gamex86.dll that created it initially. It appears to have been an unnecessary paranoia-check since the compilation date of the gamex86.dll should be sufficient as verification.

The ability to render the world in wireframe mode were added. It gives an interesting perspective on how the world is rendered on a more technical level by showing how geometry move, rotate and gets culled by the renderer based on the position and direction the camera is facing.

Functionality have also been added to enable the engine to load inflated versions of the original 8-bit low resolution textures to double their original size which in turn doubles the amount of texels on any given surface. This reduces the blurriness of textures to a comfortable midway point between the pixelated look of the original software renderer and the excessively blurred look of the hardware renderer. This produces a much smoother and sharper view of the world. This functionality have also been extended for video playback to allow for a much more crisp and closer to the original playback quality of cinematics.

The lighting calculation on models were updated to smooth changes in lighting with regards to model rotations. Originally the lighting on models only updated every 16 degrees when rotating as one of many optimizations that have been implemented to compensate for the limited processing power that were available at the time of the original release. The updated calculation interpolates between each 16 degree rotation change to produce a smoother result.

Some engine tweaks to ensure it properly runs on Windows 10 as well as removing the ancient assembler code from the engine and rather use standard C code instead. The assembler code was required on very old hardware to improve performance, which with today's hardware is unnecessary engine bloat.

The engine were compiled using Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and should run great for old-school gamers running on modern hardware.

http://www.jacqueskrige.com/news/2016/09/uqe-quake2-updated

[INF3CT3DxBROOKES]

how do you add the soundtrack to this?

[Gtwo]

I'd love to know how I can activate OpenGL on your Quake II source port. I saw some screenshots on your site and the game is beautiful, but when I run UQE Quake 2, it runs as if it were in software mode, with point textures and the lighting is missing.

[Crunge]

FYI, I get the same Big Gun crash using Q2XP.

[Jacques Krige]

Hey. The next update will have the pixellated look as an option. :)

[JaredX7]

I think the last update of UQE Quake 2 from September 2016 broke music support for the expansions >.<

[fezzie]

can i have my money back it doesnt work ffs

[Jacques Krige]

Hey NoVa... could you gimme some information how the music is broken?

[JaredX7]

The ogg files just won't play in both of the expansion/mission packs, xatrix and rogue.

Only the baseq2 music plays if no expansion/mission pack is loaded.

baseq2/music = works fine if no expansions/mission packs are loaded.
xatrix/music = no files play.
rogue/music = no files play.

On the earlier version of UQE, the music files played in both of the expansion/mission packs. So something must have broken.

[Jacques Krige]

Try checking the following: (it should be the same if you read the included docs)

rogue
music/mp2_track02.ogg -> music/mp2_track11.ogg

xatrix
music/mp1_track02.ogg -> music/mp1_track11.ogg

MP3 versions following those naming conventions should also work fine.
Lemme know what it does. :)

[AlienPathogen]

Hello, I found a bug with vsync in 3.23 release:

1. start the game like this: uqe-quake2 +map "anymap" +gl_swapinterval "0"
2. vsync is disabled
3. enter "vid_restart" in the console or open and exit video menu
4. vsync is enabled and can't be disabled by any means without restarting the whole game

I have Win7 x64 system, NVidia GTX 750 Ti graphics card with 384.76 driver
Other than that, the engine seems to work fine. I didn't realize at first it's binary compatible with vanilla mods, that's really nice since I imagine source codes for most of the old mods are gone for good. Thanks for all the work!

Which version of OpenGL does the renderer utilize, by the way? Does it use GLSL for gamma settings?

EDIT I also found the final cutscene of grinspq3 map pack (http://www.3dgamersedge.com/spq2lvlrevs/cos3.html) crashes the engine. That doesn't happen in Knightmare's unofficial patch 3.24. Here's a save at the end of the hub after the final boss in case you want to investigate:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19dz7PMo4Ojfyfj56JqGisqknom2y1kEi/view?usp=sharing

Looks like the usual hardware gamma control is still used, since the crash messes your desktop brightness.