Quake II Remastered

[Individualised]

I'm pretty certain you are both agreeing with each other and are just confused.

1 hour ago, Koko Ricky said:

I looked through the entire list and while r_shadows doesn't toggle anything, r_staticshadows seems to get rid of dynamic shadowmaps. If those blobs are hard-coded, that's a rather odd decision to make. They've been distracting a bit from the presentation as it clashes awkwardly with the light/shadowmaps. Am I alone here?

That doesn't sound intentional.

Edited August 19, 2023 by Individualised

[Cutman 999]

1 hour ago, lowenz said:

 

Damn, i didn't expect them to change the renderer and lightmaps, but they did. This remaster wasn't based on the xbox360 version of quake 2?

[dustarma]

5 hours ago, scalliano said:

Have you tried crouching? I had this happen on PS5 and that was how I got through.

 

I didn't, but I ended up getting in through the roof thanks to a lucky grenade jump.

[tzen]

4 hours ago, Koko Ricky said:

I looked through the entire list and while r_shadows doesn't toggle anything, r_staticshadows seems to get rid of dynamic shadowmaps. If those blobs are hard-coded, that's a rather odd decision to make. They've been distracting a bit from the presentation as it clashes awkwardly with the light/shadowmaps. Am I alone here?

 

Honestly between the new static lighting and the new dynamic lighting and the fog and such, I barely noticed the blob shadows at all. I agree with you that it should be toggleable if not through the interface then a console command at least. But the blob shadows are so subtle for me that I basically don't even notice them.

[Edward850]

2 hours ago, Cutman 999 said:

This remaster wasn't based on the xbox360 version of quake 2?

It was, that's where the split screen came from. However the xbox360 version is basically identical to PC 3.21 anyway.

[Terrcraft]

So I've beaten all the campaigns including the new ones for the remaster. and I must say that this remaster is very good and makes Quake 2 hold up closer to Quake 1. The new enemy behavior for the most part is vastly better with only one exception. 

 

I played Quake 2 64 first and my thoughts were that it's cool it was preserved, but it's the weakest campaign of the lot. very small levels, the new ai are clearly not built for the environment. and the levels are the least interesting looking as well. the only plus is the new environments when they are not borrowing basic room layouts from the base game and 2 og expansions. Quake 2 64 is clearly here for preservation 1st and enjoyment 2nd. And thats fine but dont expect as much of a change as Doom 64.

The Base Quake 2 campaign was "good" in the original release. but this remaster with the better visuals and ai, makes this campaign even with Quake 1. Also additions like the unused now used environments are very nice. But when I got through this campaign. 2 things were agitating me and they are the 2 worst things about this remaster. 

1. Berserker leap attack shockwave range is too damn high, you could be 2 units away from the attack and when the Berserker hits the ground you will be launched. unless you are bhopping while the enemy leaps, kill the berserker before it hits the ground, or rocket jump out of the way, you will be launched. no questions asked. you cannot outrun this attack. 

 

2. railgun nerf. the railgun does 100 damage instead of 150, this is because, at least what ive heard, to make the railgun damage the same as its multiplayer damage for simplicity. But this nerf makes the railgun feel so lame. 3 shots to kill a berserker is 1 too many imo, and the general game balance change this does for the single player makes the 1st railgun in gaming (that matters anyway) lame. Is the railgun a little too good in the original game? Maybe so but both these 2 changes are clear over corrections because the base version of Q2 is piss easy. and clearly with all the AI and gameplay changes it was meant to make the game a lot more engagingly difficult. But the 2 negative changes in the remaster, veer the game into annoying bullshit. 

Thankfully a mod on the Quake 2 remaster nexus called Quake 2 Unmaster allows you to unnerf the railgun, and either revert the berserker behavior or just tweak it to reduce the shockwave range. I used this mod for the remaining 2 base expansions, and call of the machine. And I probably enjoyed it more than if I didn't use it.

Next I played The Reckoning and it was fine? not exceptional but a decent campaign, probably not as good as base q2 but brief and a fun time. new guns are cool but this campaign felt the least changed from the og. i dont have much more to say.

Ground Zero got the most improvements here because simply the turrets are no longer bullshit and annoying. you can outrun them and you don't die 25 milliseconds after they see you. this change makes ground zero a great expansion that is better than base Q2 in this remaster. 

And lastly call of the machine the new campaign exclusive to the remaster. Visually beautiful and with as many monsters as a doom level. this campaign is the best one out of the lot. which is surprising because I've heard very mixed reception about it. but i found it pretty good. Although it was pretty clear that these new levels might have been made in mind of the railgun nerf. given that you are given it pretty early in each unit. But even with the unnerfed rail gun. on nightmare, the difficulty was just right.

Ranking of campaigns from worst to best

Quote

Quake 2 64

The Reckoning
Quake 2
Ground Zero
Call of the Machine

The id vault on offer here is extensive and very cool and more in-depth than I would guess it would be, the playable levels from early builds are nice to see. Also, the deathmatch/ctf is superb and I've had lots of fun with this remaster. 

I know that I had strong words for the 2 things I'm not a fan of but for each 1 thing done wrong here, 100 is done right.

Big thanks to everyone at Nightdive, id software, and machine games involved in making this happen. 

Quake 2 will rule the cosmos forever!

[Cutman 999]

6 hours ago, Edward850 said:

It was, that's where the split screen came from. However the xbox360 version is basically identical to PC 3.21 anyway.

So the changes in renderer and everything else is from the remaster?

[Edward850]

1 minute ago, Cutman 999 said:

So the changes in renderer and everything else is from the remaster?

Yes.

[tzen]

https://bethesda.net/en/article/6NIyBxapXOurTKtF4aPiF4/enhancing-quake-ii

[Dark Pulse]

I'd say at this point that really the changes should just be user CVARs. Do what that mod did a few pages back, just expose it in the options menu and as a CVAR. Maybe force the railgun to 100 damage for CotM if it would really wreck the balance; I'd be fine with that.

 

The main thing I'm worried about is that literally all custom Quake 2 content that is NOT MP (and there obviously is going to be more than a few map packs and whatnot, let's not kid ourselves) is simply not built around a railgun that does 2/3rds of the the damage that it normally should. And it's not like you pick up extra slugs to compensate for the reduced damage - a box of slugs is still 10 slugs, which is 1000 damage under the new rules, 1500 under the old ones. You are, very literally, getting 1/3rd of the damage lopped off without 1/3rd extra ammo added to compensate for the change and balance out the adjustment. If this change is going to stick, then it should at least have the pickup amount upped to compensate for the reduced damage - which is, IMO, a worse behavior than simply letting the user set a CVAR and be done with it.

 

The talk of "Well that's not how it was in MP" also doesn't really wash out, considering the team was fine with upping the Blaster's damage a full 50% to 15 damage, which also affects SP in a certain way - namely, it definitely incentivizes you using the Blaster more on much weaker enemies who have a far distance to you or rely on projectile attacks to hit you - I have literally shot Tanks to death with it just to conserve ammo. It can be done in exactly 50 shots with the new blaster; the old one would've taken 75. That's a pretty significant decrease.

• Railgun Damage: 100 vs. 150
• Berserker Leap: Enabled vs. Disabled
• Machinegun Kick: Enabled vs. Disabled
• Compass: Enabled vs. Disabled
• Barrel Explosions: Delayed vs. Instant
• Blaster: 15 vs. 10

Just let the end user set it however they want and be done with it. Make the new behaviors the defaults, sure, but give the option for the old ones.

 

That said, I do love you guys actually porting the console enemies in here. PSX Quake II was my first Quake game, and to see some of those nightmares come back (...though the models are definitely hella bubbly and low-texture-rezzed) and be on the PC for the first time was a nice touch. I can't remember if PSX Quake II had any exclusive SP levels (I think it was basically just cut-down versions of the PC levels and the N64 map before the start of Unit 1?), but if not, I think literally the only official content missing would be the exclusive Deathmatch maps that version had.

 

Though I am also well aware that that wasn't running on a Quake engine period (IIRC it was based on the engine HammerHead used for Shadow Master?), and so porting them would definitely be significantly harder.

 

Oh, though the bug that causes the music to stop looping whatever track is assigned to the map and choose to start playing "Showdown" after a few loops of the song is an interesting bug. But obviously, pretty low priority, especially since a quicksave and quickload will restore the original music.

Edited August 20, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Edward850]

We are looking at tweaking some of the changes, however they will not be made into menu options because:

• They are gameplay options that would affect both singleplayer and multiplayer, but only as the server. There's no logical menu to put such options in (remember the existing gameplay options only affect the individual player, or a single session in multiplayer).
• Each menu option would need post localization support and require testing each option in QA under multiple different configurations, which would be an exponential increase.
• There is such a thing as too many options, and we'd rather not turn this into GZDoom. The point of this port is to be as streamlined as possible for new audiences.
• I can't make any sense as to why you would want an option to disable the compass when you could just... not use the compass?

 

34 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Oh, though the bug that causes the music to stop looping whatever track is assigned to the map and choose to start playing "Showdown" after a few loops of the song is an interesting bug. But obviously, pretty low priority, especially since a quicksave and quickload will restore the original music.

This is not a bug, it's vanilla behavior to switch to track 11 after 3-4 loops for the current track.

Edited August 20, 2023 by Edward850

[Dark Pulse]

6 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

We are looking at tweaking some of the changes, however they will not be made into menu options because:

• They are gameplay options that would affect both singleplayer and multiplayer, but only as the server. There's no logical menu to put such options in (remember the existing gameplay options only affect the individual player, or a single session in multiplayer).
• Each menu option would need post localization support and require testing each option in QA under multiple different configurations, which would be an exponential increase.
• There is such a thing as too many options, and we'd rather not turn this into GZDoom. The point of this port is to be as streamlined as possible for new audiences.

I suppose that's all fair. I just mentioned making them menu options because, obviously, you can't just pull down a console on a PS5 or a Nintendo Switch at the press of a key; otherwise I'd be fine with just tucking it as a CVAR. Though this being said, on those systems, there's also not exactly the possibility to add custom content easily either like there is on PC.

 

However, I'd still say that if you plan on allowing for curated content on consoles, that there be some sort of way to address this. In this case, upping the slug ammo might have to do if you guys really don't want to expose an option to rebalance for the old railgun, I don't know.

 

(And to be fair, I do personally like most of the new behaviors - the only real sticking points for me are indeed the railgun, and that the Berserker's splash radius on that leap attack is a fair bit too high for my tastes. The machinegun kick is something I can understand though, as I vaguely recall it being posted elsewhere that the increase in the internal tickrate also made this hard to properly bring over?)

 

11 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

This is not a bug, it's vanilla behavior to switch to track 11 after 3-4 loops for the current track.

This I did not know - to be fair, I never got to play PC Quake II with the proper soundtrack. I wonder why the heck they decided to do that... to me it just sticks out weirdly. Also doesn't help that it's one of the songs I'm less impressed by.

 

Got me wondering now if it'd be possible to add support for seamlessly looping music. The music is already regular ogg files, so theoretically, should just be a matter of making the music players recognize a start loop and end loop sample. I remember proposing something like that to the author of Yamagi Quake II a handful of years back, but it never really gained traction.

 

(Of course, I also doubt this would be added - but it would be nice.)

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

1 minute ago, Dark Pulse said:

This I did not know - to be fair, I never got to play PC Quake II with the proper soundtrack. I wonder why the heck they decided to do that... to me it just sticks out weirdly. Also doesn't help that it's one of the songs I'm less impressed by.

It would probably get tiring to hear a hard rock/metal track play constantly throughout a level, especially after you've already killed everything and are just exploring.

[Dark Pulse]

Just now, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

It would probably get tiring to hear a hard rock/metal track play constantly throughout a level, especially after you've already killed everything and are just exploring.

I mean, my first Quake II was PSX Quake II, so... that's kinda actually what happens, lol.

 

(The game does switch which song is playing anytime you hit a load though, and of course, on PSX, a bunch of little loading corridors were added throughout the levels.)

[Cantleylads]

 

 

Detailed feedback for the thumbstick controls. Skip to 27:29 for a brief summary

 

It's a 30 minute video but the take away from this is that the game is 2-3 adjustments away from being top tier console FPS controls. Examples from both Halo and COD are mentioned for comparison.

 

The weapon wheel feedback is also excellent.

 

Edited August 20, 2023 by Cantleylads

[Individualised]

16 hours ago, Edward850 said:

This is not a bug, it's vanilla behavior to switch to track 11 after 3-4 loops for the current track.

That is very weird and not something I recall happening in Yamagi. I wonder what the creative reasoning was for that...

16 hours ago, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

It would probably get tiring to hear a hard rock/metal track play constantly throughout a level, especially after you've already killed everything and are just exploring.

Once you have completed all objectives in an area the music stops.

Edited August 20, 2023 by Individualised

[Blzut3]

17 minutes ago, Individualised said:

That is very weird and not something I recall happening in Yamagi. I wonder what the creative reasoning was for that..

From a quick search of the source I do believe that is missing from Yamagi.  But it is indeed vanilla: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/win32/cd_win.c#L390

 

Don't have the remaster in front of me but in vanilla the cvar to change the number of loops before changing the track appears to be cd_loopcount.

[Dark Pulse]

6 minutes ago, Blzut3 said:

From a quick search of the source I do believe that is missing from Yamagi.  But it is indeed vanilla: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/win32/cd_win.c#L390

 

Don't have the remaster in front of me but in vanilla the cvar to change the number of loops before changing the track appears to be cd_loopcount.

That CVAR is indeed in the remaster, and the default is 4.

 

Guess I'll be changing that, as honestly I don't mind it being all rock, and the Showdown track is basically pale in comparison. (PSX Quake II had you fight the Makron to "Pressure Point" which is IMO a hell of a lot more fitting, but of course, that was absent from original Quake II, since that was added in Ground Zero.)

 

There's also cd_looptrack, if for some reason you want a different track.

Edited August 20, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Lizardcommando]

Any places where I can download custom player skins? I want to try and redownload the old Homer Simpson skins, Doomguy skin and the Quake Ranger skin.

[Dark Pulse]

2 minutes ago, Lizardcommando said:

Any places where I can download custom player skins? I want to try and redownload the old Homer Simpson skins, Doomguy skin and the Quake Ranger skin.

I'd imagine most of those sites are long gone, but maybe try looking up places like PlanetQuake on the Internet Archive?

[Dweller Dark]

At least one of the Homer Simpson skins is here, but I haven't tried downloading it: https://dondeq2.com/2018/01/11/mike-ds-quake-ii-models-skins-page/

[Koko Ricky]

How do you load skins in-game?

 

[Azuris]

57 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I'd imagine most of those sites are long gone, but maybe try looking up places like PlanetQuake on the Internet Archive?

 

Yep, many good Sources for Skins, Models and Levels are gone or have dead Links.

 

But i managed to find at least one pretty big one for Quake 3, guess somewhere will be Stuff for Quake 2.

 

If i remember it tomorrow i'll look up the Link on my PC.

Often such sites have more Stuff of an Series.

[LadyMistDragon]

1 hour ago, Koko Ricky said:

How do you load skins in-game?

 

Go to the menu then Options/Multiplayer/Player Configuration. I actually had this same question but I was told that's what I was during a Quake II stream.

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, Blzut3 said:

From a quick search of the source I do believe that is missing from Yamagi.  But it is indeed vanilla: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/win32/cd_win.c#L390

 

Don't have the remaster in front of me but in vanilla the cvar to change the number of loops before changing the track appears to be cd_loopcount.

Update: Apparently these don't work. Or at least, I tried setting cd_loopcount to 255 and it still seemed to be set to 4, even though it read 255 properly. It definitely reset to 4 upon relaunching the game though, and the music still went to the ambient track after four loops.

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

8 hours ago, Individualised said:

Once you have completed all objectives in an area the music stops.

Regardless there have still been times where I spent a little too long running around a level before completing the final objective, at which point I feel the switch to the ambient track helps to stop the metal tracks from getting too grating.

[Koko Ricky]

I had the music stop during deathmatch. Made no sense. 

 

[Azuris]

On 8/19/2023 at 6:55 PM, Koko Ricky said:

I'm sorry, but I do not believe you when you stated "all textures are 32x32." You can literally see the dimension sizes of them in the editor. The 64x64 textures are not idtech1 style patches of smaller textures. They become larger in the editing process. The base textures are not strictly 32x32. In fact it has already been confirmed by @SteelPH that the colors are indexed, which is why many of them are base 64x64, as it uses up exactly all 4096 bytes of cache. If they're RGB, then they are reduced to a maximum of 32×32.

 

Doom Builder 64 is not for the Nintendo 64 and the original Engine used on the Console.

I guess there are some Possibilities, either Doom Builder 64 preessembles the Textures to show up how intended or it skips the Trickery completely and merges it as one Texture, as there is no Space Limitation of the Module or the RAM.

 

If i remember it well, i had the Info about the Textures from the Digital Foundry Video that was made with Nightdive.

Maybe look it up and how they Remade the Engine :)

 

 

[Kinsie]

Kaiser's Doom 64 Tech Bible from back in the Doom 64 Ex days talks about how textures can be flipped and mirrored by linedefs to create the illusion of larger textures. Specifically, on page 43.

[mhmh]

I mentioned before cases where the new AI makes the game easier; here's another, quite silly one. 

 

In the Cooling Facility there is a water-filled room with two platforms you can ride up to a balcony around the top of it. Some monsters roam the balcony, including some Berserkers.

 

With the old AI they stay at the top and mob you when you come up. They can knock you off the balcony into the water, and mob you again if you come back up. 

 

With the new AI they jump into the water at you, and drown themselves. 

 

It's because of things like this that it's desirable to have an option to revert to the classic AI and gameplay. Sometimes things are removed for a reason.