Quake II

Quake II

Developer(s)

id Software

Publisher(s)

Activision

Series

Quake

Release date(s)

December 9, 1997

Genre(s)

First-person shooter

Mode(s)

Single-player, Multiplayer

Platform(s)

AmigaOS, Mac OS (Classic), Nintendo 64, Windows, Linux, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5,

Engine

id Tech 2

Steam AppID

2320

Written in

C, Assembly (for software rendering & optimization)

Mod support

Yes

SDK

N/A

System requirements

• See #system requirements.

Steam Deck compatbility

Playable

Distribution

Retail, GOG.com, Steam, other

Official website

https://bethesda.net/en/game/quakeii

Links

Steam Store page
GOG.com store page

Previous game

Quake

Next game

Quake III

Stub

This article or section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

This page documents information about a third-party game running on a non-Valve engine. This information is documented here because it has technical and/or historical relevance to Valve's engines.

Todo: Elements relevant to Valve's engines (ex: skybox format, colored lighting, translucency, BSP format, PAS, etc.).

Quake II (1997) is the second installment of the Quake series, following Quake. The game moves away from the original Gothic  Lovecraftian horror theme and instead, making the game more sci-fi aesthetic.

Like its predecessor, Valve's GoldSrc engine also used most of the code from Quake II Engine as far back during its early development, though later in the final version it used the heavily modified Quake Engine, with only a little Quake II engine code. Source uses additional code from Quake II, such as for collision and alpha sorting, and Source's BSP format is based upon Quake II's BSP format.

Furthermore, Half-Life was originally planned to be released in November 1997 to compete with Quake II (which would be released in Dec 1997), but it was later delayed to 1998 with Valve reworking every level of the game.

Releases

Original

Quake II was originally released in December 1997 for PC, then later ported to both Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1 in 1999, along with Classic Mac OS, Linux and BeOS operating systems, which all of them are also released in 1999. It is also ported to Xbox 360, available on Quake 4 bonus disc.

Quake II RTX

In March 2019, a remaster of Quake II, called Quake II RTX was announced by Nvidia, and later released in June 6 for both Windows and Linux. As the name suggest, you need a NVIDIA RTX, Intel Arc or Advanced Micro Devices RX 6000 series card in order to enable ray-tracing, but the game offers software fallback for cards that are fast enough.

It is available for free on Steam with three demo levels included, but RTX version was able to play the full game as long the original game files were installed.

2023 Kex Engine remaster

Also known as Quake II Enhanced, and colloquially referred to as Q2EX.

Another remaster of Quake II was released for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on Aug 10, 2023 during QuakeCon. These runs on Kex Engine on top of modified version of id Tech 2 engine.

This is a first time that Quake II was officially ported to modern consoles, with 1080p 60FPS rendering on 8th gen consoles, while Windows, PS5, Xbox One X, and Xbox Series X|S are able to run on 4K (or higher on PC) up to 120FPS (or more on PC). It also introduced new single-player expansions, "Call of the Machine", which was designed exclusively for the remaster by Bethesda studio  MachineGames, comprising 28 additional levels and a new Deathmatch map. A Nintendo 64 port of the game was also bundled with the remaster, as a bonus game.

Additionally, the game runs at a 40 Hz tickrate as opposed to the original's 10 Hz, and it does not use any bilinear filtering for the textures at all unlike the original with OpenGL mode. 13 new achievements has been also added to the game.

Source ports

Thanks to the release of the Quake II source code, there have been many source ports that seek to supersede the vanilla engine. The following modern source ports are actively or semi-actively developed:

• Yamagi Quake II - Vanilla-friendly source port. Singleplayer-focused; multiplayer may be too insecure for netplay.
• Q2Pro - Multiplayer-focused source port, with added security fixes, optional anticheat, and many enhanced graphical features.
  • Q2RTX (Quake II RTX) - Fork of Q2VKPT (which itself forked from Q2Pro) with real-time raytracing.
• KMQuake II - Feature-focused source port, aimed at removing limits to increasing mapping potential.
• Quake II XP - Graphics-focused source port, porting the graphics pipeline to modern GLSL. Aims to remaster the visuals without sacrificing the original "style" of the game.

For more source ports, see Source ports section on PCGW.

Bugs/Limitations

Original version

Important:Transparency and Translucency:

• Only translucency is supported in vanilla; alpha testing requires certain source ports (Notably not in Yamagi).
• Translucency is only supported on worldspawn textures and SP2 sprites, and cannot be used on brush entities or MD2 models in vanilla, due to the usage of the BSP tree for alpha sorting.
  Compare to GoldSrc, which supports translucency on any brush entity except worldspawn (as well as models and sprites).
  Some source ports (such as KMQuake2) support translucency on brush entities, but exhibit the same alpha sorting issues as GoldSrc.

Only in modern versions of Windows or modern PC

Like most unpatched games from the 1990s, the game can usually have issues and bugs when played on modern systems and modern version of Windows. You can check the Issues fixed section on PCGW for more information.

Bug:No CD Music:

Like Quake and WON/Retail version of Half-Life, along with other games from that era, Quake II plays the soundtracks by streaming it from CD Audio.

• Steam and Microsoft Store versions of the game does not ship with its original soundtracks at all, it can be fixed by using Ultimate Quake II patch, burn a new CD or use CD emulator that contains the soundtracks or simply use a source port.
• GOG versions of the game on the other hand, did include the soundtracks, however the soundtrack patch was broken by recent versions of Windows 10, and all versions of Windows 11, in order to resolve this, use a source port.  [todo tested in ?]

Enhanced version (2023 Kex Engine remaster)

Bug:Steam Cloud in the enhanced version of the game was misconfigured by the developers. As a result, only configurations files are synced, not the save files.^[1]
☑ Resolved. : Fixed in August 15, 2023 update. ^[2]

System requirements

Original version

Minimum:

Recommended:

Processor (CPU): 90 MHz Intel Pentium PowerPC 603e (Mac) Graphics (GPU): Optional, otherwise Software renderer. Memory: 16 MB (Windows & Linux) 48 MB (Mac) Storage: 25 MB Sound card: Any OS: Windows 95, 98 / NT 4.0 or later Mac OS (Classic) 7.5.3 Linux kernel v2.0.24 Note:Windows - Software renderer may not work properly on modern systems (due to how DirectDraw works on modern OS). Using source port is recommended for modern systems. Software renderer may use DirectDraw if available.

Processor (CPU): 133 MHz Intel Pentium Graphics (GPU): Any graphics card with Glide (3dfx MiniGL), OpenGL support. Memory: 24 MB RAM Storage: 400 MB

Enhanced (2023)

Minimum:

Recommended:

Processor (CPU): Intel Core i5-3570 3.4 GHz AMD Ryzen 3 1300X 3.5GHz Graphics (GPU): GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMD Radeon HD 7750 Direct3D 11 (DX11) or Vulkan capable 1 GB of VRAM Memory: 8 GB Storage: 2 GB Sound card: Any OS: Windows 10 Note:Despite such high requirement for minimum, the Kex Remaster can run on any systems below its minimum requirements, as long it was playable at 30 or 60 FPS with dual-core CPU and late 2000s GPU, or does not run out of memory (RAM and VRAM)

Processor (CPU): Intel Core i5-6600k 3.5 GHz AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz Graphics (GPU): Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 AMD RX Vega 56 8 GB of VRAM

See also

• Quake II.fgd

External links

• Original engine and game DLL source code - Does not include game DLL source code for expansions
  • 2023 remaster game DLL source code - Includes original and remastered game code for the base game and both expansions, as well as FGDs for TrenchBroom
• Quake 2 Tools source code ^{[ Deprecated]} - Source code for original 1997 tools, such as map compilers. Provided for reference only; third party tools such as ericw-tools were used for the 2023 remaster.

References

1. wolfinston85 on Steam Community:
   Does Steam Cloud only support options and not saves? - last accessed on 2023-08-11
2. Quake II History · Change #19910560 · SteamDB - last accessed on 2023-08-16