README.md

Overview

This is the official Quake 2 code v3.21 with additional Vulkan renderer. The goal is to maintain as much compatibility as possible with the original game, so there are no fancy visual upgrades here - just pure, vanilla Quake 2 experience as we knew it back in 1997. There are, however, a few notable differences that made the cut for various reasons:

• original compiler warnings have been fixed
• M_DrawTextBox function is being called slightly differently without resorting to ending the frame prematurely
• debug build comes with additional cmd console for debugging purposes when no visuals are available
• 1920x1080 screen resolution has been added
• warped texture effect (lava, water, slime) is now properly drawn (though only with Vulkan and software renderer!)
• software renderer has been completely replaced with KolorSoft 1.1 - this adds colored lighting and fixes severe instabilities of the original renderer
• on first launch, the game attempts to use Vulkan at 1920x1080 resolution by default and reverts to software renderer on failure

Building

• download and install Vulkan SDK - make sure that the VULKAN_SDK environment variable is set afterwards
• install Visual Studio Community with the MFC package
• install Windows Universal CRT SDK and Windows SDK 8.1 or alternatively the latest Windows 10 SDK (this will require retargetting the solution)

With this setup, the game should build out of the box with no additional dependencies.

Running

The Visual Studio 2017 C++ Redistributable (32 bit) is required to run the application.

The release package comes with game data used in the demo version - for full experience, copy all retail Quake 2 data paks (pak0.pak, pak1.pak, pak2.pak) into the baseq2 folder and run the executable. The mission packs have not been tested but should work just as well.

Console commands

The Vulkan renderer comes with a set of its own additional console commands:

Command Action vk_validation Toggle validation layers.
0 - disabled (default in Release)
1 - only errors and warnings
2 - full validation (default in Debug) vk_strings Print some basic Vulkan/GPU information. vk_msaa Toggle MSAA.
0 - off (default)
1 - MSAAx2
2 - MSAAx4
3 - MSAAx8 vk_flashblend Toggle the blending of lights onto the environment. (default: 0) vk_polyblend Blend fullscreen effects: blood, powerups etc. (default: 1) vk_skymip Toggle the usage of mipmap information for the sky graphics. (default: 0) vk_finish Inserts vkDeviceWaitIdle() on render start (default: 0).
Don't use this, it's just for the sake of having a gl_finish equivalent. vk_point_particles Use POINT_LIST to render particles, textured triangles otherwise. (default: 1) vk_particle_size Rendered particle size. (default: 40) vk_particle_att_a Intensity of the particle A attribute. (default: 0.01) vk_particle_att_b Intensity of the particle B attribute. (default: 0) vk_particle_att_c Intensity of the particle C attribute. (default: 0.01) vk_particle_min_size The minimum size for a rendered particle. (default: 2) vk_particle_max_size The maximum size for a rendered particle. (default: 40) vk_lockpvs Lock current PVS table. (default: 0) vk_modulate Texture brightness modifier. (default: 1) vk_shadows Draw experimental entity shadows. (default: 0) vk_picmip Shrink factor for the textures. (default: 0) vk_round_down Toggle the rounding of texture sizes. (default: 1) vk_log Log frame validation data to file. (default: 0) vk_dynamic Use dynamic lighting. (default: 1) vk_showtris Display mesh triangles. (default: 0) vk_lightmap Display lightmaps. (default: 0) vk_texturemode Change current texture filtering.
VK_NEAREST - nearest filter, no mipmaps
VK_LINEAR - linear filter, no mipmaps
VK_MIPMAP_NEAREST - nearest filter with mipmaps
VK_MIPMAP_LINEAR - linear filter with mipamps (default)

Known Issues

• reported crashes on AMD Vega GPUs when the application starts

TODO

• implement screenshots
• implement water warp effect
• implement vk_clear
• add music
• use push constants
• Linux and MacOS versions