vkQuake2 is a Quake 2 Source port created by Krzysztof Kondrak and released to the public for the first time in December 2018. Unlike most ports, it was created using the original game code as a base and the project's main focus is to stay truthful to the original look and feel of Quake 2. Because of this, there are very few visual upgrades and only most necessary modifications have been implemented (such as support for modern screen resolutions and aspect ratio's, adding antialiasing and hud scaling etc.). The primary feature of vkQuake2 is the introduction of Vulkan renderer which is a great showcase of how multiple renderers can coexist in a single game (the original OpenGL and software renderer are still present for comparison). This project, however, is not to be confused with Quake 2 RTX and q2vkpt, both of which also focus on using Vulkan but take advantage of raytracing instead.
vkQuake2 supports the official mission packs out of the box and also comes with prebuilt binary for a widely popular Quake II: Zaero expansion.
Features[]
- world colors have been slightly upgraded - the game's original, darker look can be toggled with the
vk_postprocessconsole command - 64-bit support, additional screen resolutions and DPI awareness have been added
- underwater vision effect similar to software renderer has been implemented
- antialiasing and sample shading is now natively supported
- anisotropic filtering toggle has been added
- software renderer has been completely replaced with KolorSoft 1.1 - this adds colored lighting and fixes severe instabilities of the original implementation
- Vulkan renderer fixes broken warp texture effect (water, lava, slime) seen in OpenGL
- HUD elements, menus and console text are now scaled accordingly on higher screen resolutions (can be overridden with the
hudscaleconsole command) - support for OGG/FLAC/MP3/WAV music has been added in addition to standard CD audio
- triangle fans have been replaced with indexed triangle lists due to Metal/MoltenVK limitations
- players can now change texture filtering modes from within the video menu
Download[]
vkQuake2 source code and binaries for Windows (64 and 32 bit) can be downloaded from the project's GitHub page