Quake II

Quake II is not really a sequel to Quake. It was just a working title, such as the working title for Hexen was Heretic II. But then it turned out that all of the final titles the developer team had in view were already taken or at least of questionable trademark status. The E3 deadline drew near. And Quake, after all, was a successful franchise. So the title remained.

Technically, Quake II was far more straightforward than Quake. There never was a DOS version, it ran on Windows 95 and NT alone. This may have raised some eyebrows at the time, for while the new 32-bit Windows was establishing itself as a game platform with titles like Diablo and Age of Empires, DOS was still seen as the natural platform for 3D games; the Build Engine, for example, was never ported to Windows at all. Richard Connery acknowledges this in his Unofficial Quake II FAQ and ensures us:

Yeah, I know: why Windows and not plain, old and fast DOS? Well, it's easier to develop games since you don't have to worry about devices like mice, sound cards, modems, LAN card setups, video cards, 3D acceleration cards; the list is endless. Trust me. It's BETTER this way. The OS handles things automatically and the programmers can concentrate on the game itself instead of writing emulators and drivers like in the DOS days. Quake II doesn't use Direct3D but OpenGL instead, which is a set of drivers 3D card developers are really pushing forward, some even say it has surpassed Direct3D, at least in the first-person perspective genre. The bottom line is: install either Windows 95 or NT 4.0 and you can be sure if the OS detects and correctly configures your device Quake II will have no problems using it and that can only be a good thing. I've personally been able to run Quake II under Windows 98.

We see the same straightforwardness in 3D acceleration: Quake II runs either in OpenGL or a software renderer. There was no support for Rendition Vérité any more. There were OpenGL drivers for PowerVR PCX2 (used for example in the Matrox M3d add-in board) and, of course, the popular Voodoo chips.

Cheats

COMMAND                ITEM                QUANTITY
give all               All items
give health            Health             100
give health 999        Health             999
give weapons           All weapons        All (no ammo)
give ammo              All ammo           Max 
give armor             Body Armor         200
give bodyarmor         Body Armor          +1
give silencer          Weapon Silencer
god                    God Mode
notarget               No Target Mode
noclip                 No Clip Mode
give blue key          Blue Key             1
give red key           Red Key              1
give security pass     Security Pass        1
give commander's head  Commanders's Head    1
give power shield      Power Shield         1
give armor shard       Armor Shard          1
give combat armor      Combat Armor         1
give power cube        Power Cube           1
give slugs             Slugs               10
give invulnerability   Invulnerability      1
sv_gravity             Change gravity     800 (800 is normal)
crosshair              Change crosshair   1 or 5

Tricks for Old Hardware

Shane Mooney, the author of the Gamespot Guide for Quake II reports that he could significantly raise his framerates while running in 640×480 mode on a 266MHz Pentium II with a Voodoo card by adding the following lines to his AUTOEXEC.BAT:

SET SST_SCREENREFRESH=60
SET SST_GRXCLK=57
SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0
SET FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH=1
SET SST_FASTMEM=1
SET SST_FASTPCIRD=1
SET SST_SWA_EN_WAIT_ON_VSYNC=0
SET SST_VIDEO_24BPP=0

Links

• Official Homepage
• PlanetQuake
• Secrets
• An attempt at Cel Shaded Rendering in the Quake 2 Engine
• Quake II Benchmarks from the id site
• NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR Guide
• Benchmark on high-end 1999 hardware