Quake II
Facelift

This MOD greatly enhances the visulal quality of Quake 2, it upsamples all the game textures using the powerful Lanczos filter specially designed to increase the visual quality of the resampled image.

Download (0.3Mb)

The original Quake2 renderer DOWNsamples the textures to fit the weak 3d accelerators of its days, using a visually degrading linear filter at that. So, I can say, the original renderer MUTILATES the game art turning it into a blurry crap.

It's not Carmack's fault, it's just the harsh reality of the late 20th century hardware. Keep in mind that the monsters of Quake2 were intended for *software* rendering, their non-power-of-two skins are proof enough.

This version does also include the underwater blurring/warping effect that simulates the software shader used in Quake1 and software renderer of Quake2 to annoy and disorient player swimming under water.

REQUIREMENTS

1. Original Quake II for Win32, dated 1997 or 1998.

2. A video card that supports the S3 texture compression and has 32Mbytes of memory or more. I think, even GeForce 2 will do.

3. It works with all mission packs, including "Ground Zero"!

INSTALLATION

1. Back up your quake2.exe and ref_gl.dll, just in case.

2. Unpack stackhack.exe and ref_gl.dll to your Quake 2 folder replacing the original ref_gl.dll

3. Run stackhack to patch quake2.exe This should take care of the stack overflow crash.

4. Start your Quake 2, choose "Default OpenGL" in the "Video" menu and enjoy ^_^

NOTES

1. The "use 8 bit textures" option switches off the texture filtering making the image look more pixellated.
The mipmapping is disabled, the gl_texturemode variable is ignored. Use the option above to switch between GL_LINEAR and GL_NEAREST.

The texture quality slider in Q2 (which does have 4 positions) greatly affects the texture quality, just like it does in the original renderer. The lowest setting limits texture size to 256x256 (just like the original).
At the maximum quality most of the wall textures and monster skins are upsampled to 1024x1024.
This setting also controls the power of the underwater warping/blurring effect.

3. The video modes below 640x480 are substituted with your desktop default.

4. The menus and GUI are scaled up in the high resolution video modes.

THANKS

1. To Jan Horn (R.I.P) and everyone who did the Quake2 to Delphi conversion. This renderer is compiled using Turbo Delphi Explorer.

2. To Marek Mauder for his powerful Vampyre Imaging library, native to Pascal and available as sources.

Quirks

(shamefacedly hidden at the very bottom)

1. The loading times are outrageous. To be corrected.

2. The enlarged font looks like crap. To be corrected.

3. The brightness slider affects the sky (in the original Q2 it did not).

Screenshots

Warning: this hosting was never known for its speed (only for its reliability) and the images aren't small.

Iron Maiden
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Big Tank
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Items
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Bee-like-mini-boss-forgot-his-name
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Gunner
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Berserker
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The Big Bad Boss
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The Big Bad Boss
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Technician
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Guard
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Enforcer
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Tank
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