Author Topic: Quake II Apearance (Read 27248 times)

jägermonsta · « **on:** October 08, 2009, 07:18:23 AM »

Back in the day... long long long time ago I use to play Quake2 at this office building with some old programmer dudes I met through my friends father. This is where I started playing Quake... besides the fact they use to touch me. They also rigged up some sick computers for the time. They would "SLI" sorta, (two video cards) a rig and their Quake 2 graphics looked pretty sweet.

So anyhow... through all this time, I've never been able to mimic their graphic potential, even with the technology we have today. When ever I load Quake, my graphics are all bright, textures are ick, lighting in general is garbage. While this works good for competitive Quake 2, I'm looking for something more enjoyable, something nostalgic for the time.

What are some graphics settings I can rig up to give my quake more of a gloom effect? Good lighting, quality textures, etc... as I'm sure I'll still get my 999 FPS even if I jack the game all the way up.

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #1 on:** October 08, 2009, 07:24:25 AM »

Might have been 3dfx.

My old 3dfx required 2 cards to run, and Luci told me that 3dfx was much better looking than todays cards.
I was still on q1 till 03, so never got to check it out.

[BTF]Sigma · « **Reply #2 on:** October 08, 2009, 09:27:48 AM »

I had an old voodoo3 card that I refused to give up on until it finally gave out on me. I know what you mean with the 'look'. It was so vivid and the colors were so rich when it ran q2.

I think there is a command to manage the color lightmaps in r1q2. Does it work to intensify them past "1"? I know you can dim the color with it to make it look more 'software' lighted.

[BTF]Jehar · « **Reply #3 on:** October 08, 2009, 10:10:38 AM »

There's gl_coloredlightmaps 0-1 (and everything in between) for desaturating the lightmap, but yes, intensity can go above values of 1. Actually, it appears 3 is the default. The biggest thing is to find a way to make a low gl_modulate playable. If you can get a client with entity minlighting (such as jdolans build of aprq2), you can pretty much set it back to default and still be able to clearly see items and players.

Whirlingdervish · « **Reply #4 on:** October 08, 2009, 10:46:09 AM »

I fiddled with r1q2/r1gl this mornin trying to produce some very nice looking fairly stock q2 by twiddling settings around.
I was trying to recreate the really great depth that the old voodoo cards seemed to create, and I think it kinda worked.

vid_gamma was a big part of it. raising it up to nearly 1 caused the extra brightness to go away so the textures had much more impressive contrast.

I recommend jdo's retex pak http://ir.tastyspleen.net/files/q2retexpak.zip

and these settings:

gl_ext_texture_filter_anisotropic 1
gl_ext_max_anisotropy 16
gl_ext_multisample 1
gl_ext_samples 8
gl_modulate 2
intensity 2
gl_coloredlightmaps 0.8
vid_gamma 0.9

this made everything look quite a bit smoother and more crisp, and brought the lighting to a playable level without removing the dark shadowy areas and without the orange glowing look of an overly brightened map.

I just put them in a file called vid.cfg, with a vid_restart command at the end of it, and exec'd it from the console.

There are probably some other settings to try out, but this might be a start.

my Quake 2 Before:

my Quake 2 After:

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #5 on:** October 08, 2009, 11:48:09 AM »

Looks really good,

I'll stick that in my cfg, do a before and after tomorrow

jägermonsta · « **Reply #6 on:** October 08, 2009, 11:53:00 AM »

Sweet man, I'll see how that works when I get home.

[BTF]RottenRose · « **Reply #7 on:** October 08, 2009, 01:27:11 PM »

Man Dervish, that's sexy!

Whirlingdervish · « **Reply #8 on:** October 08, 2009, 03:30:08 PM »

figured I'd take a page out of your book..

R1CH · « **Reply #9 on:** October 09, 2009, 02:53:55 AM »

Latest R1GL also has a gl_texture_lighting_mode to provide even more control:

Quote

# New texture lighting code from JDolan / Quake2World. Disabled by default, control with gl_texture_lighting_mode 1 to enable. New cvars, gl_contrast and gl_saturation to control amount of contrast and saturation. gl_modulate does not apply to textures in this mode, use vid_gamma to control texture brightness. Should result in higher quality textures at higher brightness levels without washing out the colors, at the expense of slightly longer load times.

Whirlingdervish · « **Reply #10 on:** October 09, 2009, 08:26:34 AM »

I tried those out a bit this mornin with a few different values.
lowering the saturation tends to ugly the weapon skins up a bit, and raising it makes the colors pop much more.
A slight up in the contrast seems to help all around.

I added these to the config:

gl_texture_lighting_mode 1
gl_saturation 2
gl_contrast 1

and got this:

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #11 on:** November 24, 2009, 05:20:47 AM »

If you up the gl_modulate after that, without vid_restart, the items will be bright still.

Downside to that is I have a key bound to run my cfg at the start of each map, gl_modulate being the last command.

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #12 on:** November 24, 2009, 05:44:21 AM »

Some tweaks on what you did, but here's what I have mine looking like.

gl_ext_texture_filter_anisotropic 1
gl_ext_max_anisotropy 16
gl_ext_multisample 1
gl_ext_samples 8
gl_modulate 2
intensity 2
gl_coloredlightmaps 0
vid_gamma 0.9
vid_restart
wait
gl_modulate 99
wait
sky black

peewee_RotA · « **Reply #13 on:** November 24, 2009, 05:58:49 AM »

So you're making it so that not everything is a shade of orange? I don't get it. What's wrong with orange?

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #14 on:** November 24, 2009, 06:02:35 AM »

Being able to turn that off is the best thing to happen to quake since straf jumping

Finally got onto Quake Live to add you as a friend.

Was thinking about moving this to FAQ's How to's and articles

Author Topic: Quake II Apearance (Read 27248 times)

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