These objects and the ambient input and comm chatter from your fellow marines makes Quake II seem much more like a movie than game. Yes, it is a plot that would do any science fiction B-movie proud, but it frames the combat in a way that few other 3D shooters do (the exception being LucasArts' Outlaws). However, what is most exciting about Quake II is that there are coherent and logical mission objectives for each level as well, and that these fit into a larger plot. GameplayĪs in most 3D shooters, the basic objectives of Quake II are to blast the bad guys, get the keys, find the doors, advance through all the levels, and finish off the Master of All Evil, thus saving the world. It is, frankly, what the original Quake should have been, and it is worth every penny you'll pay for it if you have any love for this kind of game. Quake II is about combat, and about using your brain as much as your guns. In essence what id has done with Quake II is to return to their roots, but with 1998 technology. A lot.The beauty of Quake II is immediately evident from the opening scene - this game has spectacular ambience, graphics to match (especially in 3Dfx accelerated mode), and level design so good that you'd have to go back to the original Doom to find this kind of balance between clever tricks and traps and a low frustration level. “But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. That means all lighting, reflections, shadows and VFX are ray-traced, with no traditional effects or techniques utilized. Running on a Vulkan renderer, with support for Linux, Quake II RTX is a pure ray-traced game. He said yes, and this week NVIDIA is presenting the newly-created Quake II RTX together with Christoph at GDC 2019. So, we reached out shortly after Q2VKPT’s release to ask if our own ray tracing experts, many of whom he worked with previously, could develop enhancements and major additions. To solve the problem, Christoph and his university colleagues built upon ideas originally conceived in 2016 during his NVIDIA internship, when he co-invented a fast way to remove said graininess by combining the results of multiple game frames, in a manner similar to that used by Temporal Anti-Aliasing.Īs Christoph states on his site, Q2VKPT is the basis for future research, and a platform for more ray tracing goodness. With Ray Tracing being all the rage, word of a developer making a beautiful, real-time ray-traced version of Quake II made headlines around the world.īut path tracing has a downside: its random sampling algorithm introduces ‘noise’ that makes gameplay appear grainy and speckled, as seen in 2016’s Q2PT.
The “PT” in its name stands for Path Tracing, a compute-intensive ray tracing technique that unifies all lighting effects (shadows, reflections, et cetera) into a single ‘pure ray tracing algorithm’. student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Released in January, Q2VKPT was created by former NVIDIA intern Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. Ever since, fans have beavered away on their own personal projects, the latest of which is Q2VKPT.
#Quake 2 completo software#
Colored lighting, dynamic visual effects, and much more, all running at a glorious 640x480, or perhaps 800圆00 if you had top-of-the-line hardware.įast forward to 2001, when id Software made the Quake II engine open source, enabling anyone to legally release total conversions with complete engine overhauls. Id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine that supported 3DFX GPU acceleration out of the box.
Here you can download Quake II RTX, the legendary 1997 game with added real-time ray traced global illumination and reflections, dynamic direct and indirect lighting effects, mimicked physical material light reflection properties, and volumetric lighting effects.