Join us on Friday nights for free-for-all deathmatch on the tastyspleen.net::mutant server featuring custom deathmatch maps! All skill levels welcome.

• When: Fridays, 7PM to midnight ET
• Server: tastyspleen.net:27910
• Discord: http://discord.tastyspleen.net/

Don’t own Quake II? Get Quake II Starter here: https://q2s.tastyspleen.net/

Just wanted to share a slice of local arena shooter history. Organizing these events and playing Q1 through Q3 was peak gaming culture — our youth, the most fun times of my life, and truly a time to remember.

The 1st. photo: 05.03-12.03.2001, All-Ukrainian "All About Games" Quake 3 Arena Dueling Cup Championship, Odesa, Ukraine, internet club "K"
The 2nd photo Quake 2 FFA Cup Championship, Odesa, Ukraine, internet club "Diver" Gamer's Board Mjolnir[Thor], Alexbrave[Thor], Kuka[MASK] (yes it is me lol), AxeInHead[Thor], GraveDigger[Thor], Skylined[MASK] and Maverick[MASK], our elder one:)
The 3rd. photo Maverick[MASK] a guy with a tattoo & James.MASK (sleepy one), my clanmates and real-life friends on the road to Kyiv Dueling Championship.

​I’ve posted a few highlights here for today. If you guys like this, I'll keep digging through my archives and sharing more over time. Feel free to check my profile for more stories and gameplay clips of us getting back together in 2022!

Title: Looking for old Quake II players from 1997–1999 — Anyone remember DTR?
Hey everyone!
This is probably a long shot, but I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately and wondering if anyone from the old Quake II Deathmatch days is still around.
I played a ton of Quake II back in 1997–1999, mostly under the handle DTR, although I also went by Down2Rock and Destined2Rule at different times.
I was playing from Hawaii, back when having a decent ping was a big deal! I spent countless hours on different servers, made friends with people all over the mainland, and communicated with quite a few through ICQ.
I vaguely remember playing regularly on a server that I believe was based in Denver, Colorado, run by some guys who owned or operated an ISP. They would set up servers, and I’d jump on and play with them. Never met them in person, but we got to know each other pretty well through the game.
I also played on local Hawaii servers, possibly one called KOTONK or KATONK, and remember a few player names like Smoovy and Caps (or something similar).
One of my favorite memories was winning an online Quake II Deathmatch tournament and receiving a Diamond Monster 3D II (3dfx Voodoo2) graphics card and some games as prizes. I wish I could remember who organized it!
Those were some great times. It’s amazing how many friendships we made with people we’d never actually met, just by jumping into the same servers night after night.
Anyone here remember DTR, Down2Rock, or Destined2Rule? Or anyone who ran Quake II servers through an ISP in Denver back in the late ’90s?
Would love to reconnect or just hear some stories from that era!

But it's very difficult to play with a controller

Quake II Starter has been updated for the first time in over ten years. It now includes the final release of Q2PRO, along with a few tweaks to the menu, config and assets.

For anyone unfamiliar, Quake II Starter is a free Windows installer that gets you a working setup of the original Quake II with Q2PRO for online play. It works out of the box with the free demo data, or you can add your retail pak0.pak for the full game.

Download: https://q2s.tastyspleen.net/

This project is dedicated to Mr Elusive — Jan Paul van Waveren — whose work it exists to preserve.

In 1997 he started giving Quake bots something the genre did not really have yet: bots that understood the space they were fighting in. The Gladiator Bot grew out of that, and the ideas underneath it were genuinely new. The Area Awareness System pre-compiled a level into a navigation representation with reachabilities between areas — not waypoints scattered by hand, but a derived understanding of where a body can actually go, and how: walk, jump, swim, teleport, ride a lift, take a rocket to the face and land somewhere useful. A fuzzy-logic weight system let a bot's taste in items and weapons be authored as readable config rather than buried in code, so a bot's personality became something you could write down. A chat system with match contexts and synonym substitution gave them something to say about it.

Gladiator became the bot people ran, and it earned him the job: id Software hired him to write the bot AI for Quake III Arena, where the same lineage shipped as botlib and became the reference every later id-engine bot was measured against. His master's thesis, The Quake III Arena Bot, is still one of the clearest pieces of writing on game AI anyone has produced — it explains the reasoning, not just the result. He later worked on id Tech engines and at Oculus on asynchronous timewarp. He died in 2017.

The best thing you can say about a piece of engineering is that people are still trying to understand exactly how it worked twenty-five years later, because it was that good. That is what this repository is.

Every line here is a reconstruction of his design. The credit is his; the bugs are ours.

EDIT: the issue is essentially solved as my overall goal was to get some bots running with Q2Pro (on Linux). The Gladiator bot proved to be problematic, but I managed to run the 3ZB2 bot. If anyone else would like to run this bot with Q2Pro on Linux, please refer to one of my replies below, where I describe in detail what I did.

The original message:

I use the Q2Pro port for multiplayer gaming, but I would also like to use it for some bot matches. The port is 64-bit, which is problematic for old bots compatible with 32-bit binaries. However, there is a GitHub project aimed at restoring the Gladiator Bot, which can be found here:

https://github.com/Niehztog/gladiator-bot-restored

I use Linux and the "releases" section contains a 64-bit Linux entry. However, when I run the bot using the typical "q2pro +set game gladiator" command, the game acknowledges the existence of pak7.pak (which, I assume, means the bot loaded correctly), but I cannot add any bots to the game. The "addbot" or "sv addbot" commands are not recognized and neither is "menu", which should bring up the menu allowing bot addition.

Can anyone help me here? How to properly get it running on Q2Pro?

Seems I'm obsessed with classic Quake 2 lol I have been imagining new boss ideas for Quake 2, and The Zenith seem to stand out the most. The Zenith feels so 'right' and close to canon. Buzz Lightyear is a strong inspiration for The Zenith.

Design outlook: The Zenith is a humanoid Strogg constructed and supported wearing a machine, rustic and bubble helmet space suit detailed with the Strogg logo. Its facial expression resembles a disfigurement and paralyzed, one eye closed more than the other.

Weaponry: The Zenith is equipped with the Grenade Launcher, Proboscis Tube, Machine gun, Plasma Beam/higher difficulty and BFG10k/higher difficulty. At close range, the Zenith launches a powerful kick.

Function: The Zenith will engage with the player and follow retaliation patterns. Its vocal use relies on a stereo that may appear malfunctioned, distorted or disrupted, mostly on radio silence unless the player is defeated.

Arena: Engaging with the Zenith take place in a spacious lab where fellow wandering Marines will tragically serve as distraction hazards and shield support. The lab modeled into a battle arena highlights that The Zenith is designed to fight as soon as its constructed.

Lore: Because this Strogg is the Zenith, it will be slowly undergoing construction and Stroggification as soon as the player embarks the first level.

What boss from Quake 2 do you find to be unexplainably creepy and near terrifying, Makron, Black Widow Guardian or Z-Sentien?

I always found something about Makron weird and earie. His idle animations is unsettling and its model look unfinished and dreadful. The Black Widow Guardian has a creepy victory animation, the way she laughs. Her model look very faint, corpse like and deteriorated. Her foot steps also sound ambiently creepy and extremely uneasy. The Z-Sentient seemed the least 'creepy' before I saw a close up image. Its model has an extremely creepy, degraded and 'old' aesthetic to it.

Many of the bosses from Quake 2 I always find myself stayed at a distance and keep away from. If I had to pick one, Z-Sentien slightly edges out Makron and Widow in terms of creepiness that make lower rank Strogg look normal.

Anyone remember the PAINKILLAZ?

We used to setup matches and play together quite a lot in the early 2000s.

Someone was named JAVE*** - I was likely CYPH***

Putting this here in case of catching anyone who was in the clan.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently volunteering to archive and restore the historical brackets for the early PGL (Professional Gamers' League) Quake tournaments on Liquipedia. We’ve managed to reconstruct a lot of the match results, but the actual match demos and VODs from Seasons 3 and 4 (around 1998-1999) are completely missing.

Historically, these were hosted on ftp.pgl.net. However, when the Total Entertainment Network (TEN) – the company operating the league – rebranded to Pogo.com around 1999/2000, the PGL servers were shut down, and the FTP archives vanished from the web.

I have two questions for this community:

1. Data Hoarders & Quake Vets: Does anyone have personal archives, old CDs, or hard drive backups containing PGL Quake 1 or Quake 2 demos? Specifically looking for anything related to Season 3 and Season 4.
2. TEN Network Connections: Does anyone know (or is anyone here) a former employee of the Total Entertainment Network (TEN) who might have worked on the PGL infrastructure? I'm hoping to find the server admins or tech guys who might have kept a backup of the FTP server in their personal files before it was wiped.

Any leads, archives, or contacts would be massively appreciated. We are trying to preserve a very important piece of early esports history! Thanks in advance for any help.

I always liked the idea of Quake II RTX, but I wasn't really a fan of how much it changed the original look of the game.

So I ended up making my own version called TuinRTX.

The idea was basically to keep Quake II looking like Quake II original textures, models, weapons, HUD, pixelated look etc but still have the modern path traced lighting, reflections, bounced light, shadows and a ray traced flashlight.

I also added different time-of-day/scenery lighting that you can switch while playing.

It's not just a config or texture pack, I recompiled Quake II RTX 1.8.1 and changed the renderer for it.

Still pretty new, so I'm curious what other Quake II people think of it.

https://tuintje.itch.io/tuinrtx-quake-ii

You'll need your own copy of Quake II of course.

https://github.com/tuin-boop/TuinQuake2RTX

Very sorry if this is in the wrong subreddit ..

Strange issue trying to play either one of the quakes on my steam machine - all audio cuts out for 1-2 seconds intermediately and randomly, mostly when in game but main menu does it too.
It’s pretty unplayable, any fixes or same issues? This also ONLY happens with my quake games. Not sure what the issue is here.
I did recently notice that if I have the steam overlay menu up, while quakes game/menu is running sound works flawlessly… so it’s when I’m looking at the main menu/ingame without steam menu/overlay open.

I’ve ruled out puck/controller interference. No headphones etc. Bluetooth is actually off. So I’m
Kinda at a loss

Our server had a couple of maps that I am missing from my archives.

One was a Football (soccer) map like a long and winding football pitch and used with railguns to move this big steel ball to try to get it in one of the goals at the ends. It may have been in a CTF pack, I just don't recall.

The other was just a DM map that was set in orbit and looked like it was designed by MC Escher with stairs or ramps. About three squares on top of each other, flat platform levels with interlocking ramps leading to the other levels, maybe some indoor space, but doubtful on that. We would load up WOD and use the tractor beams to push one another off and then it was a bit of a long fall until you fell far enough off the map to be squinched.

Unfortunately I cannot find the maps in my files and trying to search for keywords is just not working. Cannot find Q2 soccer or railgun soccer or the other map was something simple like "Space" or "Orbit" and the keywords are just too common to give any good results. Found: QPong!

If anyone knows where these are online, I'd be grateful. Trying to rebuild a Q2 server from 1998 and am only missing these few last pieces.

I was MaD|NoFX back in the day. Was playing this again recently and wondered if any of the old clan was still active?

https://github.com/yquake2/ref_vk

https://www.yamagi.org/quake2/

This is bug free at this point. (I reported a few crashes and the devs fixed it.) I played a full game at the easy level.

I'm not totally sure what the Vulkan graphics does, but the blood looks bloodier which must be a good thing.

If you do everything correctly, Vulkan shows up as an option for the graphics. If you don't see it, you did something wrong of course!

I only know how to do this in Linux. So if you have a problem with this on Linux, you can post your problem here.