quake2world.net Pwning nubz, one rail slug at a time.

Some of you may have noticed the new look around here.  I'm happy to report that the site has been migrated from Drupal 5.1 to Drupal 6.6, and is sporting a new customized theme as well as numerous enhancements and fixes.
I've also installed some new modules to help the site scale and provide optimal SEO.  For that reason, you may find that your old bookmarks no longer work.  Sorry about that, but the new path conventions are here to stay thanks to the Pathauto module.

You can now find the Quake2World team on Facebook. The group is open, everyone is free to join it and peep our ugly mugs.

I took a few moments this evening to update the Screenshots section with some new stills of Aghast and Torn Glory, both of which recently received the per-pixel re-rub. The old screenshots have been archived and are available here.

Some screenshots of TRaK's second beta of Devolver, which was released about a month ago. It is a quick deathmatch map with some lovely detail. All screens can be seen in this gallery.

Some screens showing off deluxe and bump mapping on Cardo's Torn Glory. The effect is intentionally overdone so that it's evident in still images. I owe LordHavoc for guiding me through this implementation, and taking the time to point out defects and shortcomings in my approach. Thanks very much, LH.

For the past week or two I've been attempting to add bump mapping to Quake2World's realtime lighting shaders. It's proven to be quite difficult; I've rewritten my shaders from scratch at least 3 times so far. Nevertheless, here are some carefully selected screenshots showing off way-overdone specular highlights on q2dm1.

(Sorry, these screens are no longer available.)

The Quake2World engine draws a fair amount of attention on account of its performance when compared to other Quake- and Quake2-derived engines. On certain hardware, it does benchmark as much as 400% faster than the Quake2 3.21 engine source, upon which it was originally based. And so I figured I'd take a moment to talk about some of my optimizations.

Jay's periodic mailing list updates haven't gone out in a couple months, so I thought I'd quickly mention a few things that have been recently implemented in Quake2World..

Quake2World picks up input settings from your environment via SDL. If you have mouse acceleration enabled in your desktop environment, it will also be enabled to that same extent in Quake2World. Mouse acceleration is a pesky little setting that often makes your mouse-input feel too fast and not very responsive while using slow mouse movements.

Here are is how to disable it in the usual major platforms. Be cautioned, your mouse will most likely feel slower in both your desktop and in your games.