7. Quake Sequels

7.1 Hexen II

Hexen II is a colourful adaption of the Quake engine, and in terms of source code and theme is much closer than Quake II to the original game. Unfortunately, Raven Software released the game with many rough edges... So beautiful, yet so cruel.

Hammer of Thyrion is the main Linux Hexen II port , and has had much work done towards squishing bugs and enhancing the OpenGL graphics. While it is not as widely distributed as Quake, the HoT demo includes some of the game's best levels and is available from the Sourceforge project page.

7.2 Quake II

Quake II is the sci-fi themed sequel to Quake. Early Linux releases weren't very solid, especially the mouse handling, but there is now a few related projects to choose from.

QuDos' Quake II is the most notable. It is based on Icculus Quake II, and includes some beautiful graphical enhancements - including cell shading - and support for FreeBSD and XMMS plugins. Another project still in development is Quetoo which has speed and security enhancements, but also a very stripped back interface and a few bugs.

Older projects include Michael Olson's source and binary rpms (which appear to be based on an old Icculus release) and the QuakeForge Quake II project with support for multiple operating systems. On a slightly different note - the Jake2 project is a version of Quake II written in Java.

The multiplayer mods Digital Paint 2 and Argonium are also based on Quake II.

See the old version of this how-to for Quake II troubleshooting tips.

7.3 Quake III Arena

The third Quake installment was a landmark multiplayer game, with some of the most beautiful and well balanced fragging ever. It was one of the first games to receive a full Linux commercial release.

Most mods should work. The Linux Gamers FAQ reports:

    Yes, ... modifications work in Linux as long as they are compiled to the
    Quake III ... VM bytecode as advised by id software.  ...  modifications
    compiled to Windows library files will not work.

The retail add-on Quake III Team Arena is supported and, despite never getting rave reviews, is a great game.

Open Source Projects

Icculus Quake III Project

Sourceforge Quake III - Cell Shading

Mods

The Dark Conjunction is an atmospheric Q3 single player conversion.

Or try the alien themed Tremulous for an original multiplayer mod.

Links

The Zerowing installation and known issues guides hosted by ID Software.

Linuxgamer's Quake III Howto.

Linux Questions' Quake III forums for Sound and Mouse problems.

All things Quake III at Planet Quake

7.4 Quake IV

Quake IV is an epic FPS from the awesome Raven Software. It is based on the Doom-III engine and has high hardware specs: A 2GHz P4 (or AMD equivalent) and 512meg ram are the official minimum requirements. It's a beautiful game which should really be played with the graphical settings set to "medium" or "high". For this reason the author recommends against using entry level cards such as the FX5200.

The game runs well under Linux, but still has a couple of issues:

• Quake IV only runs in 32 bpp colours (X11 colour depth 24), so restart X in this mode if you have to. Attempting to run in 16 bpp colours will give you an error message like: Couldn't find matching GLX visual ..... Sys_Error: Unable to initialize OpenGL. Alternatively you can start a new X session with the command:

  startx `which quake4` -- :1 -depth 24
  

• The Alsa sound libraries are used by default. To start with OSS sound , type:

  quake4 +set s_driver oss
  

• The Quake IV DVD Edition comes with several promotional movies. Although the movies appear to be Windows executables, they are in fact Bink videos, and can be viewed with the Linux Bink Player.
  
  
• Apart from demanding a quality video card and CPU, the author found 512meg ram to be slightly insufficient and performance wasn't great. The game ran better after placing the kernel's swap file on a different hard-drive from the game. To do this, once you have the second disk installed and partitioned, type (for example)

  swapoff -a
  mkswap /dev/hdb2
  swapon /dev/hdb2
  

  if hdb2 is the new swap partition.

Links

The Official Linux Faq

Linux Questions Quake IV bug forums

Quake IV demo