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doubleQuake:

Quake is such a great game. People ask why I don't just play quake 2 or quake3arena, but it's not even a close comparison in gameplay and atmosphere.

The last time I got into a quake spree was back in my 3dfx voodoo 2 days. Those that know, know. Those that don't, don't. Well, I don't use 3dfx cards anymore, so I used my trusty glquakepro for pretty graphics. I figured that was as good as it got, since quake is almost 10 years old. Then I happened upon a little program called fuhquake. That changed the way I look at quake, forever. Since the quake source code was released to the public in 1999, I think, different people have created new quake clients. They use the original files of quake, but with new interfaces and such. Most of these are quakeworld clients, the most popular of which is fuh. There are even some, like tenebrae, that completely redid the engine to support all kinds of effects that make the game run at like 15fps on my radeon 7500.

Well, fuhquake is great, but I quickly realized that loading single-player saved games didn't always work. As much fun as deathmatching on the internet is, there is some satisfaction from sitting by yourself and nailing a bunch of ogres and scrags. Something else that I noticed fuhquake lacked was the ability to play co-op over a lan. When I would have friends over for a game day I would have to switch back to glpro and loose all of the pretty stuff.

Then I was turned on to joequake. This is a release of netquake, which is the original network code for quake, with all the new graphics and stuff. That was just great. I had my eyecandy for quakeworld and I had my eyecandy for netquake, but now I had 2 seperate installs of a couple hundred megs because of the graphics. I have space, but it's the principle. Since I don't know how to code quakec, although maybe I'll learn and make a real doublequake, I tried to somehow combine fuhquake and joequake and make a single install that supports quakeworld, netquake, and all the new graphics. It was a success.

Fuhquake and joequake both look for the original quake files, actually just pak0.pak, in the same location, so that part was easy. Both games have their configurations, menu entries and such, in their own respective directories, so that was pretty simple. It got a little more complex after that, though. Fuhquake puts all of the graphics in $quakedir$\qw\ but joequake puts them all in $quakedir$\joequake\, so I was back to having two sets of graphic files. Well, if you start joequake with "-game qw" then it uses the graphics in qw as well as the config.cfg, so all was well.

Once that was done, I started playing around with the graphics. I didn't like some of the graphics in fuhquake, so I headed over to the quake revitalization project and downloaded their newest 24-bit texture and model packs. Well, I didn't like some of those, either. Sometimes the new graphics are overly well done, like glowing demon skulls and such. But I was able to combine the two sets and have a group of graphics that suited me better. Some that were still past my preference I was able to edit, for instance I replaced the old demon head on a wall with stained glass. It doesn't seem to detract from the other graphics and doesn't scare 2 year olds. You can download that from the download page, ironically enough, if you wish to use them yourself. For some reason, I couldn't directly edit and save the retexture project graphics with photoshop, so I had to fire up the gimp.

After all that was done I was feeling pretty good, but it annoyed me that the fuhquake part had nice graphics for the menus while the joequake part had the original fuzzy quake menus, so I tried combining them. It was a partial success in that the menu headings were new, but the menu entries were old. Also, fuh had a much cooler font for the console, whereas joe used the original. I was off to figure out how to make the two match up, again. This time I found out about moon[drunk]s quake graphics. It has new menus, backgrounds, and fonts supporting fuh and joe. Did I strike it or what? I decided to incorporate his metal graphics since it was all matching and I was well on my way. Then I figured that I should create my own console background. I mean everyone else does and I already decided to rebrand my install as doublequake. I did a little editing to moon[drunk]s metal background and I finally felt an ending place coming. As an aside to the console background, if you would like to use a refresh of the background with a big ol' picture of me splashed across your screen, you can download and replace.

So, that's where we are. I played around with some other sky images, but I wasn't happy with a single choice. I believe you are able to script sky changes based upon time of day, but I couldn't get that working with joe, so I just left the originals. If I figure out how to get the skybox to be set for each level, then I may refresh the install, but it will have to work for both quakeworld and netquake. We'll see how it works. If you happen to play it and like it, good for you. It's a rather large download, at over 200mb, and the server only has 256k upstream, but I think it's worth downloading once. Please burn it to a cd after that, though, so you don't have to download it 40 times.
Hehehe...