Retro | r3dux.org

DarkPlaces Quake FTW!

r3dux | December 24, 2011

As it’s Christmas and I’ve got a little bit of free time, and since I saw that quakeforge 0.6.0 was released the other day, I thought I’d have a play around with it as I’d not played any Quake (1) for ages… so with lots of fighting to compile and use it properly I finally got quakeforge up and running – and was distinctly unimpressed. Grr! So, this got me wondering about what good quake engines are available at the moment (apart from FuhQuake and Tenebrae) – and then I came across the DarkPlaces Quake engine – and it rocks!

The above is a self-captured version of the Quake Done Quick: With a Vengence episode 1 speedrun – and doesn’t she look purty? It’s almost a shame that everything is moving so fast as you don’t really get a chance to check out all the cool particle effects, shadows, texture detail and all the other eye candy.

The above capture is using:

rygel’s “high” texture pack ( the “ultra” pack – at ~2.7GB of textures – would kill my 3yr old laptop =/ ),
DP pretty water v0.51,
Romi’s rtlights file: For ID maps, For mission pack 1 maps,
Ogro’s monster skins, and
Seven’s effectinfo.txt settings file with a tweak to the underwater grenade bubble spacing (line 926 – changed from 6 to 1).

Then it’s just a case of cranking the effects and lighting up to “full” from the Options menu, and capturing the footage with glc-capture through the command:

glc-capture -o ~/test.glc -s ./darkplaces-glx -game rygel_textures_high -game dp_pretty_water -game ogro_monster_skins -game qdq

Finally, to get the resulting capture file (~3.6GB!) to an avi using h264 and with a gamma tweak to 1.5 I used the following shell script (which I found here):

#!/bin/bash
AUDIOFILE=$(echo $1 | sed 's/.glc/.mp3/')
RESULTFILE=$(echo $1 | sed 's/.glc/.avi/')
 
# Extract audio
glc-play $1 -o - -a 1 | lame -hV2 - $AUDIOFILE
 
# merge audio with .glc video file
glc-play $1 -o - -y 1 | mencoder -demuxer y4m - -audiofile $AUDIOFILE -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts qp=18:pass=1 -vf eq2=1.5 -of avi -o $RESULTFILE

Rawr! =P

As a final note, if you really wanted to see the fastest Quake speedruns, then you’ll want to check out Quake Done Quickest – but as the demos aren’t available as a single, combined pack (you have to get each level individually) – I just stuck with QDQ:WaV, which is still super-awesome =D