Old school newb

[DragonStang]

For the longest time I had not been able to play Quake on windows XP, and now Vista.

I figured out through your site how to get it to work though.

My question is, I see all these screen shots on here where the graphics are amazing!

How is it that I get the graphics to look so much better?

Is there another version of Quake that I do not have? The computer I have is only 3-4 years old so should be able to run Quake with pretty good graphics, though this laptop has just a stock Toshiba graphics card... Are these just screen shots with really awesome Graphics cards?

I'm in the process of building a gaming PC, but wanted to enjoy Quake's awesomeness till I get it done.

Thanks!

[Mr.Burns]

Hi Dragon,

There's plenty of options when it comes to pimping your Quake but as a first step you might avail yourself on one of the better quake engines there are available. Qrack, JoeQuake, DirectQ, Fitquake and Darkplaces spring to mind each have their own pluses and minuses and links are available to most if not all on this site.

Once you have got those working, which shouldn't be that difficult you could look at using some of the hi res textures and model sets that are available but first things first

Hope this helps

Monty

[DragonStang]

hhhmmm... Well I'm clearly retarded.

I've looked at a couple of these and I can't get them to work right.

I can't seem to figure out where or how to install them.

I wanted to try JoeQuake, and my favorite so far is Darkplaces, but I can't figure out how to install them properly

[MH]

For the laptop try DirectQ; it was built to run on laptops. It's probably really an Intel chip in it, just rebranded by Toshiba. DirectQ loves Intel chips.

You don't need to do anything fancy to install it, just pop the directq.exe file into C:\Quake (or wherever you have Quake installed to, the same folder as you have WinQuake.exe and GLQuake.exe in).

It'll start up in windowed mode but you can change that in Options | Video Options in the menu if you want.

If that doesn't work for any reason let me know and I'll send you a test build of the new version which works on even crappier hardware.

[DragonStang]

^^^ Thank you very much.

I shall give er a go.

Mr.Burns, thanks for pointing me towards the proper programs.

[DragonStang]

Yep!!! DirectQ is amazing!!!

Thanks guys!

[DragonStang]

I had a question about the amazing graphics on the home page of this site featuring the quake "grunt" and the "lightning monster" (I don't know the correct name, I apologize).

What is needed to get that kind of graphics for Quake?

Is that a special map or remade program of Quake? I've never seen multiple colors in the Lightning gun and the smooth/bold outlines of the monster and level.

I have DirectQ and the graphics are soooooo much better than before, but nothing like that picture shows.

Thanks for your input and responses!!! You guys are awesome! I feel like I'm 13 again lol !!!

[Mr.Burns]

I'm no expert but it looks very similar to Qrack plus a few choice textures for the walls and maybe a skin or two for the models. I'm a fan of DirectQ but you might also consider giving QRack a try if eye candy is your thing and graphics power is not a problem.

Some links that may help you:
Quake Retextured Project
Quaddicted Wads Archive
QuakeOne.com Textures download

Hope this helps

Monty

[=peg=]

The quake reforged project tech guide page is another very useful source of info..

[MH]

DirectQ is more of a "pure" engine than an eye-candy one, but - especially now that the essential feature set is starting to come together well - it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that it might start gaining eye-candy features (as options, "pure" will always remain the default).

All of the retextuing/etc stuff should work fine with it though, but I don't use them myself so they don't get much testing. Enough to confirm that they won't crash in normal usage, but if you do strange things with unintended combinations of cvars I honestly don't know what would happen. Maybe nothing, I don't know.

That screenshot looks a lot like Qrack to me, by the way.