recently, as in today, i decided to try a quake1 modernized port..but first! some memories…
i remember quake1 coming out years ago. it was big news that even made it to the mainstream newspapers. i think this happened because of the phenomenon doom created. quake was supposed to be a medieval dark fantasy game and ended up being a dark fantasy/futuristic hybrid. i forget how i got the shareware version/demo. back then i used to get demos mostly from pc gamer and cd-rom today magazine. i didn’t download much of anything because i was so limited with a dialup connection. i was a kid with no real income and games were expensive. so i would seriously play the hell out of demos. i would play a demo of a game (that i liked) so much that i’d have those levels memorized. and i’d keep playing it til i needed to make room to install more demos.

my first immediate impressions of quake were disappointment. i loved doom and expected a superior version of that. and instead quake levels looked bland and the enemies were all polygony looking. that was my initial reaction. but then after playing it for a while i really liked it. the atmosphere, the sound, and especially the gameplay. the gameplay was amazing. graphically, back then i don’t think consumer brand 3d cards existed yet. voodoo cards were the big thing during the following years. i never owned one. my first 3d video card was an nvidia geforce1 (1999). anyways, the point i’m trying to make is because of very limited availability of 3d-capable hardware..quake didn’t look great back then. yet, it was quite revolutionary in being one of the first true 3d game engines (along with descent1, and maybe some others). eventually i actually bought the full game (and at some point i bought the entire doom1/doom2 collection).

back then, i stumbled upon a service called mplayer.com back then which was like a gamespy-type service. via mplayer i got introduced to quake team fortress…and that is some of the most fun i’ve had playing games online. awesome experience despite having to play over dialup.

alright and now the modernized ports…
one that i have always commonly come across is quakeforge
it runs on both windows and linux. development seems to have ceased though. quakeforge looked good and provided a very smooth playing experience. doesn’t add much by effects, mostly just a classical quake look. had some problems getting it to fullscreen i think. i ran it on windows. gave up trying to figure out what path it wanted for the quake data files in linux.

secondly, tenebrae
not sure where i originally heard about this port. the tenebrae1 site seems to be broken, but i still found a download of it via googling. ran it on windows and it looked incredibly impressive. looked very doom3-ish. and i guess that was the point of the port? and now the bad news…i could never get over 30fps running it in various configurations. so that made the game pretty much too sluggish to play effectively. looked great though. the video card used is an ATI radeon 9550 256MB (AGP), not a modern videocard by any means.

third, just today by looking up ports i came across darkplaces
i had heard that name before, mentioned around nexiuz, but never looked further into it.
it was equally easy to get darkplaces up and running on both linux and windows
on linux i used the -basedir <path> option to specify the path to quake data files.
darkplaces looks great and also plays very smoothly. not as nice as tenebrae, but that port is unplayable (at least by me).
and darkplaces is still actively developed which is always good news.

update 11/29/09: found out about one final quake port from wikipedia called ezquake
it focuses on being the standard quakeworld client. incredibly smooth and fast gameplay with this one.
graphically, it seemed conservative like quakeforge.

screenshots:
darkplaces – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=0
darkplaces-sdl – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=1
winquake – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=5
quakeforge-wgl – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=3
quakeforge-sgl – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=2
ezquake – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=6
tenebrae – http://resinblade.net/cpg/displayimage.php?album=29&pos=4