Quake II
For a overview of the Quake game franchise go to Quake series.
Quake II, released on November 30 1997, is a first person shooter game developed by id Software and distributed by Activision. It is the sequel to Quake. Background music was provided by Sonic Mayhem.
Overview
The action takes place in a sci-fi environment. In the single-player game, the player is a human soldier taking part in Operation Overlord, a desperate attempt to protect Earth from alien invasion by launching a counter-attack on the home planet of the hostile cybernetic Strogg civilization. All the other soldiers are captured or killed almost as soon as they enter the planet's atmosphere, so it falls upon the player to penetrate the Strogg capital city alone and ultimately to assassinate the Strogg leader Makron.
Unlike Quake, where hardware accelerated graphics controllers were supported only with later patches, Quake II came with OpenGL support out of the box.
The latest version is 3.20. This update includes numerous bug fixes and new maps designed for multiple players deathmatch. Version 3.21 available on Id Software's FTP has no improved functionality over version 3.20, it's simply a slight repackaging to make compiling for Linux easier.
Quake II uses an improved client/server network model introduced in Quake.
The server code of Quake II, which defines how everything behaves in the game, can be changed in any way because id published the source code of their own implementation and Quake II uses the shared library functionality of the operating system to load the server program at run-time.
The source code to the game's client program was released under the terms of the GPL on December 21 2001.
Since the release of the Quake II source code, several 3rd party update projects to the game engine have begun; the most prominent of these is known as Quake II Max, followed in popularity -- if not improved features -- by Quake II Evolved. Generally, such source upgrades improve things like the maximum resolution the game may be run at, the quality of the lighting engine, adding things like shaders or decals in order to generally update the look of the game and prolong its lifetime.
Games using the Quake II engine
Addons
There are two official Addons:
- The Reckoning - released on May 31 1998, developed by Xatrix
- Ground Zero - released on October 31 1998, developed by Rogue
