Digital foundry - Quake 2 on Xbox 360.

[Adam]

Eurogamer's Digital foundry has done a piece about Quake 2 on the Xbox 360.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22OSOQvYXVw][60fps] Quake 2 on Xbox 360: The First 1080p60 Console Remaster?[/ame]

Quake 2 on Xbox 360: the first console HD remaster
id Software's launch game had 1080p60 support - even when the hardware didn't.

An excerpt :
"Quake 2 seemingly uses full 16x anisotropic filtering to further refine the clarity of its textures at oblique angles. Delivering such a clean image at a near perfect 60fps is a great achievement considering the fact that it was just a bonus disc with a low budget behind it. There's no doubt that the Quake 2 engine's support for OpenGL, Glide, PowerSGL, and software backend helped make this port to DirectX a bit easier than the (then) OpenGL-only idTech 4 engine powering Quake 4. Remarkably, Quake 2 delivers - quite possibly - the single cleanest image output we've seen on the Xbox 360. Of course, the lack of complex shaders and materials helps keep aliasing at bay, but the results remain impressive nonetheless.

If we stopped there, Quake 2 would still be an excellent port, but the improvements go further - for instance, character textures are displayed at full resolution on Xbox 360. The original PC OpenGL version downsamples character art to the next lowest power of two, while the Xbox 360 port simply uses the textures as they were originally stored, giving the impression of slightly increased detail. The option to sidestep this appears in a number of other source ports but it wasn't present in the original Quake 2 code. Animation is also improved thanks to a rewritten GPU-accelerated interpolation method that uses a vertex shader to blend two vertex streams together."

Interesting stuff if you are that way inclined plus Quake4 for the 360 can be hunted down quite cheaply online, just make sure you get the version with the bonus disk.

[golden_boy]

Indeed, interesting.

I guess Quake 2 is an order of magnitude simpler than Quake 4 and modern shooters, so 60fps with 16x AF isn't that surprising. I wonder which source ports do the texture thing though.

It really still looks pretty dated unfortunately.

[Adam]

Texture comparison:


They mention something about them having access to the original artwork but I don't think that they would have gone to that much trouble. The difference looks like its caused by the rendering method. I could be wrong tho'

I will have to google "Q2 high-res texture pack" and see whats out there.

[golden_boy]

I dicked around with that image in GIMP for a bit and here's what I came up with:



I'm sure it is the same texture. It might have been downscaled in the original Q2, but the main difference is that there's some kind of postprocess colour/brightness/contrast type filter in the xbox version.

There is also different texture filtering or something to make the xbox version look more pixely.

Edit: maybe they actually photoshopped the Q2 textures to have some more contrast and more intensive colour. I'm thinking the blue wall in the xbox shot looks quite intense. Either that or some sort of finely tweaked colour filter or set of filters.

[Spike]

There is also different texture filtering or something to make the xbox version look more pixely.

that'll be the 'full 16x anisotropic filtering' that gives greater texture resolution when viewed at an angle.

NPOT helps too, although I had thought most q2 textures adhered to this (I admit I never checked for any that didn't).

regarding colours, kinda looks like they just doubled the intensity in an overbright kind of way.

[golden_boy]

Gives it a Quake 3 kind of look, with the intense colours. I never really noticed that the machinegun had an orange stripe.

[ninenullseven]

Actually what really makes it stand out - it is the only faithful split screen quake 2 port. Without any compromises - it offers split screen DM and Coop up to 4 players on single console, and even allows split screen + online/lan combo. All at solid 60fps. That's a achievement.
Everything else was done better million times on PC. I don't care much about consoles, because my platform of choice is PC due to it's superiority.
I don't understand all this 'shaders over low-poly stuff' that's going on with source ports, but I appreciate proper social interaction like split screen deathmatch with friends. That's social and that's a lot more fun than playing with people I don't care over the internet. Quake 2 and Perfect Dark are great. Too bad you can't buy Quake 2 for xbox360 anywhere these days, the thing is hard to find (to the point it's cheaper and easier to get used modded xbox 360 just for the Quake 2 - that's what I did).
What's bothering me even more - people keep talking about their childhood memories of split screen deathmatch, and yet I haven't seen a single source port (apart from FTE and Spearmint) that offers it. Hell, nowadays PC is as simple as console - hook up controllers and your 40+ inch TV and you are all set, we can make dreams come true. How could I be the only one who just want to kickback and play some deathmatch with friends? LAN parties is (was) awesome, but as grownup guy it's pretty hard to do - LAN party should be planned beforehand (wires, tables etc), while playing halo in split screen on xbox 360 is like 'oh, we are drunk, let's shoot each other, kkay?'. I'm not elitist (I don't have time for BS these days), and I consider FTEQW as the best engine just for it's support of split screen (pretty broken though). Spearmint Q3A is a blessing, and it's controllers/split screen support is rock-solid. Too bad my favorite quake was first one...

[Mindf!3ldzX]

With no effort given,Mario Kart?
Sonic the Hedgehog ? I grew up playing split screen / same screen games....

[Baker]

The original PC OpenGL version downsamples character art to the next lowest power of two, while the Xbox 360 port simply uses the textures as they were originally stored, giving the impression of slightly increased detail.

FitzQuake (and therefore by extension obviously Quakespasm) avoids downsampling by padding model textures instead of resizing them. A way of avoiding dependency on non-power of 2 (NPOT) support.

This gives FitzQuake crisper looking textures on models than GLQuake, ProQuake, JoeQuake, ezQuake and derivatives.

[Not sure what DarkPlaces does, I would guess the npot method since in older times some versions of DarkPlaces had issues with non-npot supporting hardware.]

[RangerXT]

Man, my favorite version of quake II will always be PC. but the most impressive port of quake II is definitely the PSX port. No, it does not look sleek and sexy, but they managed to get that mammoth of an engine (at the time) to work on limited PSX hardware and run it at 30 FPS non stop. The controls could be better, but it you get used to it. Plus, you also get to do split screen gaming the old fashion way. Well, as long as you avoid the N64 version anyways...

[Ebisu]

Quake II on N64 is a completely different game though.

[RangerXT]

My point exactly. Sadly, it wasn't a great one, either...

[Adam]

I would like to defend Raster productions's version of Quake 2 for the N64.
I thought the single player campaign was better designed than the PC version.
They did a really great job with Doom64 too, again different to the original which makes me wonder why, when they released Quake64 it turned out to be a really close match to the PC version.
Maybe they thought it couldn't be improved upon.


I also liked HammerHead's Playstation version, it was excellent in its own way but was severely cut down and lost some of the original enemy types. At least you could use the PS mouse with it.

If you are willing to engage emulation though, you can achieve (with some tweaking) excellent results.

@Baker, I will have to give Quakespasm a try. It was something I have intended doing for a while now since some of the mapjams recommend it.
At least, I think they did. I can remember trying some out using DP and parts of the geometry kept flickering in and out of existence.

[golden_boy]

I will have to give Quakespasm a try.

Pretty much all new single player maps require Quakespasm, probably because it's nice to have a standard. It's a kind of agreeable conservative Quake engine with some extended mapping features.

It doesn't support any DP extensions or CSQC, so it's not terribly modder-friendly, but I think that's not its goal anyway.

[RangerXT]

I would like to defend Raster productions's version of Quake 2 for the N64.
I thought the single player campaign was better designed than the PC version.
They did a really great job with Doom64 too, again different to the original which makes me wonder why, when they released Quake64 it turned out to be a really close match to the PC version.
Maybe they thought it couldn't be improved upon.


I also liked HammerHead's Playstation version, it was excellent in its own way but was severely cut down and lost some of the original enemy types. At least you could use the PS mouse with it.

If you are willing to engage emulation though, you can achieve (with some tweaking) excellent results.

@Baker, I will have to give Quakespasm a try. It was something I have intended doing for a while now since some of the mapjams recommend it.
At least, I think they did. I can remember trying some out using DP and parts of the geometry kept flickering in and out of existence.

Well, I don't think the N64 version is bad in its own way, but the fact that they were able to get almost better graphics on PSX, with better controls, and had 3D models (N64 version only had sprites) makes it better. It feels like they tried with the PSX version, and the N64 version seems half assed at least to me.

I LOVED Doom64 though, it was amazing, and in SOME ways, better then the original. But they really are completely different games almost. Quake64 was good, but the only real difference was the lighting and some very minor differences. Other than that, it was basically the PC version.