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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> id Software’s Quake II launched in 1997, bringing gamers a new single-player campaign, a long-awaited, addictive multiplayer mode that we played for years on pitifully-slow 56K modems, and a jaw-dropping engine

As for me Quake 2 was kind of a disappointment after Duke Nukem 3D. Only Half-Life brought back the depth Duke Nukem 3D had. E.g. seeing something like a ventilation cover and not being able to break it and climb through felt infuriating.

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Honestly Quake 2's biggest feature was going open source.

When I was porting Quake 2 to MS-DOS, I have to admit that it's the most I ever played of it. It really fell into Carmak's view that stories have no place in gaming.

It's a shame Valve found a much bigger market than games, but it leaves the mantle for others to pick up.

Quake 2 is one of the most difficult FPS games to play competitively. I played the game for 10 years, 1998 - 2008. I can tell you're looking at the game from a different perspective (I'm assuming you're referring to its singleplayer), however - its multiplayer component was nothing short of amazing. Game actually takes a huge physical toll on the player due to complex controls (strafe jumps, circle jumps, doublejumps, circle-strafes, occasional rocket / grenade jump), and the movement aspect combined with aim and general awareness made it one of the best games I had honor to play.

Part of the reason I started the DOS port was that the QuakeWorld port had dropped to zero activity. I was trying to validate a different style of building GCC and all the servers were empty.

When q2 had shipped out I was so busy working I never had time to play it seriously.

Quake 4 felt far more engaging to me. And q3.. I had the tin box set for Linux. Remember that push to make retail Linux gaming a thing? Shame it never panned out.

> stories have no place in gaming

What does this mean? Being told and participating in a story has always been by far the primary thing I play a game for. Interactive visual fiction experience inducing compassion and involvement bundled with moderate challenge, a degree of freedom and realism (that's why I don't like rail-nailed heavily scripted games) is what I want of a game. The visual part should be reasonable (mostly needed for the atmosphere) and controls should be convenient. In my opinion Half-Life and Fallout (all the parts) were the best games I ever played. The story unveiling and the sense of helping people in the imaginary world heroically (something that is a way too hard and dangerous for an average Joe to do in the real life where you can't save&load) and exploration are the things that make a game addictive for me.

It's an old Carmack quote:

> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.

It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.

It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.

I'm 100% with you

But it wasn't the first id game to go open source.

I didn't mean to imply that, just that the only reason q2 gets as much love these days is that it's source is available.

And iD did a great job of writing modular and portable code.

It was really exhilarating to get it running on a different platform with essentially no real changes, other than platform code and initially removing the DLL support.

Thankfully DJGPP had progressed far enough that its DLL support works great.

I remember there was a DOS extender that could run Win32 console and very basic (full-screen window) GUI binaries. Just enough to run Quake 2 in software mode.

HX Dos extender.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/

when the author disappeared from the face of the earth I uploaded everything I had regarding it. It's an incredible extender, sure, but it's nothing like having a native port.

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